On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (Paperback)

~ (Author) "On June 22, 1906, in the Galician village of Sucha Beskidzka, south of Krakow, Eugenia Wilder went into labor with her second child..." (more)
Key Phrases: drag comedy, production file, new collaborator, Billy Wilder, New York, Sunset Boulevard (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

German-born Billy Wilder (b. 1906) is one of the last survivors of Hollywood's Golden Age, the writer and director of seminal films like Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot and his masterpiece, Sunset Boulevard. By naming this attempt at a definitive Wilder biography after the savagely humorous 1950 classic, Sikov (Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s) invites a risky comparisonAand pulls it off with a broad, well-documented overview of Wilder's life and work. Considering Wilder "the fastest, funniest, meanest mind in Hollywood," Sikov admires his subject without succumbing to reverence. Wilder is an infamous raconteur, and Sikov wisely lets him hold forth on his self-made legend, including his acerbic assessments of fellow Hollywood players, his outrageous and wrenching accounts of Europe before and after WWII and his steely insights into American culture. Though the preface acknowledges that the work is "unauthorized," it presents so many Wilder quotes (of Raymond Chandler, "I was all that he hated about Hollywood"; of Audrey Hepburn, "After so many drive-in waitresses...here is class") and authoritative accounts of his comings and goings that it reads almost as if Wilder's own hand were behind it. The book's film criticism works best as a tool for gleaning Wilder's sensibility from his scripts and direction. The often irascible, always witty Wilder emerges from these pages as shrewd, eminent and, especially in comparison with today's tepid Hollywood fare, daringly authentic.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post

A careful and thorough researcher, Sikov has pieced together more about Wilder's European years than the previous biographers. But lacking Wilder's cooperation, he has had to rely on other biographers and interviewers for a sense of the man himself, and none of them has penetrated through to his emotional core. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; 1st Pbk Ed edition (November 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786885033
• ISBN-13: 978-0786885039
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #930,221 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five stars to Ed Sikov, November 25, 1999

By	[e-mail] (Miami, FL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (Hardcover)

This bio is very well-written and reads like a novel, as other reviews agree, and I would add that it is even better than most novels. Often one wonders whether a story in the book has really occurred and that helps to develop the fiction aspect of the book. At first I thought that a bio with more than 600 pages would be boring, but it turned out to be very engaging and informative about the golden age of Hollywood and one of the smartest and sophisticated directors ever. Although this bio has so much infomation, the author has such a fluid writing style and such a story-telling ability that makes it very interesting and entertaining. While reading this book my attention span never sagged and it made me keep reading for a longer period at a time. English being my third language, I really appreciated Mr. Sikov's wide range of vocabulary and slang that seemed to fit perfectly into his varied style of sentence construction.

I agree with Mr. Sikov that screenplay writing is a vital part of a consumate and well rounded director, which other celebrated directors, such as Hitchcock, Ford, and Spielberg lacked. For this reason I consider that the two best directors of all times are Billy Wilder and Akira Kurosawa, who besides being great visual and cinematic artists, they had more input and control of their movies by also writing the scripts. Billy Wilder's use of cynicism, sarcasm and curse words in his movies, when allowed, and in his life never came across as vulgar and lewd, but rather as an effective and witty punch line or criticism about the human condition.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Book on the Late & Great BILLY WILDER, April 1, 2002

By	Steven DeRosa, author/screenwriter (writingwithhitchcock.com) - See all my reviews

Last week marked the passing of a true Hollywood heavyweight, a man who excelled as a writer, director, and producer, who left his mark in just about every film genre, except the Western - the one and only Billy Wilder.

Wilder's death at the age of 95 will no doubt bring renewed interest in his long and varied career. It is an irony that would have brought a wry smile to Wilder, and undoubtedly one of his biting remarks. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a comprehensive study of the life and art of Billy Wilder, you should look no further than Ed Sikov's brilliant "On Sunset Boulevard."

Sure, if you're looking for an extended interview with Billy Wilder himself, there's that other book ... but like the more famous, or rather infamous Hitchcock/Truffaut sessions that inspired it ... it can only be one sided.

Ed Sikov doesn't merely tell you to take Billy Wilder at his word. He conducted original interviews with scores of Wilder's colleagues and friends, dug through production archives, scripts, notes, and film footage to assemble not only a fascinating study of a filmmaking genius, but the conclusive portrait of the man behind that genius.

Sikov's analyses of Wilder's films are fresh and exciting, and his prose leaps off the page. You know instantly that Sikov knows his stuff, and that it's a subject close to his heart.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Good, but Nobody's Perfect, October 8, 2002

By	Michael Samerdyke (Big Stone Gap, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a very good biography of Billy Wilder. It revealed a lot about him and his career I didn't know. I disagreed with Sikov on his evaluations of a few films (I like "Love in the Afternoon" much better than he, but Sikov really seems to hate Gary Cooper) but we agreed on a lot. (Heck, we even liked the same scenes in "Fedora.")

I gave the book five stars, but I have a few reservations. My problems came when Sikov went beyond Wilder's career -- or didn't. His descriptions of politics in Interwar Europe struck me as okay, but superficial. Okay, this book will be nobody's first choice to learn about such matters, but a little more polish here would have helped. Then, toward the end of the book, Sikov keeps mentioning that Wilder was out of step with Hollywood. However, there is really nothing about what the rest of Hollywood was doing, namely how Wilder stacked up against Mel Brooks or Woody Allen in this era. I would have liked to have seen that issue addressed.

However, as a "life" of Wilder and not a study of his "times", this is a great book. Fans of Wilder's films will greatly enjoy it.