Courtesy of Princeton University Press
Writer-director Billy Wilder was funny. His mordant sense of humor and the sharp stick of his irony were on full display in Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Apartment (1960) and other films that deserve to be called by that much abused word—classic.
Before fleeing the Nazis and landing in Hollywood, Wilder earned his keep as a satirical freelance writer for publications in Berlin and Vienna. Some of his articles appear in English for the first time as Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimer Berlin and Interwar Vienna.
The collection is edited by Noah Isenberg, the University of Texas at Austin media professor who has become a leading contemporary film historian on the strength of previous books such as We’ll Always Have Casablanca and Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins. Isenberg’s introduction highlights the thematic links between Wilder’s screenplays and the stories Wilder told of his swashbuckling journalism days—as well as his unsubstantiated claims. He once told Playboy that in “one morning” he interviewed Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Arthur Schnitzler and Richard Strauss. Busy guy but the proof for those interviews hasn’t surfaced in any archive.
Wilder’s interest in film was apparent early on. He reviewed movies and wrote an account of his collaboration with other young Berliners on what today would be called an indie film, People on Sunday (1930). His essays remain amusing. Included in Billy Wilder on Assignment is his advocacy for the mandatory teaching of telling lies in schools. This way, successful lying would no longer be “the privilege of the few” but distributed “on a strictly democratic basis.” Honestly?
Billy Wilder on Assignment was translated by Shelley Frisch and published by Princeton University Press.
