Robert Horton

Billy Wilder: Interviews Robert Horton

Marc Notes: Includes index and filmography; Cloth avail. @ $46.00. Publisher Marketing: Always daring Hollywood censors' limits on content, Billy Wilder directed greats such as Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, Kirk Douglas, Audrey Hepburn, and Gary Cooper. "Billy Wilder: Interviews" follows the filmmaking career of one of Hollywood's most honored and successful writer-directors and spans over fifty years. Wilder, born in 1906, fled from Nazi Germany and established himself in America. Starting with a celebrated 1944 "Life" magazine profile, the book traces his progress from his Oscar-winning heyday of the 1940s to the 1990s, in which he is still witty, caustic, and defiant. Often playful and sometimes outrageous, but just as often very serious, Wilder details his rise as a Berlin cub reporter to a fledgling screenwriter in Hollywood's "Golden Age." He tells the stories behind his brilliant direction of such classics as "Double Indemnity" (1944), "The Lost Weekend" (1945), "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), "Stalag 17" (1953), "Sabrina" (1954), "The Seven-Year Itch" (1955), "Some Like It Hot" (1959), and "The Apartment" (1960), among others. A dazzling raconteur, Wilder gives the scoop on the royalty of cinema, from the maddening magic of Monroe to the uncanny empathy of frequent alter ego Lemmon. Though his natural tendency is to spin marvelous anecdotes on the subject of show business, Wilder also delivers penetrating and instructive observations on his craft. On screen, his special blend of cynicism and romanticism was always expressed in a style that avoided showiness. "Billy Wilder: Interviews" includes in-depth profiles, spirited Q&A's, and on-the-set glimpses of the director at work. Taken together, the interviews form an unofficial memoir of a sophisticated artist once described by a colleague as the most unusual and amusing man in Hollywood. Robert Horton is the film critic for "The Herald" in Everett, Washington. His work has been published in "Film Comment," "New York Newsday," "American Film," and the "Seattle Weekly." Review Citations:

Booklist 05/01/2002 pg. 1497 (EAN 9781578064441, Paperback)

Booklist 05/01/2002 pg. 1497 (EAN 9781578064434, Hardcover)

Contributor Bio:  Wilder, Billy Billy Wilder was born in 1906 near Cracow in Polish Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His first career was journalism, but he soon moved into the German film industry as a scriptwriter. When Hitler came to power, Wilder fled to Paris and came to Hollywood in 1934. His fifty-year career there as both director and cowriter was one of astonishing versatility and genius, encompassing films about war, murder, alcoholism, Hollywood, sensational journalism, prison camps, criminal trials, love stories, and romance as comedy. Billy Wilder has been nominated for twenty-one Academy Awards and has won six Oscars. He lives in Los Angeles. Jeffrey Meyers, a renowned biographer, has written many books and articles on modern American, English, and European literature. He lives in Berkeley.