I had come across a good review of Mr. Wilder and me by Jonathan Coe and decided to read it. It's a short, gentle novel about guess whom, both funny and moving, and a love declaration to the movies of Billy W. and his scriptwriting partnership with IAL Diamond.

The basic premise: our narator, Calista, half Greek, half English, as a young girl through various plot circumstances lands a job as an interpreter and then as a gofer when Billy Wilder is shooting his penultimate (and today nearly forgotten, as it was a resounding flop) movoie Fedora. As far as Calista is concerned, it's an obvious coming of age novel - she changes through the experience, she falls in and out of love (with another fictional young character), she finds her own calling - but while she is a sympathetic presence, she's also a plot device so the story can be told from an outside pov that does not feel too intrusive. Mind you, the story complicates things in this regard somewhat in that the narrating Callista is not the young student, it's a woman looking back decades later, so her pov is basically two folded - her younger and her older self.

Coe knows his movie history and for my taste strikes a good balance in not using too many nor too few cameos and namedroppings (very unlike, say, Mank) - for example, Emeric Pressburger shows up repeatedly - waves at sovay - and that is incredibly characterisation and plot relevant, but Raymond Chandler does not get mentioned, because Double Indemnity and his effective but tempestous one and only cooperation with Wilder is very much not where the focus of this story is. Nestled in a linearly told "making of a movie becomes character exploration of people creating it" tale is an audacious set piece and change of format, when Billy Wilder, mid- press conference in Munich (where he and the rest of the team are because Fedora was partly financed with German money), suddenly goes into a long flashback in script format about his flight from Germany when the Nazis took over, his early, pre-America exile and his post 45 return when he had to view concentration camp footage and edit it into a movie.

It's not just a sudden switch of genre, so to speak, but also makes the contrast between young Billie (sic, remember the early spelling) and old Billy, whom we've gotten to know through Calista's eyes so far, especially startling. (Though there are, of course, ongoing traits.) And it seems fitting that the horror and the tragedy at the core of the witty persona can only be expressed in irony and satiric form. And once the lengthy script format flashback is over, we're back to linear prose and our young pov character telling it.

Naturally, Coe works in a lot of actual Wilder quotes from various interviews, and some, according to his afterword, from IAL Diamond's unpublished memoirs. If this were a different type of biographical novel - one aiming at covering the entire life - I would nitpick (for example, the wives are also characters and are written ad smart and charming, but both Audrey Wilder and Sandra Diamond agreeing that really, their husbands are closer to each other than to them and that they're totally cool with this smacks of wish fulfillment and not wanting to get into Front Page territory, to stay with Wilder films) - but it's not: it's a portrait through the double focus of one particular twilight moment and hidden within in it the past, and as such, it succeeds beautifully.

Does it also work if you haven't seen at least some of Billy Wilder's movies and know nothing about his life? I think so, due to Calista herself being written as a Wilder ignoramus when she first encounters the film team (she quickly catches up, though), but then I went in knowing a lot, so I can't really say.

Definitely read the credits, err, the afterword and thank yous, since one particular Billy Wilder statement I hadn't been sure of (as in, fictional or not) is sourced there to Volker Schlöndorff.

Weirdest review complaint I've seen so far: that Calista, in a story that takes place largely during the production of a film made in the 1970s, isn't molested, lusted after or otherwise exploited by anyone who has power over her despite being a young woman. (Her romance with someone her own age is entirely consensual.) This is deemed as writerly chickening. Good grief. Must we?

There is a point in the story - now everyone is in Paris - where young Calista watches a movie of Wilder's idol Ernst Lubitsch for the first time, and is charmed not just by the obvious - the wit, and the elegance - but also by the sense of kindness she gets from the film. And that's just how this novel feels when you read it. (Without being sentimental about it. Older Calista freely admits there's a reason why Sunset Boulevard became a classic and Fedora did not.) It's one of several reasons why I recommend it.

Smart, wonderful review of Cleopatra, 1963 version, too often dismissed as campy extravaganza. (amenirdis, this one is for you!) It was, of course, scripted and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who in this most recent list of 100 greatest screenwriters of all time makes it to No. 23 ("Says Phyllis Nagy: “There may be a more endlessly quotable screenplay than All About Eve, but I’ve yet to find it.”).

About that list: as per usual in such lists written in the English language (US edition), what they mean is "100 Greatest American Screenwriters", with the odd foreigner thrown in. They also confess right at the start: It’s worth noting that Hollywood’s traditional exclusion of women and people of color makes it extraordinarily difficult to truly qualify the best in the craft, but acknowledging today’s urgent need for more inclusive storytelling doesn’t negate the contributions of these 100 pioneers.

That said, it's very satisfying to see pioneer Frances Marion (first scriptwriter, either male or female, to win the Oscar, twice) acknowledged at No.20), and the (imo deserved) number 1 spot goes to an immigrant to whom the English language was something he only learned as an adult (which turned out to be one of the all time successful love stories between a writer and an adopted language), the late, great Billy Wilder. Some of the other choices (even keeping the US pov in mind) are bewildering, no pun intended, but such is always the case.

In terms of Hollywood history, though, it amuses me that Joe Mankiewicz' brother Herman only makes it to No.56 while Orson Welles lands at No.41. Pauline Kael would roll in her grave. As the list writers themselves put it: Once upon a time, a small firestorm might have ignited over placing Orson Welles on a list of great screenwriters. For years, his co-authorship of Citizen Kane was in dispute, with many claiming that the credit belonged almost entirely to the great Herman J. Mankiewicz. (Pauline Kael even wrote an explosive, brilliant, deeply problematic essay arguing so, only for much of her research to be discredited later.) But even if he hadn’t co-written Citizen Kane (which he absolutely did), Welles would have been one of the great screenwriters of the 20th century. He was certainly one of the great adapters, able to take everything from the most acclaimed classics (think The Trial) to the lowest-brow pulp (think Touch of Evil) and make it his own. His Shakespeare adaptations are gems of concision and imagination, balancing respect for the text with a willingness to innovate. Look at the incredible Chimes at Midnight, where he takes pieces of several of the Bard’s plays and turns them into something completely modern.

I'm totally with them in terms of Orson as an adapter. (Which, btw, Welles biographer Simon Callow argues is what he did with Citizen Kane, too - Hermann Mankiewicz' original script - with some imput from John Houseman - was over three hours long, and Welles did what he did with Shakespeare, Kafka, and whoever wrote Touch of Evil - he cut, edited, added, rewrote, until the script had the shooting shape.) It's what makes his version of The Trial infinitely more interesting than the far more literal, bland and justly forgotten version of Kyle McLachlan as Joseph K. much later, and makes Chimes at Midnight show up later adaptions of the Henriad such as The Hollow Crown as deeply conventional and pulling their punches by comparison.

On a book-to-film note, thanks to chaila I've discovered Fall Equinox, a vid-athon wherein the vids in question are using book-based source material. I've only just started to watch my way through it, but check out Wherever I Go, a breathtaking exploration of the Gods in American Gods!

Back last autumn when I did my Sunset Boulevard rewatching for my Yuletide story, I also checked out various bits and pieces of the musical based on the film because I was interested in how other actresses and actors interpreted the part. It's also interesting in what it says about adaption to another medium. I don't think I could stand a Sunset Boulevard remake: it's one of these films where a remake wouldn't just be unthinkable heresy, but also extremely impractical. Back in 1950, Billy Wilder made a contemporary film, not a costume drama, as any remake would invariably be. He also, and this is an advantage no one will ever have again, had actual stars from the silent age avalable to let them play against then-contemporary actors, and the clash in styles is as much part of the story as anything else. But a) theatre, and b) a musical is such a different form of expression that I don't mind in the same way I would a film remake.

Plus: watching the likes of Glenn Close, Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey et al having a go at Norma Desmond, or Hugh Jackman and John Barrowman try their hand at Joe Gilles is immensely entertaining, I have to admit.

( Check out the evidence )

Recently, a friend of mine wondered in an aside what a Watchmen adaption by Orson Welles would have been like. Clearly, this was an idea of pure genius. Because Welles had both the absolute fearlessness and cheek, and while managing to infuriate half the fanbase before ruthlessly jettisoning some of the main characters along with subplots and plundering other Moore works for dialogue inserts, he'd have created something breathtakingly original in its own right.

(Also the meta of it would have been fun. Because in Watchmen the book, one of the earliest excerpts from Hollis Mason's memoirs mentions listening as a fan to Orson Welles on the radio, playing The Shadow/Lamont Cranston, one of the earliest superheroes.)

This train of thought of course brought me inevitably to contemplating other adaptions of comics classics by legendary directors, or rather, which legendary director would match best to which classic comics. Here are some ideas:

Charlie Chaplin: Mad Love by Paul Dini. Come on, it would have been awesome. Given how Chaplin loved to branch out (see him playing both Hitler in The Great Dictator and a serial killer in Monsieur Verdoux), you know he'd have been utterly unable to resist casting himself as the Joker. And as Harley Quinn? Paulette Godard, of course. However, in my head this adaption is a silent one, because though I do like Chaplin's later sound movies as well, the silent film is his true and most perfect medium. It would have been the best and most unique of all Batmenverse based films.

Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Phoenix arc, by Chris Claremont. Hitchcock, expert in neurotic heroines and heroes as well as people going mad and trying to hide it, would have excelled at the original Jean Grey tragedy. Mind you, given that as Joseph Cotten put it in his memoirs he didn't understand why actresses didn't dye their hair blonde for the privilege of working for him, he'd have been sorely tempted in switching hair colour between Jean and Emma (if the Hellfire Club would have shown up in his adaption, that is, and knowing Hitchcock, I think it would have), but in the end he might have resisted.

Billy Wilder: Alias by Brian Bendis. Noir look at the underside of the Marvelverse, first person narration that really works instead of coming across as superfluous, sharp dialogue, inner brokenness? So a Wilder thing. He'd have probably ended up having a hate/hate relationship with Bendis as he did with Raymond Chandler on their shared script for Double Indemnity, but the result would so have been worth it. Including Barbara Stanwyck as Jessica Jones.

Being sleepless again thanks to my current cold, I'd love to watch Just Rewards, the Angel episode bimo kindly brought, but alas, it turned out my laptop hasn't got the necessary codecs. It'll have to wait until I'm reunited with my normal computer. So I'll muse on two movies I love instead.

Hollywood on Hollywood is a fascinating subgenre in the movie world. I already wrote about one of my favourite examples, Tim Burton's Ed Wood, that hymn to the losers in Tinseltown.

Two other examples, which fascinate me with their parallels and contrasts, and which I rewatched recently, are Sunset Boulevard by the late, great Billy Wilder, surely still the best cinematic word on the subject, and Gods and Monsters, directed by Bill Condon. Gods and Monsters, though it does deal with a real-life director, James Whale, and consequently uses several of Whale's topics and visual motifs very effectively, also is quite openly influenced by Sunset Boulevard: the triangle of old star, devoted housekeeper/butler of German origin, and young attractive beefcake, for example. The imagery, notably the dead body floating in the pool and the introduction of the Hollywood legend, standing at a window, gazing outside at the young man, though it's significant that we see James Whale photographed from the inside of the room (i.e. we're in his point of view), while we see Norma Desmond from the outside, from Joe Gillis' point of view. Sunset Boulevard gazes at Norma in her tragedy and mad baroque splendour but never presumes to enter her inner world; Gods and Monsters is a far kinder picture.

James Whale (played superbly by Ian McKellen) might be in decline, in (self-imposed) exile from Hollywood, and haunted by his past (which allows script and director to fill us in on crucial background - his childhood in working-class poverty which he reinvents as gentility for interviews, his traumatic WW I experience and of course his time as one of Universal's most successful directors, creating the first two Frankenstein movies); his mind might be betraying him by being unable to stick to the present, and his body might be frail. But at the same time, he's presented as deeply intelligent, witty, and mosty rescued from self-pity by his gift for irony. His former lover David still is friends with him; his unlikely friendship with gardener Clay Boone (Brenton Fraser) is a genuine relief from loneliness. For that matter, Clay, though at times uneasy and freaked out by Whale's homosexuality, genuinely cares and is charmed and touched by the old man and his stories. Clay is a naïve, and in turn rescued from hisloneliness by the friendship. (Both Clay and Whale are at various points identified with the Monster of the Frankenstein movies visually.) As I said, it is a kind film, despite some bitchery about George Cukor which is rather unfair, going by all I've read about the man, but then it's Whale doing the bitching and he is presented as jealeous. You could say that despite the occasional black-and-white flashers, Gods and Monsters is painted in gentle pastels.

Sunset Boulevard, on the other hand, is Billy Wilder at his most acid. There is no gentleness for Norma or Joe, save one. When Norma is funny (and she has some great lines - so often quoted and repeated by now), she is so without realizing it, except during one brief scene, the terrific little Chaplin impersonation she does for her hired lover when she's happy. She's completely lacking of Whale's insight or conscious wit about her situation as an Hollywood relic, clinging to the belief that her public ("all those wonderful people out there in the dark") hasn't forgotten her and wants her to return as an increasingly disappearing lifeline. Norma Desmond, one of the great icons of cinematic history, is played by the genuine article, Gloria Swanson, one of the great stars of the silent screen. (And as opposed to Norma living quite happily and sanely in New York at the time Wilder hired her for the picture, as opposed of declining in a Los Angeles mansion. Swanson is decidedly not playing herself here, but she's acting her heart out, and it's one of the great injustices she didn't win an Oscar for this.) Her entire physical language comes from another era, and provides a great contrast to William Holden's subtle acting as Joe. The camera mercilessly exposes every one of Norma's and Swanson's 50 or so years - not really old by any standards save the crucial Hollywood one which has captured her in her youthful glory and never allows her to escape the contrast, and as for her relationship with Joe… we're not talking "A Star is born" sentimentality here.

Norma might genuinenly love the young man who shows up accidentally in her mansion, but she's also very consciously buying him, and knows she does. In return, she doesn't get sympathy and friendship, as Whale does in Gods and Monsters, she gets pity and disgust. Because Joe quite consciously lets himself be bought. Men on sale are something of a red thread through Billy Wilder's pictures, which is quite unusual not just for Hollywood at the time but also for the present-day incarnation. (As opposed to women on sale, of course.) In Wilder pictures, you get Jack Lemmon selling himself out metaphorically through letting his boss use his flat for trysts in return for more money and more attention in The Apartment; you get Lemmon, again and more farcically finding money and happiness in drag in Some Like It Hot; you have the G.I. pretending love to get out of an investigation to Jean McArthur in A Foreign Affair. Men sell their charms (to quote Stephen Sondheim's lyrics from Passion "Women sell their looks/ Why not a man?/If he can") in Wilder's world, but I don't think anyone does it so openly, or filled with as much self-loathing, as Joe Gillis (William Holden, who competes with Jack Lemmon as Wilder's favourite actor). Wilder doesn't have any mercy with Joe, either. If Norma is mad and pathetic, she's also genuinenly larger than life; when she says, in reply to Joe's initial "You used to be in pictures - you used to be big", "I am big; it's that pictures that got small", we believe her. Joe is sane, and modern, sensible Hollywood as opposed to Norma's over-the-top past, but he is small. And a sell-out who can't say he doesn't know what he's doing; he's intending to exploit Norma from the moment they meet (though initially he just wants some quick bucks by pretending to proof-read her efforts at a script) just as she's intending to exploit his obvious financial desperation.

It has been observed that Wilder, though he adored America and all things American from the moment he arrived (not to mention the English language - Billy Wilder is one of the all-time best screenwriters in it, entranced by its rhythm as perhaps only someone who learns it later in life can be), never lost his European cynicism. (And in relation to Sunset Boulevard, that he literally knew the older woman/ younger man tango from having danced it himself, working part-time as a hired dancer in Berlin in the 20s for a while.) Which is true and yet not, for Altman (American born and bred) has as cynical a view on all things Hollywood in The Player. I'd say a film like Sunset Boulevard is the perfect union of what America and Europe could offer on experience at the time, including, ironically, the Universal horror movies, mostly shot by and with European emigrés like James Whale, Edgar Ulmer, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi. Norma in her mansion, greeting her guest and intending to keep him with her spidery gestures is echoeing Dracula in his screen incarnation just as much as anything else. Max, her possessive, devoted butler who as Joe later finds out was her first director and discover and her first husband, is every creepy servant of those horror movies, and James Whale would have recognised him immediately. (Meanwhile, Whale in Gods and Monsters gets his German-accented housekeeper full of devotion, Hannah, who loves him as surely as Max loves Norma, but Hannah echoes Whale's comic female characters played by Una O'Connor more than she does the male variety, as opposed to Max in Sunset Boulevard.)

Lastly, it's interesting to compare and contrast the way both films deal with sexuality. Recently at the Book Fair more than one reviewer observed tersely that our Great Old Men in literature currently indulge in another fit of Altherrenerotik, i.e. endless scenarios of old-man-meets-young-nubile-woman-who-rejuvinates-him-sexually. Neither Gods and Monsters nor Sunset Boulevard indulge in that kind of sexual sentimentality. Whale might find Clay quite attractive, but never kids himself Clay would desire him, nore does the movie go for a old-teaches-young/young-gives-old-youth-back sexual discovery. When Joe in Sunset Boulevard decides to sleep with Norma out of a mixture of pity, guilt and mercenary greed, we're never under any illusion he finds her sexually desirable, and though she wants to believe it, she never quite does. Meanwhile, Max' devotion to and obsession with Norma does have sexual overtones, sadomasochistic ones at that. (Which pleased Erich von Stroheim, who plays the part - von Stroheim of course was like Max one of the great silent directors (and an actor as well) who loved to tease the audience with S/M overtones. One of von Stroheim's suggestions which Wilder shot but ultimately didn't use was Max putting Norma's underwear in drawers.) And then there's Joe's relationship with Betty Shaffer, which you might think would be the audience's relief in sexual identification, since he's good-looking and relatively young, and so is she, but Betty is engaged with Joe's friend, ambitious for fame herself and not exactly an innocent, either. One doesn't really root for her and Joe to make it; when she departs in disgust after finding out how he earns his living, there is a feeling of relief. Good for Betty. And we're left with the one moment, where Wilder, and life, as the dead Joe in his voice-over observes, is kind to Norma Desmond. Who finally, mercifully, gets the light of the cameras back and, having lost her grip on reality entirely, does not notice anymore they're not the cameras she has been waiting for. She's ready for her close-up now.