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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Never bore anyone!: Schlöndorff remembers Wilder

Volker Schlöndorff has a lengthy and entertaining memoir of Billy Wilder in the LA Times. “It was Wilder’s First Commandment: Never bore anyone! Billy 2375000.JPGNeither in front of the camera nor behind it, neither in the screening nor drawing room, not on the phone nor in a restaurant… Rather than acting out a scene himself to indicate what he was looking for, he used ironic exaggeration. It is my hope to someday achieve his seemingly carefree levity. For as different as our personalities and films may be, he has always been my role model… Comedies, he said, are like Swiss clockwork: Just as one gear wheel locks into another, each rejoinder drives the next; the straight line must be delivered clearly before the punch line, then a short pause for laughter, followed by another punch line to redouble the laughter and to keep it going. Nothing is worse than sporadic laughter — swivel204.jpgonly roaring, continuous laughter brings down the house… [W]e were friends for 25 years, until his death in 2002. We often discussed films, and he was always full of stories, tricks, rules, answers. He had rules for every situation in life, in a script and on the set: how something should be done, and what should not be done under any circumstances. What shoes you should buy and where. What you should eat. What cut you should never make, and what camera angle you should never use (worm’s-eye view or from a chandelier). What an actor cannot express without looking stupid (a sudden realization). What is indecent to show (a close-up of a person who has just learned of a friend’s or relative’s death)… [H]e took me to Lubitsch’s grave to show me that his secretary really had been buried at the master’s feet — “in case he needs to dictate something to her.” Of three hours of Schlöndorff’s assembled footage of Wilder’s lessons in life and film, the Berliner retorted: “”What this shows us is that you should never give an interview on a swivel chair. Also, you shouldn’t talk so much with your hands if you have a mouth. And above all never use a back-scratcher during an interview! It just does not look dignified.” [It’s a long piece, worth reading in full.]

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon