Billy Wilder: The Art of Screenwriting (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
Billy Wilder
Writing Lesson: Before every form and genre, be humble.
Interviewer: Why have so many novelists and playwrights from the East, people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, had such a terrible time out here [in Hollywood]?
Wilder: Well, because they were hired for very big amounts of money. I remember those days in New York when one writer would say to the other, I'm broke. I'm going to go to Hollywood and steal another fifty thousand. Moreover, they didn't know what movie writing entailed. You have to know the rules before you break them, and they simply didn't school themselves. I'm not just talking about essayists or newspapermen; it was even the novelists. None of them took it seriously, and when they would be confronted by their superior, the producer or the director, who had a louder voice and the weight of the studio behind them, they were not particularly interested in taking advice. Their idea was, Well, crap, everybody in America has got a screenplay inside them--the policeman around the corner here, the waiter in Denver. Everybody. And his sister! I've seen ten movies. Now, if they would only let me do it my way . . . But it's not that easy. To begin to make even a mediocre film you have to learn the rules. You have to know about timing, about creating characters, a little about camera position, just enough to know if what you're suggesting is possible. They pooh-poohed it.
I remember Fitzgerald when he was working at Paramount and I was there working with Brackett. Brackett, who was from the East, had written novels and plays, and had been at Paramount for years. Brackett and I used to take breaks and go to the little coffee joint across the street from the studio. Oblaths! we used to say. The only place in the world you can get a greasy Tom Collins. Whenever we saw Scott Fitzgerald there, we'd talk with him, but he never once asked us anything about writing screenplays.
Pictures are something like plays. They share an architecture and a spirit. A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what's wrong with the third act. What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act. Scott just didn't seem particularly interested in any of these matters.
For Dorothy Parker's very different take on Hollywood (also from a Paris Review interview), I send you here.
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Just a few of his Academy Award-nominated films include: Ninotchka (1939), The Lost Weekend (1945, won), Sunset Boulevard (1950, won), Sabrina (1954), and The Apartment (1966, won).
The Paris Review interview with Billy Wilder took place in 1996.
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