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  through a glass darkly the Lost Weekend and die todesmühlen I have supp’d full with horrors. —William Shakespeare, Macbeth Billy Wilder was on his way by train to New York for a holiday in the spring of 1944. He picked up a copy of Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend at a kiosk during the stopover at Union Station in Chicago. Wilder sat up all night reading it. By the time he reached Pennsylvania Station in New York City the following morning, Wilder had finished the book. He was convinced that it would make an engrossing movie. Wilder phoned Paramount executive Buddy De Sylva from the station and requested that the studio purchase the screen rights to the book. De Sylva informed him that Y. Frank Freeman was out of town but said that he would buy the novel for Wilder on his own authority. So De Sylva plunked down fifty thousand dollars for The Lost Weekend.1 De Sylva had started in show business as a lyricist for major songwriters like Jerome Kern, with whom he had composed “Look for the Silver Lining.” He graduated to producing pictures and became Paramount’s head of production in 1939. He supported Wilder in the making of Double Indemnity, which turned out well, and he was more than willing to sponsor another Wilder project. Wilder then sold Brackett on the book; both were eager to collaborate again.2 When Freeman learned what De Sylva had done in his absence, he was outraged. As a Bible Belt Baptist, he did not approve of Paramount’s making what he considered a sordid movie about a disreputable souse. Wilder did not relish having to face Freeman, who had likewise strongly disapproved of Double Indemnity. Freeman called an executive meeting to rake Wilder over the coals.3 Wilder presented an inspired talk at the meeting, in which he emphasized that the movie would not be a dreary message picture about tem- Some LIke It WILder  perance. “If you want to send a message,” he commented, “go to Western Union.” He said that the script would focus on the romance between the main character and his loyal girlfriend. He devised on the spot a classic “meet-cute” to rival the one he had pitched to Ernst Lubitsch for the script of Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife. In the present instance the hero and heroine would meet over the mix-up of their coats in the cloakroom of the Metropolitan Opera House. But Freeman remained intransigent; he stated emphatically that The Lost Weekend would be made “over my dead body.” Wilder muttered under his breath that that could be arranged.4 There is a saying in Hollywood that a director is only as good as his last picture. Although Double Indemnity would not be released until the fall, the buzz about the picture in the film colony was enthusiastic, a point in Wilder’s favor. Furthermore, De Sylva was in Wilder’s corner. Consequently, the board of executives at the meeting finally green-lighted the project. Their decision was ratified by Barney Balaban, president of Paramount, whose office was at the studio’s headquarters in New York City. Balaban, who had run a lucrative chain of theaters in the greater Chicago area before taking over at Paramount, was a canny judge of potential film projects. The Lost Weekend (1945) After the conference, Wilder commented to a journalist that TheLostWeekend was not going to be the ordinary Hollywood fare. “Hollywood is in a rut,” he said. Speaking of the run-of-the-mill movies the studios churned out, he noted that Hollywood was a slave to formula. “They don’t make pictures, they remake them.” The Lost Weekend, he continued, would be the first mainstream film to take alcoholism seriously.5 Prior to this movie, drinking was primarily employed on the screen as comic relief. “In those days an alcoholic was something you roared with laughter about,” Wilder explained.6 The drunkard would be a comedian like W. C. Fields, who would get plastered in a bar, then bump into the furniture and put on his hat backward as he left. But Don Birnam, the writer in The Lost Weekend whose addiction to liquor leads him into the wretched world of the alcoholic, is not a comic drunk, Wilder said: He does not stagger; he is a dignified man. In fact, there is nothing at all funny about Don Birnam. Asked if he modeled Don in the...

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