Oscars 1945: Drunk with Success

The story of an alcoholic writer with a propensity for hiding liquor in the most unlikely places was a big winner on Oscar night, though the Billy Wilder drama wasn’t the easiest picture to get off the ground. Paramount balked at having the alcoholic played by anything other than a matinée idol, and matinée idol Ray Milland was advised not to touch the role. Preview audiences didn’t care too much for it, the liquor industry was none too thrilled either, and Paramount released it wide only after it received rave reviews during a limited-engagement run. At the awards ceremony, The Lost Weekend received Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Milland was presented the Best Actor trophy from Ingrid Bergman, who announced, “Mr. Milland, are you nervous? It’s yours!” Quipped host Bob Hope, “I’m surprised they just handed it to him. I thought they’d hide it in the chandelier.” The next day, co-screenwriter Charles Brackett and Wilder were greeted by a congratulatory gesture from fellow scribes—a series of little booze bottles hanging from strings outside each window of Paramount’s Writers’ Building.

BEST PICTURE
The Lost Weekend

BEST DIRECTOR
Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend

BEST ACTOR
Ray Milland, The Lost Weekend

BEST ACTRESS
Joan Crawford, Mildred Pierce

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
James Dunn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Anne Revere, National Velvet

Billy Wilder on Sunset Boulevard (1950)

It was an idea that Charles Brackett and I had long before we tackled it. We wanted to do it, believe it for not, five years before we actually got around to it. We wanted to make a picture with a kind of a passé star. We wanted to do it with Mae West. That’s all I can tell you. But it didn’t come out this way.

There is no such thing as somebody sitting down and saying, “Now, all right, I’m going to make a new picture.” Not at all. You have ideas stashed away, dozens of them—good, bad or indifferent. Then you pull them out of your memory, out of your drawer, you combine them. An actor is available, and that’s the way it starts. People think when it comes to a screenplay you start with absolutely nothing. But the trouble is that you have a million ideas and you have to condense them into a thousand ideas, and you have to condense those into three hundred ideas to get it under one hat, as it were. In other words, you start with too much, not with nothing, and it can go in every kind of direction. Every possible avenue is open. Then you have to dramatize it—it is as simple as that—by omitting, by simplifying, by finding a clean theme that leads someplace.

Sunset Boulevard was a picture where everything sort of fell into my lap. I needed the Paramount studio, and we got permission to shoot at Paramount. I needed Cecil B. DeMille to play DeMille, and he played it. I needed somebody to play the part Stroheim played. Stroheim at one time had been a director and had, indeed, directed Gloria Swanson in Queen Kelly. We needed old faces and got Buster Keaton. Everything was just right.

When we made that picture with Gloria Swanson people forget that she herself was considered sort of an old bag from silent picture times. At the time when we shot the picture she was actually fifty years old, that was all. She was then three or four years younger than Audrey Hepburn is today. But it was the split, you know, the divide between sound pictures and silent pictures that made such a difference. She was actually very young for that thing. She was just forgotten because she had stopped making pictures when she was about thirty, when sound came in. But what would she be doing today? As you heard in the picture, she had those oil wells, pumping, pumping, pumping. I guess she would have four or five gigolos. She would now be living somewhere in Santa Barbara with George Hamilton.

September 28

Paramount Pictures is sued for plagiarism over the screenplay of Midnight, 1939. After competion of the film, writer Robert Buckner filed a suit demanding an injunction against the film’s exhibition, citing a play that he and Charles Beahan wrote called Dearly Beloved  that  he delivered to the studio in 1933.

In the early stages of film production, Paramount felt the script, by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, needed a rewrite team to shape it. The studio blindly assigned the script to a couple of writers at the studio—Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett—who simply retyped the script and resubmitted it. It was accepted without further changes.

25 Great Lines from Billy Wilder Movies

Billy Wilder, along with collaborators Charles Brackett, I.A.L. Diamond and a handful of others, created more than 60 screenplays in his lifetime. From them, we selected single lines of dialogue that stand on their own. Many are succinct observations of the human condition. The rest are just really, really funny.

"Democracy can be a wickedly unfair thing, Sabrina. Nobody poor was ever called democratic for marrying somebody rich." — Thomas Fairchild (John Williams), Sabrina (1954), screenplay by Billy Wilder, Samuel L. Taylor and Ernest Lehman

"Ya know, I used to live like Robinson Crusoe; I mean, shipwrecked among eight million people. And then one day I saw a footprint in the sand, and there you were." — C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon), The Apartment (1960), screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

"I can handle big news and little news. And if there's no news, I'll go out and bite a dog." — Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas), Ace in the Hole (1951), screenplay by Billy Wilder, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels

"Real diamonds! They must be worth their weight in gold!" — Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), Some Like It Hot (1959), screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

"Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body." — Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), Ball of Fire (1941), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett

"We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!" — Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), Sunset Blvd. (1950), screenplay by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr.

"I am constantly surprised that women's hats do not provoke more murders." — Sir Wilfrid (Charles Laughton), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Harry Kurnitz

"Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?" — Mr. Osborne (Robert Benchley), The Major and The Minor (1942), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett

"I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you, you're twenty minutes." — Lorraine (Jan Sterling), Ace in the Hole (1951)

"I'll pick you up at 6:30 sharp, because the 7:00 train for Moscow leaves promptly at 8:15." — Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholtz), One, Two, Three (1961), screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

"The Lafuentes have more of everything. In fact, most of their children were born with eleven fingers." — Princess Bitotska (Lucile Watson), The Emperor Waltz (1948), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett

"It's like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night. Good night." — 'Bim' Nolan (Frank Faylen), The Lost Weekend (1945), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett

"When you're in love with a married man, you shouldn't wear mascara." — Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), The Apartment (1960)

"To be overly honest in a dishonest world is like plucking a chicken against the wind—you only wind up with a mouth full of feathers." — Moustache (Lou Jacobi), Irma la Douce (1963), screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

"Bad news sells best, 'cause good news is no news." — Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas), Ace in the Hole (1951)

"Do you know what happens if I defect? They will line up my family and shoot them! My wife, my mother-in-law, my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law...[pauses] Let's do it!" — Peripetchikoff (Leon Askin), One, Two, Three (1961)

"All columnists should be beaten to a pulp and converted back into paper!" — Oliver Larrabee (Walter Hampden), Sabrina (1954)

"I am big. It's the pictures that got small." — Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), Sunset Blvd. (1950)

"My three-o'clock patient jumped out of the window in the middle of his session. I have been running fifteen minutes ahead of schedule ever since." — Dr. Brubaker (Oskar Homolka), The Seven Year Itch (1955), screenplay by Billy Wilder and George Axelrod

"I don't care how rich he is, as long as he has a yacht, his own private railroad car and his own toothpaste." — Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), Some Like It Hot (1959)

"I picked you for the job, not because I think you're so darn smart, but because I thought you were a shade less dumb than the rest of the outfit. Guess I was wrong. You're not smarter, Walter...you're just taller." — Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), Double Indemnity (1944), screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler

"I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." — Lorraine (Jan Sterling), Ace in the Hole (1951)

"I'm his brother-in-law, Sister. And this is his mother, Sister, and this is my wife, his sister, Sister." — Willie Gingrich (Walter Matthau), The Fortune Cookie (1966), screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

"One's too many and a hundred's not enough." — Nat (Howard Da Silva), The Lost Weekend (1945)

"And I promise you I'll never desert you again, because after Salome we'll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life. It always will be. Nothing else...just us, the cameras and all those wonderful people out there in the dark...All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." — Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), Sunset Blvd. (1950)