Customer Reviews

On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I discovered this biography after seeing a rave review in the New York Times Book Review, and I must say it was entirely justified. I've always loved Wilder's movies, but this book gave me new insights into how the films were made and the man who made them. I liked the snappy style, and the biographical stuff reads like a psychological thriller. But the best part is how the behind-the-scenes details enhance my experience of movies that I thought I knew well.

Billy Wilder is one of my favorite directors, but his films almost don't compare to his colorful life, and the author has captured Wilder's character in all its Technicolor glory. Wilder is a great storyteller on the screen, but he's been equally adept at spinning yarns about his life. Sikov separates fact from fiction in an entertaining read that does nothing to diminish Wilder's stature and puts the director's legendary wit out there for all to enjoy.

Sikov chronicles the life of Billy Wilder quite well. I especially like his chapter per film approach. There is an awful lot of behind the scenes stuff from even the more obscure movies. I couldn't believe how much was written about the Emporer Waltz and Fedora. If you like Wilder, give it a read.

A large book tracking Wilder from Vienna to Hollywood through most of the century. When I finished I wished there were more of it it read so well - though there probably wasn't much more to write about. A good thing about unauthorized biographies is that one has to dig and dig to come up with the material rather than kind of ghost someone's memoirs. And like all good biographies this encompasses a lot more than Wilder - Hollywood at its grandiest and gaudiest. I never cared much for his movies and, after reading the book, of him but he's a fasinating subject and Sikov does a terrific job. I gave it 4 stars because 5 star biographies always seem to blend into fiction.

Billy Wilder is one of my favorite filmmakers, creator of three masterpieces: "Sunset Boulevard," "Double Indemnity" and "Some Like It Hot." Sikov does a remarkable job of giving us the life and mind of the man. Show people rival Southerners in their refusal to let the trivia of facts get in the way of a good story, and Wilder was a storyteller among storytellers. Most film bios are hopelessly gullible, but Sikov uses the interviews that Wilder gave throughout his career--the man would say virtually anything--to give us his full flavor, always careful to show where the facts and stories diverge, but without spoiling our pleasure in those stories. The result is the best film biography I've yet read, well-versed in the business, politics and psychology of filmmaking. And because the subject is Wilder, it is also one of the funniest books I've come across in a long, long time.

This is a good biography, and essential reading for any Billy Wilder enthusiast. It provides as much detailed information as any reader could hope for. However, as much as detail is the book's strength, it is also a weakness. In researching Wilder's life, Sikov naturally found many conflicting versions specific incidents. And rather than choosing the versions that seemed most valid in order to string together the most logical, readable, entertaining narrative of the subject's life (which is, after all, the biographer's role), Sikov chose instead to give the reader all versions, explaining every contradiction. The result is that the book reads more like a very long, very well researched graduate thesis than a proper biography. This is frustrating, as it tends to slow down the book. Wilder, as a master storyteller, would have hated this kind of academic posturing, but students and professors should get a lot from the book.

In the mid 1980s, with his best films well behind him, pushing eighty, the famous and, some might say, notorious movie director Billy Wilder was midly contemptuous of the current Hollywood milieu.

"In the olden days you went to see an MGM picture. It had its own handwriting. Or you knew it was a Warner Bros. picture -- Cagney and Bogart and the small actors that were under contract there. Now studios are nothing but the Ramada Inn -- you rent space, you shoot, and out you go. . . Nobody talks about the picture, just about what kind of deal: Who presents? Whose picture is it? And all that totally idotic crap! It's a world with ugly, ugly, terrifying words like TURNAROUND and NEGATIVE PICKUP. Although I think the two ugliest words in the world are ROOT CANAL, with the possible exception of HAWAIIAN MUSIC. . . . And only a fool would think that by kissing a** you will make it because you are kissing the a** that will be out on HIS a** a week from today and there's going to be a new a** coming in."

That's Wilder in his later years. He wasn't alone in his disgust. A lot of older directors, like Jack Ford, were voluble about the change in circumstances. The traditional moguls -- the Louis B. Mayers and Harry Cohens -- were dead and gone, and the industry was now run by number crunchers who had graduated from film schools or flourished their MBAs, and the bottom line was money -- period.

Wilder was a Jew born in Galecia in southern Poland who migrated first to Vienna, then to Berlin, and then, like so many other refugees, to Hollywood in the 30s. He'd grown up with the business of film making and had shared some miserable conditions with people like Ernst Lubitsch and Franz Waxman. These names may or may not mean much to today's viewers but they shaped cinema during its florescent period in the 30s and 40s.

Ed Sikov covers Wilder's life in enough detail for everyone except some troglodyte doing a doctoral dissertation -- and even in that case, this book would provide a springboard. The emphasis is on Wilder's working relationships and his career, rather than family gossip. That's all to the good, I think, and anyway Wilder was a private person who hid any sentimentality behind a kind of brutal humor. "I laugh at everything," he once said. "I laugh at Hamlet." He lost many of his family members in the Holocaust and his father's grave in Berlin was lost under a pile of rubble and mud during the war.

Sikov ought to know what he's talking about. He has a BA from small but rather exclusive Haverford College near Philadelphia and a PhD in film studies from Columbia. He's written or made major contributions to half a dozen other books in addition to a couple of casual academic appointments. Not that you'd be able to tell he was a professor from his everyday and mostly matter-of-fact prose. I can't help looking at a work like this -- the number on the last page is 675 -- and thinking about the awesome amount of work that went into it. I wrote a dissertation too, much shorter than this book, and it took me two years of solid effort.

At this point I could go on and summarize Wilder's life and career as we get to know it through this biography but I imagine the subject is covered elsewhere so I think I'll skip it. And I won't bother to pass on any of the better-known examples of his difficulties with co-writers like the patrician Charles Brackett or the more compatible I. A. L. Diamond. Neither does the author dwell on Marilyn Monroe's inability to say, "Where's that bourbon?" Anybody who wants to see Billy Wilder in action -- and he was always in action -- might consider getting hold of the special edition of "On Sunset Boulevard." In one of the "Special Features," Wilder paces about, gabbling away in his German accent, waving his walking stick, sitting down, standing up, emphasizing, a gnome running off at the hands. He was a talented and fascinating man and I enjoyed reading this book about him.