OPINION:
“IT’S THE PICTURES THAT GOT SMALL”: CHARLES BRACKETT ON BILLY WILDER AND HOLLYWOOD’S GOLDEN AGE
Edited by Anthony Slide
Columbia, $34.95, 422 pages
Charles Brackett was the writing partner of legendary Hollywood movie director Billy Wilder. Their productive, brilliant and sometimes combative collaboration during a 14-year period produced such masterpieces as the “Lost Weekend” (1945) and “Sunset Blvd” (1950) — iconic and award-winning movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
The two men came from completely different backgrounds. Brackett was the son of a New York state senator. His American roots could be traced back to the early years of the 17th century. He fought in Europe during World War I and received the French Medal of Honor. He was a Harvard University graduate, a novelist, a drama critic for The New Yorker, president of the Screen Writers Guild and also of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Wilder was a Central European immigrant — born in 1906 in the Polish-speaking part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — who presented himself at the Mexican-U.S. border speaking far from perfect English and with a dream of making movies. Wilder, 14 years younger than Brackett, arrived in Hollywood in 1933 and worked as a screenwriter, director and producer for a period lasting more than a half-century.
After a screenwriting career in Berlin during the late 1920s, Wilder gained prominence as a Hollywood movie maker with the 1944 film noir “Double Indemnity.” His career reached its artistic zenith in 1960 with the movie “The Apartment.” He was the first person to win Academy Awards as producer, director and screenwriter for the same film.
This book, which is primarily written for devoted movie buffs and not for a general readership, is a collection of writings taken from Brackett’s unpublished diaries. Brackett notes in 1936 that Wilder used to say he was “born someplace in Poland, half an hour from Vienna, by telegraph … . Because he was Jewish and had an acute instinct for things that were going to happen, [Wilder] had slipped out of Germany as Hitler began to rise.”
Wilder’s timing — as in his movies — was impeccable. Tragically, his mother, grandmother and stepfather all died during the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe.
“It’s the Pictures That Got Small” gets its title from a line in “Sunset Blvd.” The character, Joe Gillis, an aspiring screenwriter, meets by chance a once-famous but forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond. Played by William Holden, he tells the actress “You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.” Desmond, portrayed brilliantly by Gloria Swanson, herself a famous silent movie star, says, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” She laments about the world of silent movies, “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!”
“Lost Weekend” was the first major Hollywood movie that made an in-depth examination of alcoholism. This was an unusual and controversial subject at that time. Wilder and Brackett took the train in January 1950 to San Francisco for a preview of the film.
“It was a disappointing preview — none of the lip-smacking delight that a smash preview gets, Brackett writes. “No wrong laughs of any importance but all the comments had a slightly forced enthusiasm. I’m afraid it’s too highbrow for general audience, not quite highbrow enough for the critics, although it may be a great critics’ picture.”
The Wilder-Brackett collaboration wasn’t always smooth.
On Dec. 16, 1943, years before their breakup, Brackett writes: “Another day of hell. There are times when I look at Billy, the best dramatic mind with which I ever came in contact, with the appalling feeling that his mind is dropping apart before my eyes — it’s brilliant decisiveness crumbling to utterly foolish indecisions.”
Why did this odd couple break up?
Wilder explains in The Paris Review in 1996: “It’s like a box of matches: You pick up the match and strike it against the box, and there’s always fire, but then one day there is just one small corner of that abrasive paper left for you to strike the match on. It was not there anymore.”
Wilder died in 2002 at age of 95, surviving Brackett by more than 30 years. The day after he died, the French newspaper, Le Monde, carried a front-page obituary with a headline: “Billy Wilder dies. Nobody’s perfect.”
It was a perfect newspaper send-off, quoting the final line of Wilder’s masterpiece, “Some Like it Hot.”
• Frank T. Csongos is a former Washington bureau chief of United Press International and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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