Here’s a real deep YouTube discovery. It’s a twenty minute chunk of mostly raw footage from a 1970 television doc called ‘Billy Wilder’ showing Wilder in the process of directing a movie. The making of the doc coincided with Wilder’s presence in Europe shooting ‘The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes’, a movie that was more or less his waterloo in Hollywood (it was an expensive ‘roadshow’ event movie that was chopped up into toothpicks when the ‘roadshow’ movie was declared box-office poison). This doc is filled with rare footage of Wilder on set, wearing his Fedora, hounds tooth jacket, chain smoking and in general being a raffish, authoritative and deeply involved director. As far as I know this is the only footage of Wilder directing out there, or at least the most detailed look at him in the midst of creating a film. Enjoy…