In a film, marriage is a beautiful mistake that two people make together.
—Ernst Lubitsch
When he was preparing Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife for filming, Ernst Lubitsch wanted Charles Brackett to write the screenplay. He did not ask the studio for Billy Wilder as well because he did not want to give the impression that he was a German-born director who favored hiring members of the German immigrant colony in Hollywood. But Manny Wolf told Lubitsch that Brackett and Wilder were a team, so Wilder was part of the deal.
Lubitsch, a stout, cigar-chomping little man with a thick German accent, had a genius for making Hollywood pictures, like Trouble in Paradise (1932), marked by sophisticated Continental humor. In his first meeting with Brackett and Wilder, he posed a thought-provoking question. In romantic comedies, he explained, the hero and the heroine should not meet in an ordinary way. They should “meet-cute,” as the saying goes; that is, they should meet in an unexpected manner that will get the audience interested in them. Lubitsch accordingly asked his writers, “How do the boy and girl get together?”
Wilder, who kept a notebook of clever ideas for use in screenplays, volunteered this proposal: Wealthy Michael Brandon (the character eventually played by Gary Cooper) is trying to buy pajamas in a men’s store on the French Riviera where he is vacationing, but he sleeps only in the pants. He is thrifty, as millionaires go, so he insists on purchasing only the pants. The clerk says he must buy the tops as well. Nicole de Loiselle (who would be played by Claudette Colbert) comes into the store and asks to buy the tops only, because she sleeps only in the tops. So Michael and Nicole divide a pair of pajamas. Lubitsch was enthusiastic about Wilder’s suggestion, which was the ultimate meet-cute scene.
Wilder continued the habit of scribbling ideas into a pocket notebook throughout his career. “I have always been an inveterate note-taker, because you never know when the muse will touch your brow.” These bright ideas, he concluded, could come in handy on the days “when the muse goes out to have her hair done.”
Lubitsch was just finishing another picture. So he told his writing team to go ahead and work out the narrative structure of the entire scenario, and he would have story conferences with them from time to time. The French farce by Alfred Savoir that they were adapting provided the skeleton of the scenario, including certain tentpole scenes that they had to work into the script for Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife.
Lubitsch was a perfectionist who insisted on polishing a screenplay until it was as good as possible. “Preparation is everything,” he wrote; it was vital that every scene in the script “be detailed down to the last raising of an eyelid.”1 He never allowed actors to improvise on the set—an attitude that Wilder picked up from his mentor when he became a director. Wilder clearly found in Lubitsch a kindred spirit.
During script sessions, Lubitsch would act out each role as he tested the writers’ dialogue. He would periodically prod Brackett and Wilder with queries like “Is this the best we can do?” Wilder declared, “If the truth be known, Lubitsch was the best writer who ever lived.” Most of the “bright ideas” came from him. In the script, when the American Michael is looking for a clothing store in France, he notices a sign in a store window: “English is spoken here.” Lubitsch penciled into the screenplay at this point the following addition to the sign: “American understood.”2
Michael is a millionaire who has married and divorced seven women; he paid each of them a generous settlement when he got bored with her. After marrying him, Nicole learns that she is the eighth Mrs. Brandon and nicknames him “Bluebeard.” She decides to divorce him for a huge amount of alimony. But after many twists and turns, Nicole realizes that she really loves Michael, and she decides to remain Bluebeard’s eighth—and final—wife.
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife began principal photography on October 11, 1937. Lubitsch allowed Wilder to observe him at work on the set whenever he got the chance. “His technique was totally subordinated to storytelling,” Wilder recalled. “His theory—and mine—is that, if the viewer notices direction, you have failed.” Whenever the camerawork calls attention to itself, it is mere showmanship. For example, a living room should not be filmed with a camera inside the fireplace, shooting out at the room through the flames, “unless it is from the point of view of Santa Claus coming down the chimney.”3
Shooting wrapped in January 1938, and postproduction was completed in time for a New York premiere on March 23. Some reviewers scored the picture as a near miss, complaining that Cooper never seemed at home in the role of a much-married millionaire. Moreover, the film seemed to gradually lose its sparkle after the buoyant opening scenes, when marital discord sets in. Other critics thought the picture a winner, noting that the Brackett-Wilder script provided some fine comic moments and that Lubitsch knew how to make the most of them. Despite these mixed reviews, the picture turned a profit, and Lubitsch was more than willing to collaborate with Brackett and Wilder again.
Only a few days before the opening of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Hitler annexed Austria to the Nazi empire, and Austrian Jews were summarily deprived of their civil rights. The Nazis had been actively promoting a so-called Anschluss (union) between Austria and Germany since 1935. Wilder had visited his mother in Vienna in 1935 and entreated her to come to America with him. But at the time she was convinced that Germany would not take over Austria in the foreseeable future. Besides, his widowed mother intended to marry again; she was engaged to a businessman named Siedliska, whom Wilder never met. “She was set in her ways,” Wilder said, and she decided to stay in Vienna with her new husband.
Wilder never saw his mother again. In the wake of the Anschluss, he lost contact with her. After the war, he was informed by Auschwitz survivors he had met when visiting Vienna in the summer of 1945 that his mother had been taken to the death camp in a cattle car. He finally learned through the Red Cross that his mother, his grandmother, and his stepfather were all gassed at Auschwitz in 1941. “The Nazis just threw my family away,” he said.
No doubt Wilder’s own view of human nature was indelibly shaped by his experience of the twentieth century’s violent events. “I learned many things about human nature,” he said of those days, “none of them favorable.” To the end of his life, he felt “fury, tears, and reproaches” over the loss of his family to the Holocaust. He believed that he should have insisted that they come with him to America in 1935, and not left them behind in Vienna. But, he concluded stoically, paraphrasing Shakespeare, “What is done is done, and cannot be undone.”4
After the theatrical release of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Lubitsch’s tenure at Paramount was at an end. He moved over to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to shoot a vehicle for Greta Garbo, at her request. Lubitsch accordingly arranged for Paramount to loan Brackett and Wilder to MGM to write the screenplay. He also hired Walter Reisch, a screenwriter with whom Wilder had worked at Ufa. The picture was to be titled Ninotchka.
Wilder welcomed the opportunity to observe the director applying his celebrated “Lubitsch touch” to another film. Because the term was coined by a publicist, no one, least of all Lubitsch, ever elaborated on it. Wilder finally described it as “a gracefully sophisticated, mischievous way of getting a provocative point across to the audience by innuendo.” Thus in Lubitsch’s films there are women of easy virtue, but no sluts; masked balls, but no orgies. “Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than most directors can do with an open fly,” Wilder explained. Beyond the closed door, the filmgoer imagined, the naughty lovers “were accomplishing outrageous things.” In sum, the Lubitsch touch was a cosmopolitan yet outré kind of humor, “an incomparable ability to present delightfully barbed and suggestive dialogue in such a way that it never seemed vulgar, but charming and discreet.”5
The screenplay for Ninotchka evolved from a brief story synopsis scribbled in a notebook by writer Melchior Lengyel. He in due course submitted it to MGM, suggesting that it would make a vehicle for Garbo: “Russian girl saturated with Bolshevist ideals goes to imperialistic Paris. She meets romance and has an uproarious good time. Capitalism not so bad after all.” MGM liked the concept enough to pay Lengyel fifteen thousand dollars for the three-sentence scenario.6
Lubitsch closeted himself with his troika of writers, and together they hammered out a detailed screenplay. Commissar Ninotchka Yakushova (the Greta Garbo character) is sent from Moscow to Paris to check up on three inept envoys from the Kremlin who have been assigned to sell jewels confiscated by the Communist regime from a czarist aristocrat. The diamonds once belonged to the exiled Grand Duchess Swana (Ina Claire). But the three Russian stooges, Iranoff (Sig Ruman), Buljanoff (Felix Bressart), and Kopalski (Alexander Granach), have been seduced by the decadent pleasures of Paris and have all but disregarded their mission. Lubitsch’s Paris is a place of infinite elegance, wit, and sexual tolerance; it represents a flight from everyday reality. Ninotchka intends to retrieve the jewels and get on with selling them to a Paris jeweler herself, to raise money for the state. But Swana coaxes her urbane lover, Leon d’Algout (Melvyn Douglas), to deflect Ninotchka from her set purpose by romancing her.
The razor-sharp dialogue in the streamlined screenplay by Wilder and his cohorts provides Garbo with some pungent lines. Asked by her three bungling comrades how things are in Moscow, Ninotchka, with her unbecoming granite face, replies in a tombstone voice. Speaking of Stalin’s purges, she intones, “The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.”
Leon takes Ninotchka under his wing, and they go to a bistro for lunch. In an effort to melt her ice-cold exterior, he tells her some stale jokes. Ninotchka steadfastly declines to laugh at any of them. Leon is nonetheless carried away by his own comic routine and falls off his chair; at the sight of his pratfall, Ninotchka bursts into gales of laughter. When Garbo let loose with uproarious laughter during rehearsals for this scene, Lubitsch said, “From that moment on, I knew I had a picture.”7 Ninotchka develops a crush on Leon, and the feeling is mutual.
Principal photography commenced on May 31, 1939, and lasted fifty-eight days. Garbo had no problems with the double entendres in the script. For example, on a date with Ninotchka, Leon observes, as the clock strikes twelve, “It is midnight; one-half of Paris is making love to the other half.” Continuing his amorous badinage, he says, “Look at the clock: one hand has met the other hand, and they kiss.” Then Leon bestows a kiss on Ninotchka.
Garbo insisted that anyone who was not absolutely necessary to the shooting of a scene was not to be on the set. This prohibition included the screenwriters. But Wilder contrived to sneak onto the soundstage occasionally to watch Lubitsch direct a scene with a skeleton crew. One day Wilder was hiding behind a piece of scenery, watching the filming, when two production assistants put a screen in front of him. “Nobody said for me to leave,” he remembered; “they just put it there. But I knew that Garbo had felt my presence. She had eyes in the back of her head.”
Wilder explained that the film was a “serious satire,” with references to the repressive Bolshevik regime endured by the Russian people. Back in Moscow after her sojourn in Paris, Ninotchka is reunited with Buljanoff, Iranoff, and Kopalski at a party in the cold-water flat she shares with her roommate Anna in a dreary tenement. One of the other tenants walks by while Anna is chatting with Ninotchka, and Anna suddenly lapses into stony silence. “I never know whether he is going to the washroom or to the secret police,” Anna explains.
Lubitsch invited his screenwriters to a sneak preview of the picture in Long Beach. Afterward he read through the stack of preview cards turned in by the audience; suddenly he roared with laughter at one card. “I was wondering what the hell was so funny,” said Wilder. Finally Lubitsch handed him the card, which read, “Funniest film I ever saw; I laughed so hard that I peed in my girlfriend’s hand.”8 Wilder howled too. “Garbo laughs!” was the slogan of the movie’s publicity campaign, a reference to the many humorless roles she had played in the past.
Wilder’s high regard for Lubitsch never diminished. “Many of us have tried so hard to imitate the Lubitsch Touch,” Wilder said. “Oh, we may get lucky: a few feet of cunning film once in a while, . . . that is like Lubitsch—but not Lubitsch.”9 He added later, “I have sometimes been called the heir of Lubitsch. My God, if I could write and direct like Lubitsch, I would be a very happy man. . . . No one but Lubitsch could make a Lubitsch picture.”
Brackett and Wilder coauthored the screenplay for another comedy in 1939, Midnight, which they wrote just before Ninotchka. It was directed by Mitchell Leisen, for whom the pair would also write Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Whereas Wilder developed quite a rapport with Lubitsch, he never got along with Leisen. In fact, he dismissed Leisen as Paramount’s second-string Lubitsch.
Leisen had graduated to directing after serving as Cecil B. De Mille’s set designer on films like The King of Kings (1927). He became a prominent director of screwball comedies, a brand of farce that flourished during the Depression era, when audiences hungered for escapist entertainment. This style of comedy combines sophisticated repartee with slapstick; it depends on fast, witty dialogue and usually focuses on the battle of the sexes. The main characters often represent different classes of society. Leisen’s Easy Living (1937), for example, deals with a rich playboy (Ray Milland) falling for a typist (Jean Arthur). It was written by Preston Sturges, who helped to make it a frenetic farce that was one of Leisen’s best screwball comedies.
Midnight was intended as a vehicle for Claudette Colbert, Paramount’s biggest box office draw; hence producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. judged it important enough for him to splurge on a topflight cast and crew. In addition to Colbert, the cast list boasted Don Ameche (In Old Chicago), John Barrymore (Grand Hotel), and Mary Astor (Dodsworth). Cinematographer Charles Lang and editor Doane Harrison would later work on Wilder’s own films. So would composer Frederick Hollander, who had written the music for one of Wilder’s earlier German films.
The scenario of Midnight centers on Eve Peabody (Claudette Colbert), an out-of-work showgirl stranded in Paris, who catches the eye of taxi driver Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche). But Eve is a gold digger who is looking for bigger game than a cabbie. As in Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Brackett and Wilder came up with a pip of an opening scene. Eve arrives one evening in a Paris depot, sitting on a wooden bench in a third-class coach with no luggage. An ex-chorine down on her luck, she is wearing the only finery she has left, a gold lamé evening gown. Tibor is much taken by her and offers her a free ride in his cab. She asks him to drive her around town while she looks for work. Asked what kind of work she wants, she replies, “Well, at this time of night and in these clothes, I’m not looking for needlework.” Eve implies, with an innuendo reminiscent of Lubitsch, that she is a mercenary young woman who is not above latching on to a wealthy beau now and then. At the moment, however, she is hoping to find a singing job. Tibor drives her around to several nightclubs, but her auditions come to nothing. Eve shrugs that she is prepared to sleep in the waiting room of the train station (evoking Wilder’s early days in Berlin). But she soon crashes a society party by proffering a pawn ticket as an invitation. There she encounters millionaire Georges Flamarion (John Barrymore), and the screenplay shifts into high gear.
Georges is willing to pay Eve handsomely to pose as a baroness to lure Jacques Picot, a dapper gigolo, away from his straying wife Helene (Mary Astor). Impishly appropriating Tibor’s surname, Eve calls herself Baroness Czerny, a Hungarian aristocrat. The deal includes Georges inviting Eve to a lavish party at his swank country estate. He tells her in the course of the soiree that she is the belle of the ball. She replies, “Every Cinderella has her midnight.” Tibor traces Eve to Georges’s villa, where he quickly sizes up the situation and introduces himself as Eve’s husband, Baron Czerny. Eve endeavors to keep Tibor from exposing her as an impostor by maintaining that her hapless husband is incurably insane. Eventually Eve tires of the masquerade and declares her love for Tibor, while Georges and Helene are reunited.
Leisen jealously guarded his prerogatives as a director, revising and deleting lines without consulting Brackett and Wilder—unlike Lubitsch, who always compared notes with his writers. Wilder was fit to be tied when he learned what Leisen was up to; he took to sneaking onto the set to ascertain whether Leisen was shooting a scene as written. When Leisen caught him hiding behind a flat on the soundstage one day, he had Wilder barred from the set, claiming that Wilder was spying on him. Wilder was outraged when he was escorted from the set by a security officer, but Brackett, who was always a calming influence on him, got him to cool off.
Wilder was acerbic in describing Leisen. If Leisen put down Wilder for being a “foreigner,” Wilder poked fun at Leisen, who was bisexual, for flamboyantly flaunting his homosexual proclivities. It was an open secret in the movie colony that Leisen “turned his home into a homosexual rendezvous,” according to Zolotow. With that in mind, Wilder fumed, “Leisen was too goddamned fey. I don’t knock fairies; but Leisen . . . was stupid.” Leisen, the former set designer, spent more time arranging the silverware and dishes on the table of a dining room set “than he did discussing scenes with the writers.” Wilder smirked that Leisen was still a set designer, not a director; he was a “window dresser.” What’s more, Leisen “didn’t know crap about narrative construction; and he didn’t care.”10 Wilder, who would eventually gain a reputation as a master of the well-made screenplay, maintained that each detail should have a precise, interlocking function in the script. “In a good script, everything is necessary or it ain’t good,” he contended. “And if you take out one piece, you better replace it with a different piece or you got trouble.”11
By the time he appeared in Midnight, Barrymore was a drunken relic of the dashing matinee idol he had been in silent pictures like Don Juan (1926), when he was dubbed the Great Profile. One night during the shooting period, Barrymore went on a binge; he was so fuddled with drink that he went into the ladies’ room of a Hollywood nightclub by mistake. A woman came in while he was relieving himself and exclaimed in outrage, “Sir, this is for women!” Undismayed, Barrymore turned around and declared, “So is this.”12 Little wonder that Barrymore’s addled mind could not retain his lines. Midnight represented the culmination of his long career, which ended with Barrymore’s death from cirrhosis of the liver on May 29, 1942.
When the film opened on March 24, 1939, the notices not only praised the picture for being an outstanding screwball comedy but also singled out the superior screenplay; indeed, one reviewer, according to Tom Wood, called it “a script of diamond brilliance.”13 When the film was released on DVD in 2007, the New York Times termed it “a diverting comedy” with Colbert and Ameche “running amok.”14 When, in 2006, film scholar David Kipen picked the top five Hollywood screenplays of all time, among them was Midnight, a “magnificent, overlooked screwball comedy.”15
Brackett and Wilder reentered the lists with Leisen when they were assigned to write the screenplay for Hold Back the Dawn. Wilder’s interactions with Leisen were once more marred by several testy exchanges. In the years ahead, Wilder would consistently refer to Leisen as “that fag who ruined my scripts.”16
By this juncture, Brackett and Wilder had developed a standard method of composing screenplays. Wilder paced back and forth in the office, chain-smoking and swinging a walking stick or riding crop, sometimes whacking a piece of furniture to drive home a point to his partner. “I needed something to keep my hands busy,” Wilder explained, “and a pencil wasn’t long enough.” It was Brackett who wielded the pencil. Brackett curled up on the sofa with his shoes off, making notes with a legal pad and pencil. Their script conferences inevitably degenerated into shouting matches. “We fought a lot,” Wilder remembered. “Brackett and I were like a box of matches. We kept striking till it lit up. He would sometimes throw a telephone book or a lampshade at me.”17
Still, Wilder valued Brackett’s presence. “It’s such an exhausting thing, facing that empty page in the morning,” he explained. “One of the best things about a collaborator is that he stops you from committing suicide. You have to have specific talent to be a collaborator. It’s like a marriage.”18 Wilder acknowledged that Brackett “didn’t think like I did at all, didn’t even approve of me. But, by God! When we started mapping out dialogue, there were sparks!”19
A Brackett-Wilder screenplay was not committed to paper until every line of dialogue had been discussed thoroughly. To offset the possibility of their finished screenplay being passed on to another writer to fiddle around with, as happened with Midnight, they adopted the practice of doling out their scripts a few scenes at a time, just before each one was to be shot. Producers accepted their tight security over their scripts because Brackett and Wilder were by now the most renowned writing team in town. Nevertheless, when Leisen was shooting a scene, he was still prone to modifying the screenplay. That was precisely what happened on Hold Back the Dawn, their last screenplay for him.
The film is principally set in a small town on the Mexican border, where Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer), a European refugee, desperately waits to obtain an American visa. Wilder drew on his own experience in obtaining an immigration visa to enter the United States in 1934.
The movie has a clever narrative frame: Georges sneaks onto the Paramount lot, where he encounters Mr. Saxon, a film director played by Leisen, who is shooting I Wanted Wings (1941), the war picture that Leisen was actually shooting at the time. Georges proceeds to tell his story to Saxon with the hope that the director will want to film it. His story plays out in an extended flashback.
Georges is a down-at-the-heels roué from Romania. He admits to having been a “dancer for hire” and a “ladies’ escort” back in Romania—precisely what Wilder had been in Berlin in 1926. Georges romances a visiting tourist, an American schoolteacher named Emmy Brown, as his one-way ticket to the United States. Georges and the innocent, gullible Emmy become engaged. He plans to obtain a quick divorce once he has his American visa and is settled in the United States, but he gradually realizes that he really loves Emmy. In an unexpected crisis of conscience, Georges offers to let her off the hook, but Emmy forgives him his deception and still agrees to marry him.
Shooting commenced on February 18, 1941. For one scene Brackett and Wilder devised a monologue for Georges to deliver to a cockroach crawling up the wall of his room in the wretched Hotel Esperanza, a hostel that does not promise the hope of its Spanish name. In this scene an unshaven Georges dramatizes his plight as if he were a border official delaying the cockroach’s passage across the wall. On March 15, the day that the scene was to be filmed, Boyer complained to Leisen that it was idiotic for him to address an insect that could not respond to him. Leisen deemed the lines superfluous and canceled the monologue without notifying Brackett and Wilder.
Wilder was having lunch at Lucy’s, a bistro near Paramount, when he came across Boyer, who made the mistake of casually informing him that he had gotten Leisen to cut the cockroach speech. When Wilder objected, Boyer added defensively that the scene was running too long. Wilder told Brackett after lunch that Leisen apparently did not appreciate how the cockroach monologue encapsulated the wretched Georges’ own situation. Georges, the lonesome alien, is so desperate for communication that he converses with this bug.
The irony and dark humor in the speech could have permeated the rest of the movie. “It is not necessary for a director to know how to write,” said Wilder sarcastically; “it helps, however, if he knows how to read.” Wilder pounded his fist on the desk and threatened to beat Boyer’s brains out. But then he reflected that actors did not have any brains and abandoned the notion. Later in the day, Brackett entered their office suite and found Wilder “wildly scratching out lines in the script.” When Brackett inquired what his partner was doing, Wilder answered with maniacal glee, “Cutting Boyer’s lines; if the son-of-a-bitch won’t talk to a cockroach, then he’s not going to talk to anybody!”20 Brackett and Wilder were still revising the last third of the screenplay, so they proceeded to favor Olivia de Havilland by giving her the best lines of dialogue. Boyer’s part dwindled appreciably in the last segment of the movie, and de Havilland ended up with an Oscar nomination for her performance. Brackett and Wilder were also nominated for best screenplay.
But Wilder was not yet finished getting even with Boyer. A year later, while directing his first Hollywood feature, The Major and the Minor, he included a bit in which a little girl asks her mother to buy her a movie magazine at a newsstand in a train station. The lurid cover story is titled “Why I Hate Women,” by Charles Boyer. Even years later, the Hold Back the Dawn episode still rankled. When Wilder filmed The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), he had James Stewart as Charles Lindbergh address a fly buzzing around the cockpit of his plane. Wilder defied anyone to suggest that he cut the fly monologue.
The shooting of Hold Back the Dawn was finished on May 5, 1941; Doane Harrison completed the edit in time for release in September. Like Midnight, it collected a sheaf of favorable notices. It was described as a first-rate soap opera that would please “the washboard weepers,” yet the movie never becomes maudlin. It was also called a touching romantic melodrama with mass appeal.21
Wilder had become increasingly disgruntled about Leisen’s meddling with the screenplays he and Brackett had written for him. He began to consider more seriously than ever the possibility of directing his own screenplays, to keep directors like Leisen from interfering with the scripts he wrote. But before he could pursue this ambition, he had to fulfill one more commitment. Independent producer Samuel Goldwyn had asked Brackett and Wilder to script a film for a major Hollywood director, Howard Hawks (His Girl Friday). The resulting film would be Ball of Fire, a daffy screwball romp along the lines of Midnight.
Goldwyn was renowned for assembling top-notch collaborators to work on his productions. In addition to Hawks, Ball of Fire boasted the services of the distinguished cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) and the ace editor Daniel Mandell (Wuthering Heights). Mandell would subsequently edit no fewer than six of Wilder’s own films. The stars of Ball of Fire, Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would likewise both appear in Wilder movies. There was no doubt that Brackett and Wilder were in good company on this picture.
Wilder dug out of his trunk an unused fourteen-page scenario titled “From A to Z,” which he had composed in his threadbare days in Berlin. He handed it to Thomas Monroe, a junior writer at Paramount, for a quick polish. In a story conference with Goldwyn and Hawks, he summarized the plot for them: Bertram Potts, a professor of linguistics, is coauthoring an encyclopedia with seven other scholars. He recruits sassy nightclub singer Sugarpuss O’Shea to aid him in writing the entry on slang after hearing her warble “Drum Boogie” at the club. The song is filled with picturesque slang phrases like “The hepcat’s a killer diller.” Wilder, we recall, was a jazz enthusiast from his youth in Vienna. Hence he loved having Sugarpuss O’Shea belt out the jazzy “Drum Boogie” as the lead singer for Gene Krupa and his band, who would appear in the picture. Sugarpuss invades the fuddy-duddy professors’ mausoleum for a few days to help Bertram with his research on slang. Hawks liked the scenario very much. He commented at the story conference, “It’s just Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”: the brassy showgirl is Snow White, and the eccentric professors are the seven dwarfs. Hawks concluded that Wilder brightened and said, “We’ll have it for you in a few weeks.”22
Production began on August 6, 1941, with a forty-eight-day shooting schedule. Wilder obtained permission to be on the set during filming to observe the top director at work. Hawks did not mind Wilder’s presence on the set “as a fly on the wall.”23 When Wilder had observed Lubitsch at work, he had not been thinking of moving up to directing. Now he spent more time on the soundstage. “I wanted to see a picture from beginning to end, before I started directing myself,” he said. One of the things that Wilder admired in Hawks, according to Andrew Sarris, was that he “never betrayed the script for the sake of a personal flourish of visual virtuosity.”24 Wilder noted that, like Lubitsch, Hawks avoided a display of fancy visual style for its own sake; his objective was to tell the story as efficiently as possible.
Hawks had developed the custom of changing any dialogue in the screenplay that no longer fit the flow of the shooting as it had been progressing. “I was not really improvising,” he emphasized; “I was simply modifying the dialogue to better fit the action of the scene.” Since Wilder was usually on the set during shooting, Hawks would sometimes have a give-and-take session with him on the soundstage, along with the actors, just before the cameras rolled, to revise passages of dialogue.25
The picture was released on December 2, 1941, just days before the outbreak of World War II, and it was a huge success. The critics lauded the hilariously mismatched couple—the bashful academic and the snazzy nightclub siren—who provided the makings of a madcap screwball comedy. Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy writes that Ball of Fire remains utterly charming for the brash cleverness of the dialogue, the heartwarming geniality of the professors, and the expert comic playing of Cooper and Stanwyck.26
But Wilder was still smarting from his unpleasant experiences with Mitchell Leisen, particularly on Hold Back the Dawn. When Wilder decided to establish himself as a writer-director, he implicitly asserted that a filmmaker should be in control of his projects from the script stage onward. “I got very incensed with directors, good directors, but people who did not have the proper respect for the script. I was just very incensed,” Wilder remembered. “You know, once you finished the script, they grab it and rewrite it. If they’re behind schedule, they tear out eight pages, and they’re on schedule again. It made me so furious, I decided to go on and become a director.”27
Wilder always considered himself a writer first and foremost, even after he started directing. There were two screenwriters who had made the transition to directing shortly before Wilder made his bid in 1941 to do the same: Preston Sturges and John Huston. Sturges (The Miracle of Morgan Creek), a contemporary of Wilder’s at Paramount, recalled that it was not uncommon for a platoon of screenwriters to work on the same script. “Writers worked in teams, like piano movers,” he recalled.28
Wilder persuaded the studio to give him a shot at directing. According to Wilder, Paramount figured he would do something artsy-smartsy: “What? Crazy Wilder? We’re going to give him one picture; he’s going to fall on his face. Then he’s going to come back and be a writer again,” having gotten it out of his system.29 The front office was expecting him to reach back to his Berlin days and do a warmed-over version of a film he had written then, such as Menschen am Sonntag. He had other plans. “I set out to make a commercial picture I wouldn’t be ashamed of, so my first picture as a director would not be my last.”30
One thing that was in the budding director’s favor was his versatility. His Hollywood scripts had ranged from musicals like Music in the Air to comedies like Ninotchka and melodramas like Hold Back the Dawn. “I can’t understand how anybody can always work in the same genre,” Wilder said. “I get bored and jump around to make different types of films.” In fact, writes John Russell Taylor, Wilder “stands as one of the most famous and successful of a whole group of émigrés who from the start could and did turn their hands to almost anything” with equal success.31 The first picture Wilder was slated to direct was The Major and the Minor. If the people in the front office thought he would fall on his face, they were in for a surprise.