Detailed item info | Synopsis | Over his seven decades in the director's chair, Billy Wilder masterminded some of Hollywood's most enduring and well-crafted films, among them SUNSET BOULEVARD, THE APARTMENT, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and SOME LIKE IT HOT. Known for being cagey and guarded in interviews, Wilder finally opens up here in a conversation with the director Cameron Crowe (JERRY MAGUIRE), who has named Wilder as his filmmaking idol. At 93, he seems to feel he has nothing to lose, and pours out juicy anecdotes about his Austrian childhood, his stints as a journalist, and of course, Hollywood starlets. This book is not only witty and illuminating, it is also beautiful--650 black-and-white photographs are included.
| | Size | | Length: | 372 pages | | Height: | 10.3 in. | | Width: | 8.3 in. | | Thickness: | 0.8 in. | | Weight: | 33.6 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | In Conversations with Wilder, Hollywood's legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work.
Here, in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters, stills, grabs, and never-before-seen pictures from Wilder's own collection -- the ninety-three-year-old icon talks to Cameron Crowe, one of today's best-known writer-directors, about thirty years at the very heart of Hollywood, and about screenwriting and camera work, set design and stars, his peers and their movies, the studio system and films today. In his distinct voice we hear Wilder's inside view on his collaborations with such stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo (he was a writer at MGM during the making of Ninotchka. Here are Wilder's sharp and funny behind-the-scenes stories about the making of A Foreign Affair, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Ace in the Hole, among many others. Wilder is ever mysterious, but Crowe gets him to speak candidly on Stanwyck: "She knew the script, everybody's lines, never a fault, never a mistake"; on Cary Grant: "I had Cary Grant in mind for four of my pictures . . . slipped through my net every time"; on the "Lubitsch Touch": "It was the elegant use of the super-joke." Wilder also remembers his early years in Vienna, working as a journalist in Berlin, rooming with Peter Lorre at the Chateau Marmont -- always with the same dry wit, tough-minded romanticism, and elegance that are the hallmarks of Wilder's films. This book is a classic of Hollywood history and lore.
| | Industry reviews | "Wilder is now a modern American classic: he has long been a wisecracking hero to students of the art of self loathing. Cameron Crowe proves that the Wilder Touch is a thing in the world now, that the elegant unpleasantness of his better movies has become vastly cool in the minds of yet another generation."
O'Hagan
"Crowe is a very talented writer-director in his own right...as well as a skilled former journalist who knows how to capture personality in print. The Wilder he brings to us is dapper, impatient, proud of his triumphs and freshly mortified by his goofs, a spontaneous comedic genius in private conversation, an art collector with idiosyncratic but exquisite taste, a sports addict in frequent contact with his bookie, a man subject to the unceasing physical stress of old age who nevertheless shuns the elevator because it might get stuck. There is some decent if not mind-blowing gossip here (surprise: Marilyn Monroe was hard to work with) and lively opinions dished out with the appealing, uncensored honesty of the elderly (Wilder loathed TITANIC, while, admirers might be taken aback to learn, his favorite movie of the 90's is FORREST GUMP)."
New York Times - Susan Kerr (11/21/1999)
"Though there have been several Wilder biographies in recent years, this is probably the best book about his work to date, since Crowe is able to extract so much new behind-the-scenes detail from the notoriously reticent filmmaker."
Entertainment Weekly - Charles Winecoff (12/03/1999)
"Crowe's extended interview is a merry-melancholy dance through Wilder's career, from the earliest German work through the acclaimed screenwriting collaborations with Charles Brackett and I.L. Diamond."
Washington Post - Louis Bayard (02/27/2000)
"One of the pleasures of this book is the way Crowe allows us to share the gradual opening-up of the initially curmudgeonly old-timer, letting the young man in on at least a few of his secrets, and enjoying talking to someone who so obviously enjoys his work."
Literary Review - Patrick O'Connor
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