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  From Berlin to Hollywood the early Screenplays I was a very small fish in the German celluloid pond. I had worked at the Ufa studios in Berlin, but I had only been a tiny wheel in that big machine. —Billy Wilder “Are we rolling?—as we say on the set?” Veteran film director Billy Wilder eyes the tape recorder before him on his desk and the interviewer across from him. It is hard to believe that this energetic, articulate man began his career in films many years ago in Berlin by writing film scripts, most notably for a semidocumentary called People on Sunday (1929). After he migrated to Hollywood in the 1930s in the wake of the rise of Hitler, Wilder continued his career as a scriptwriter for such major directors as Ernst Lubitsch. When he graduated to film direction with The Major and the Minor (1942), he continued to collaborate on the scripts for his films, and he finally took over the task of producing the films he directed to ensure his artistic independence . He was, therefore, able to create motion pictures that bore the unmistakable stamp of his own artistic vision. Although Wilder made comedies as well as dramas, his satirical purpose was the same in film after film: to expose the foibles and flaws of human nature to the public eye to stimulate audiences to serious reflections about the human condition. It has been said that if a satirist like Jonathan Swift had lived in the twentieth century, he would have written screenplays for Billy Wilder. Wilder’s office was richly endowed with memorabilia associated with the greats of Hollywood history with whom he had worked in his long career. There was, for example, a photo of Marlene Dietrich, whom he first knew in Berlin in the early 1920s. Some of the awards he had received over Some LIke It WILder  the years were inconspicuously stashed on bookshelves (he won no fewer than six Oscars); they easily went unnoticed by visitors. A veteran like Wilder had no need for self-advertisement. early Years Billy Wilder was born on June 22, 1906, in Sucha, a town in the Austrian province of Galicia, about one hundred miles east of Vienna, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire but is now part of Poland. He was christened Samuel, but his mother Eugenia, who had lived in New York City for a time in her youth, nicknamed him Billy. She had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Madison Square Garden and was fascinated by stories about Billy the Kid.1 Billy had a brother, Wilhelm, one year older than Billy, whom his mother nicknamed Willie. Maximilian Wilder, their father, ran a chain of railway restaurants at the depots where the trains on the Vienna line stopped. In due course Max moved on to owning a hotel for transients in Krakow called (in English) Hotel City. “My father was a failed entrepreneur; none of his business enterprises ever succeeded,” Wilder said.2 Billy Wilder was born during the reign of Emperor Franz Josef, who would figure in Wilder’s film The Emperor Waltz (1948). “Billy Wilder was part of the crowd that watched Emperor Franz Josef’s funeral procession in 1916,” writes Geoffrey Macnab. “He marveled at the scale of the pageant and the sight of the tiny Crown Prince Otto amid the black clad mourners.”3 The Wilders moved to Vienna at the outbreak of World War I and remained there after the war. The gymnasium Wilder attended in Vienna was for recalcitrant students. He had earned a reputation early on as a problem student because he sometimes rebelled against the “iron discipline” of the Vienna schools, and he often played hooky. He preferred to skip school and go to the movies. American films were widely available, and his favorite silent film star was Charlie Chaplin. A crucial incident of Wilder’s youth occurred when he noticed a postcard addressed to his father in the afternoon mail. It was an invitation to attend the graduation of his son Hubert from boarding school. The lad in question was Max Wilder’s illegitimate son, about whom his immediate family knew nothing. Later Billy silently handed the card to his father, who made no comment about it. “My father and I had an unspoken agreement about the matter,” Wilder explained. Hubert was their secret, and that created something of a bond between father and son.4 In light of this episode...

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