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"Some Like it Hot": Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond
From: American Film Institute
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Billy WilderI.A.L. Diamond |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Known for his sardonic humor and comedic sketches, Billy Wilder first arrived in  Hollywood in 1934 with little money and a limited command of the English language. In just six years, Wilder (right) became one of Hollywood's prominent screenwriters, and during the 1940s he established his reputation as a director. But it was not until the mid-1950s that Wilder met I.A.L. Diamond--a Hollywood screenwriter also renowned for his caustic wit--and the famed Wilder-Diamond director-writer team was formed.
In 1986, both Wilder and Diamond sat down with Fellows at the American Film Institute's Conservatory to discuss their 30-year collaborative career on such great comedies as Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960) and The Fortune Cookie (1966). |
 illy Wilder movies get the kind of critical descriptions--sardonic, cynical, caustic and ironic--that other movies not only don't get but also don't even aspire to. The sardonic movie is a genre that runs against the grain of American optimism, and Wilder is droll enough to deny that his movies even belong in that genre. When a journalist once asked if he really believed mankind was basically corrupt, Wilder replied: "Not at all. Where'd you get that view? Haven't you seen The Sound of Music?" But if the sardonic view of life has no strong American tradition, it does have a distinguished European one, with practitioners like Voltaire, Swift, and Wilde. It also has a Jewish tradition: a time-honored means of surviving a bad lot with good humor. And Wilder--both European and Jewish--has transplanted his wit to American films, merged it with that of screenwriters like I.A.L. Diamond and produced a palatable species: a sardonic movie that doesn't send you out feeling bad. (Wilder's choice of performers has something to do with the results: Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, and Shirley MacLaine are too likable to leave a bitter aftertaste.) |
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Transcript of a 1986 interview with Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond about their collaborative filmmaking careers . |
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The Wilder movie has its origins in Wilder's own barbed personality; he has a mind, William Holden is supposed to have once said, full of razor blades. The cutting wit, on and off the screen, is a Wilder staple, and Hollywood is full of Boswells who collect Wilder witticisms. A sampler: to his wife-to-be, Wilder said, "I'd worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood." To Walter Matthau, after a take for The Fortune Cookie: "That's fine. We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre." To his cameraman, after asking him to shoot a scene out of focus: "I want you to win the best foreign picture award." To Sam Goldwyn after being asked to arbitrate a point on an Otto Preminger picture: "I'm sorry, Sam, but I wouldn't dare disagree with Otto. I still have relatives in Germany." And a line that is often attributed to Robert Benchley: "Let me get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." |
Wilder's own origins suggest a source for his bristling view of things. He was born in Vienna in 1906, the son of a hotel owner who was restless enough to find time for other businesses, including a trout hatchery. Wilder was sent to the University of Vienna to fulfill his father's hopes for a son who would take up law. But Wilder, unimpressed with university life or the dry confines of law, left after a year and turned to the more gamy life of a reporter for a Vienna newspaper. He soon settled in Berlin, wrote for a tabloid and turned out unproduced scripts. He finally sold one, so the story goes, to a cuckolding producer momentarily hiding in Wilder's room. This was 1929--Wilder was only 23 years old--and in the next four years he collaborated on the screenplays for a dozen films. |
With the rise of Hitler, Wilder found it prudent to move to Paris and finally to settle in Hollywood, with little money and less English. "Well," he once told an interviewer, "let's say I knew a dozen words the production code wouldn't tolerate." English came rapidly and, after a time, so did the writing jobs, including work with the incomparable Ernst Lubitsch--the collaboration produced Ninotchka in 1939. But Wilder's work as a director didn't start until 1942, with The Major and the Minor. The screenplay was by Wilder and Charles Brackett, and the pair launched an association that produced The Lost Weekend, A Foreign Affair and Sunset Boulevard. |
In the 1940s, while Wilder's reputation rose, I.A.L. Diamond was laboring in the vineyards as a staff writer for various studios, including MGM and Paramount. There was standout work, like Howard Hawks's Monkey Business, in which Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer also had a hand. But it was not till the mid-'50s that Wilder and Diamond joined wits. Wilder caught some skits by Diamond, appreciated the crackling humor and arranged a partnership that still thrives. |
Diamond himself is a native of Romania. He studied journalism at Columbia, wrote humorous sketches for a college periodical, discovered his calling and went to Hollywood. (There are conflicting stories on the origins of the initials "I.A.L.," but Diamond says they stand for nothing. He was christened Itek, later changed it to Isadore and Wilder calls him "Iz.") |
Their first film together was Love in the Afternoon--an unexpectedly blithe love story with shades of Lubitsch. The caustic wit that has identified the partnership took root with films like Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, though they are always ready to defy expectation, as with The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes--an affectionate tribute to a favorite Wilder character. Another collaboration, The Front Page--a film that seems endlessly remarkable--led Vincent Canby to remark that the collaborators, "have a special (and, to my mind, very appealing) appreciation for vulgar, brilliant con artists of monumental tackiness." That appreciation is a rare commodity in Hollywood, which aspires to tasteful uplift even while toying with vulgarity. |
Wilder-Diamond films don't always meet their own aspirations, and at least one critic has complained that the films don't have the courage of their cynicism: sugar, he noted, creeps in. But at least the direction is clear: "In a world all too obsessively infected with the cult of ghastly good taste," the Times of London once observed, "thank heavens for Mr. Billy Wilder." |
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