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Conversations with Wilder
by Cameron Crowe
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Knopf (1999-11-02)
ISBN: 0375406603
EAN: 9780375406607
Dewy Decimal #: 791.430233092
Hardcover: 400 pages
Edition: 1st
Release Date: 1999-11-02
Condition: Very Good
Comments: 1999, 1st Ed, 373 pages 8 x 10, Hardcover with dustjacket in protected mylar cover (removable). Book & Dustjacket are in Very Good Condition. Book is completely intact with inside pages in Very Good condition with no tears and with no notations (no pencil marks, no underlining, no highlighting, etc.) Fast Service. Books well packed.
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Editorial Reviews
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Amazon.com
Conversations with Wilder, an invaluable, photo-intensive volume, is a kind of remake of Truffaut's must-read interview book Hitchcock, with Cameron Crowe in the inquisitive Truffaut role and wily 93-year-old Billy Wilder as the crafty master director. Drawing on his experience interviewing the monsters of rock and his deep, shot-by-shot knowledge of Wilder's work, Crowe gently and cunningly coaxes answers from Wilder--arguably today's most influential living director--on what made his hits tick and his flops suck, along with glimpses of what might have been. Did you know Mae West and Mary Pickford spurned Sunset Boulevard and Wilder spurned Marilyn Monroe for Irma la Douce? That The Apartment was inspired by Brief Encounter and the look of Double Indemnity was based on M? The gossipy insights are great too. Bogart spat when he talked, so Wilder couldn't back-light him in Sabrina, and Audrey Hepburn's wardrobe woman had to towel her off after each take--discreetly! Wilder loathed Raymond Chandler (partly because Chandler disdained James M. Cain when adapting Double Indemnity) but gives him his due as a screenwriter: Chandler could do dialogue and descriptions, but he couldn't construct a scene. "He was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence," says Wilder. Agatha Christie was the opposite: "She had structure, but she lacked poetry." Some critics scoff at Crowe (who cried while directing emotional scenes in Jerry Maguire) for taking on the cynic Wilder. But they're brothers under the skin. Both leaped from popular music journalism to directing. Both incorporate actual events in their films. Wilder keenly regrets not filming this scene in The Spirit of St. Louis, which he claims really happened: the night before his historic flight, Lindbergh's handlers talked a pretty waitress into having sex with him. They claimed he was a virgin, and likely to die on his voyage. In the hero's parade upon his return, she waves at him through the ticker-tape, but he doesn't see her. "Would have been a good scene," mourns Wilder. Without this book, we'd never have known about it. --Tim Appelo
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Product Description
In Conversations with Wilder, Hollywood's legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work.
Here, in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters, stills, grabs, and never-before-seen pictures from Wilder's own collection -- the ninety-three-year-old icon talks to Cameron Crowe, one of today's best-known writer-directors, about thirty years at the very heart of Hollywood, and about screenwriting and camera work, set design and stars, his peers and their movies, the studio system and films today. In his distinct voice we hear Wilder's inside view on his collaborations with such stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo (he was a writer at MGM during the making of Ninotchka. Here are Wilder's sharp and funny behind-the-scenes stories about the making of A Foreign Affair, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Ace in the Hole, among many others. Wilder is ever mysterious, but Crowe gets him to speak candidly on Stanwyck: "She knew the script, everybody's lines, never a fault, never a mistake"; on Cary Grant: "I had Cary Grant in mind for four of my pictures . . . slipped through my net every time"; on the "Lubitsch Touch": "It was the elegant use of the super-joke." Wilder also remembers his early years in Vienna, working as a journalist in Berlin, rooming with Peter Lorre at the Chateau Marmont -- always with the same dry wit, tough-minded romanticism, and elegance that are the hallmarks of Wilder's films. This book is a classic of Hollywood history and lore.
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Customer Reviews
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Fun Book
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-01-09
Though less clear than Truffaut's book on Hitchcock (mainly because of Wilder's lack of interest in explaining himself) 'Conversations with Wilder' does echo that landmark book. Not as tightly structured as Truffaut/Hitchcock, but also a book about a Directing God, written by an admiring younger director, who wants to go through the whole career of the maestro, hoping to understand some of the magic. A must read for every Wilder fan, something every film maker (and film lover) should be. Wilder (who at first is uninterested to cooperate) seems a bit more humble than the Master of Suspence, so he tells less tricks and other details. He is far more eager to talk about his most succesful films and prefers to leave the films he regards as failures alone. Crowe however tries to come back to them, every now and then, but Wilder is a smart converser. This leads to a fun book, which perhaps shows more of the psyche of Wilder than the film technical (in the broadest sence) side of him. As a film maker you can perhaps learn more directly from Hitchcock's approach, as a film lover this is just as much fun to read. Wilder's honousty is charming and in no way a danger to the grand status of the film maker. Knowing how wonderful his masterpieces are, it is perhaps even more impressive to read how easy it seemed for Wilder to make them. Wilder is never showing off, never full of himself and always entertaining. A true genius who made some of the best films ever.
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Outstanding
Rating  (5)
Date: 2006-11-19
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Enthusiastically recommended by Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies, the Hollywood Reporter, et.al.
If you want to get on track to one day being a happy, laughing, feisty old man, buy this book. The amazing director Billy Wilder speaks freely and delightfully with Mr. Crowe about all the things that went right, and the many, many other things that went wrong with films from "Some Like It Hot" to "Sabrina" to "The Seven Year Itch," and much more. Hundreds of photos evoke the points of discussion (or is it, thousands of photos?). Close-up discussions of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, and much more.
You may come to see Mr. Wilder as a blind date who showed up on your doorstep: a funny little German man, and not the suave genius your mother had promised at all. He spends the entire book giving you reasons why he is most certainly not the movies' knight in shining armor, but in the end (despite all his excited, hilarious minor outrages) he only proves that he is that knight, after all.
An outstanding companion to Truffaut's indespensible book on Hitchcock, but very different. Both are "interview" books, and each paints a very lively picture of its subject. But where Hitchcock comes off as a man left at the bus stop, like his cameo in "North By Northwest," with his career somehow fallen from his fingertips too soon, Wilder seems like a grandfather surrounded by delighted children in the twilight of his years. He shows us how to laugh, and roll our eyes at both success and failure, through the international language of film.
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great for any future film-maker
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-08-12
This book really allows the reader to visualize the type of person Wilder is. His character shines through in his words. Cameron Crowe succeeds in getting that more personal story behind the director by asking tougher questions. It is also very entertaining to read because of the endless stories that Billy Wilder tells about "behind the scenes" of the making of his movies.
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Hilarious, touching, thoughtful, well-written
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-07-08
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
With this book, you see what a huge difference great writing makes when it comes to films. Crowe and Wilder are both articulate, thoughtful, and in love with film and words. The care in this book shows. You don't just get a thorough knowledge of Wilder straight from the man himself, but you get a glimpse into Crowe and Wilder's developing relationship. It's an amazing, moving book, and it made me want to go out and rent every Wilder film I could get my hands on.
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Part of the bible
Rating (5)
Date: 2002-07-26
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
In the tradition of Hitchcock/Truffaut, a young master of the craft interviews an old one. One difference from the earlier book, Wilder's productive career was over, so covered entirely if not exhaustively by this book. After a slow start, a little too much of how Crow got to do this, the book jumps into an anecdotal, charming and literate discussion of Wilder's movies, Wilder's career and Hollywood movie-making. If you have any interest at all in these areas, this is a must read book.If you are interested in screenwriting this isn't a must read book, this is part of the bible.
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