Kevin Lally's Wilder Times
Kevin Lally's Wilder Times“Every picture I make involves people making moral choices,” he argues. “How can I show that without showing the seamy side of the world?” While some faulted Wilder for not having the courage of his convictions, others just saw the seaminess and were deeply offended. “Bad taste” was a label that followed Wilder through much of his career, and the attacks really gained momentum as the culture approached the sea change of the midsixties. Wilder had a role in that change: Films like Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and Irma la Douce brought a mischievous new attitude to once taboo subjects like adultery, prostitution, office hanky-panky and even sexual identity. All three were hits; Wilder was exactly in sync with a mass audience tempted by the expanding sexual frontier [...] My last film, The Front Page, was a single. It was a nice hit and drove in a run or two, but that was all. It was solid, but hell, I used to hit the solid stuff over the fences.” Wilder swore he was just going through a slump. “I did not suddenly become an idiot,” he argued. “I did not suddenly unlearn my craft. It’s a dry spell. Occasionally, the vineyards produce a bad vintage.” [...] IHAVE ABSOLUTELY NO INTENTION OF RETIRING. AS FAR as I’m concerned, this here ball game is going into extra innings,” Billy Wilder assured the black-tie audience at the Film Society of Lincoln Center tribute in his honor on May 3, 1982. But Wilder also acknowledged that the ground rules were different from the ones he used to know. “Hollywood has changed a lot,” he noted. “Today, half the people you run into are on their way to China to set up a coproduction deal, the other half are on their way to Cedars-Sinai for a quadruple bypass. As a matter of fact, the entire industry is in intensive care. So who do they call in to save the patient? Lawyers, agents, supermarket operators, soft-drink distributors—those are the people who decide what picture gets made and what doesn’t. They approach it very scientifically—computer projections, marketing research, audience profiles—and they always come up with the same answer: ‘Get Richard Pryor—he’s hot this week.’ The truth, of course, is that pictures are launched out of a gut feeling—and the prerequisite is that you have guts.” In Wilder’s heyday, those gut decisions were usually made by one unpredictable, sometimes undereducated, but resolute mogul. Now, they’re made by an amorphous mass of executives, and there’s always the danger that, as Wilder says, “after a year and a half you have been kissing the wrong ass all along.”