So now we've lost Billy Wilder, too. (By the way, before I get into this: I haven't seen any of the press reports mention it but Mr. Wilder, the last few years, had been living in the same block as Mr. Berle. Quite a few older Hollywood figures live in that block, which contains a number of luxury condominium and apartment buildings, and they're all probably a bit unsettled.) Now then: Funny thing, I was just watching The Apartment the other day for the eight-zillionth time. It's still quite a movie, though every time I watch it, the ending bothers me a wee bit more. Yes, it's wonderful that Shirley MacLaine winds up with Jack Lemmon instead of Fred MacMurray…but having previously thrown herself at a bastard for quick sex, you kinda wish she'd show the teensiest bit of passion for the nice guy who seems to genuinely love her.
I love cynicism in its place and, since Billy Wilder movies were filled to overflowing with cynicism, I like most of them, especially The Big Carnival (aka Ace in the Hole) and The Fortune Cookie. Still, The Apartment was a love story. Of the major filmmakers who didn't specialize in terror, a la Hitchcock, or unabashed fantasy, Wilder probably set the record for making movies wherein nobody fell in love with anyone…at least not permanently. In The Fortune Cookie, the only smidgen of love is what Jack Lemmon feels for his ex-wife and, by the film's end, he's gotten over it.
I met Billy Wilder only once, around 1978. A writer friend of mine, Stanley Ralph Ross, had an office in a building in Beverly Hills that was full of writers who didn't want to work at home. While I was visiting him one day, a man came in and Stan introduced us so casually, I almost thought, "This can't be THE Billy Wilder." But it was, and he invited me back to his cramped little office for a short conversation. Soon after, he moved to a nicer place over on Santa Monica Boulevard in the same block as my barber. Every time I walked by and saw his name on the office directory, I'd check and see if I had the courage to go up, drop in on him and hope he felt in a chatty mood. I never did.
The one time we talked, it was mainly about his remake of The Front Page — then, his most recent film and, admittedly, not one of his great accomplishments. He said he thought he'd been "done in" by how obvious the casting had been…Walter Matthau as Walter Burns, Jack Lemmon as Hildy Johnson. It was such a natural, he said, that he never really stopped to consider whether the film warranted another version, or whether he could bring anything new to it without mangling a classic beyond recognition. He also felt he'd miscast a couple of key roles, Carol Burnett especially. (He said she was great in the dailies, not so great — his fault, not hers — in the finished film.)
I had recently read the screenplay for The Apartment and compared it to the actual film — budding scriptwriter that I was — and I asked him about the fact that they seemed to be exact twins. Had he really followed what they'd written so slavishly or had I gotten hold of a script that had been revised to reflect the actual filming? He thought for a second and said, approximately, "Shirley MacLaine always told people that Izzy [I.A.L. Diamond, his collaborator] and I wrote the film as we went along. That's bull. We only gave her parts of the script because I didn't want her to overthink her part. We had everything set in stone before we started filming." Then he paused and added, "Well, maybe not stone. Maybe clay."
"Were there any scenes in the script that weren't in the movie?" he asked. I told him no and he decided, "Then that was a revised script because I know we wrote a couple that I ended up throwing out. But we didn't ad-lib on the set. If something didn't work, I changed it, but the goal every day was to make the movie that Izzy and I wrote, and we did. If it's not on the paper, you don't have a movie."
With Billy Wilder, it was almost always on the paper. And up until near the end, it usually made a great movie.