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  the gang’s All Here Some Like It Hot Producer David Selznick told me mixing gangsters and comedy wouldn’t work. In fact, it did. —Billy Wilder United Artists had an agreement with the Mirisch Company to distribute its films and serve as a financial backer. The Mirisch Company was based at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios, where UA had its offices. Walter Mirisch apprised Wilder of the company’s plans to produce its own pictures and to continue its working relationship with Wilder. He agreed to make his next picture, Some Like It Hot, for the Mirisch Company. That began a creative association between the Mirisches and Wilder, states Walter Mirisch, “that ultimately resulted in his making his next eight films for us. I think . . . that is a record for a relationship enduring in this industry” between a director and a production company.1 “I. A. L. Diamond and I got the idea for Some Like It Hot from an earlier German film, Fanfaren der Liebe [Fanfares of Love, 1932], which was set in Bavaria,” Wilder said. The original German film was cowritten by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, who were scriptwriters at Ufa in Berlin at the time. Thoeren was now working in Hollywood; he had repeatedly coaxed Wilder to do an American remake of the original picture. Wilder obtained a print of the German picture and screened it. (Thoeren did not live to see Some Like It Hot; he died in 1957.) Fanfaren der Liebe was about two starving musicians who don a number of disguises to get work; for example, they wear blackface to join an all-black jazz band. Only the film’s final episode caught Wilder’s attention. “When the two guys dressed as women and joined the girls’ band called the Alpine Violets,” he thought he had the makings of a farce. Some LIke It WILder  Gerd Gemünden writes in his monograph on Wilder that Wilder was influenced in remaking Fanfaren der Liebe by the successful German remake in 1951, directed by Kurt Hoffmann. But Wilder emphasized that his movie was derived from the original film.2 Wilder pitched the concept to Walter Mirisch, insisting that the premise of the two musicians in drag could be the basis for a classic screwball comedy. Mirisch had faith enough in Wilder to give him the go-ahead. In its original version, Wilder said, Fanfaren der Liebe was a low-budget, second-class German flick “with heavy-handed, Teutonic humor.” The two musicians are shown smoking cigars and shaving while in drag—rather crude jokes. Diamond pointed out that the sturdy Charley’s Aunt was the classic example of a hero dressing as a woman in American cinema. Jack Benny starred in Archie Mayo’s successful 1941 picture, playing an Oxford undergraduate in Victorian Britain impersonating an elderly dowager who chaperones young society ladies. Diamond was confident that, since Charley’s Aunt had been a hit, the general public would accept another farce about crossdressing .3 In brainstorming with Diamond about the plot, Wilder noted that Fanfaren der Liebe dealt with two guys who joined a girls’ band simply because they needed jobs. “When we talked about it, we decided that the two guys should join the girls’ band as an absolute question of life and death. Otherwise, it would seem that at any point in the picture they could simply remove their wigs and tell Sugar Kane, the band’s sexy vocalist and ukulele player, that they both love her and hence are rivals for her affections—then take it from there.” Wilder continued, “So we invented the fact that they had witnessed a gangland killing and had to disguise themselves to protect their lives. Then we set the story in the Roaring Twenties, in order to make this element of the plot more believable,” since mob warfare was rampant in the Prohibition era. “And so we brought in an actual gangland killing, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as the killing which they had witnessed.” Wilder concluded, “So it was not that Mr. Diamond and I just sat down and said that we were going to do a satire on the old gangster pictures. That is just how the scenario developed. As Lubitsch used to say, ‘We began to have a picture.’” Like Lubitsch, Wilder loved what he lampooned. The America he depicts in the Roaring Twenties is gaudy and vulgar but also full of fun. Wilder discarded the English title Fanfares of Love...

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