Apropos of the doc about the making of Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond’s ‘Fedora’ (1978) which I posted last Friday, here’s another doc about the making of Wilder’s much more robust and well-known film ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959) titled “Nobody’s Perfect’. Scholars of Wilder and Marilyn Monroe will hear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS2XRiN9xbE ‘Fedora’ (1978), written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond and directed by Wilder, was the teams penultimate film and for all intents and purposes the more appropriate finish to their legendary partnership than their unfortunate final outing ‘Buddy Buddy’. I saw the film in its Los Angeles first (and
I’ve seen ‘Double Indemnity’ (screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler based on James M. Cain’s novel) about a thousand times over the past fifty years and never knew–or frankly cared about– the identity of a man sitting outside Barton Keyes’s (Edward G. Robinson) office. Sixteen or so minutes into
Here’s an astoundingly lousy Vitaphone short from 1929 featuring ‘Harry Wayman and His Debutantes’. Yes, it’s an all girl orchestra much like the one in ‘Some Like It Hot’ (‘Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopaters’). The only differences are 1) The leader is a guy not a woman. 2) There
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’,
Filmmakers appear to be at their best when being interviewed by Europeans. Yesterday I offered up Orson Welles on Michael Parkinson’s show. Today, dig this one-hour doc made for French television titled ‘Billy Wilder; Portrait Of A 60% Perfect Man’. Ciment, a noted French cineaste, shot this material in Los