On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  The practical details of orchestrating two affairs at the same time were all part of Billy’s quotidian frenetic pace. He was writing and directing a high-profile feature film while juggling three women. He was very busy. Audrey recalls their first date as having been conducted in secrecy—not because of Judith, but because of Doris. It was easier when Audrey took off for the East Coast on a tour with the Dorsey band, but when she found herself sitting in lonely hotel rooms at night, she started calling Billy in Hollywood—on his nickel. The fact that he took the calls proved to her that he wasn’t disinterested.

  It was a life of ordered chaos, and Billy managed it beautifully. He was never less than focused on his work. Wilder knew what he wanted with and from The Lost Weekend, and he got it. There was really only one man at Paramount who could shoot the film as grimly and grayly as Billy imagined it—John Seitz. Wilder, Brackett, and Seitz came up with ideas jointly for specific shots as well as for the overall look of the film. For Five Graves to Cairo, Seitz had gotten within ten inches of Franchot Tone’s chest for the shot of his dog tag. That wasn’t nearly close enough for The Lost Weekend. This was a film about the shadowy wretchedness of a man’s interior life, a quality Wilder, Brackett, and Seitz wanted to express as vividly as possible with an intense close-up of a single haunted eye. Using a special effects lens and a camera mounted on a mobile boom, Seitz bore down on Milland’s face—specifically, the dead-center of his pupil. At the beginning of the shot, Seitz’s camera is only six inches away from Milland’s eye. (The typical close-up in that era was taken from a distance of several feet.) Quietly but firmly urging the star not to breathe, Seitz orchestrated a complicated reverse tracking movement and simultaneous change of focus, all in the context of as little light as possible. It may well have been the single most extreme close-up ever achieved at that point; without doubt it was among the closest. The result is magnificent, but because the shot so neatly expresses the character’s hungover agony, its formal beauty remains secondary.

  For a less extreme but no less disturbing close-up of Birnam at the ugly moment that he threatens a shopkeeper for a bottle of booze after being discharged from Bellevue, Seitz made it a point to film the shot as harshly as he could. Milland’s face was caked with chalky makeup, and Seitz compounded the effect by aiming the most severe light he could find at him. When they looked at the rushes, Milland actually trembled, much to his director’s pleasure. Brackett loved it as well, saying that it was the most eloquent close-up he’d ever seen. Wilder then asked Seitz if he could duplicate precisely that look for the rest of the film. Seitz agreed. They continued using ghastly makeup, caustic lighting, and an orange-yellow filter over the lens. To everyone’s credit, dapper Ray Milland looks truly dreadful for much of The Lost Weekend.

  Other clever effects followed—some chancy, others simply inspired. One scene, for instance, features a shot of what Birnam sees as he falls down a flight of stairs. Seitz captured the effect by strapping a small camera to a stuntman’s chest and having him do a tumble. For a sequence in which Birnam sits alone in his apartment, a gray rain falling outside the window, the film’s musical arranger, Troy Sanders, supervised the filming such that the dripping raindrops would be in perfect synchronization with Milland snapping his fingers. (The moment ended up being cut from the film.) On a more ludicrous note, they had to film the smoky bar scenes with a tight lid on the cigarette stock. There was a severe wartime shortage. “Don’t puff too hard,” Billy instructed his actors. “And save the butts. We may have to do this scene over.”

  In the fall of 1944, when Wilder was filming The Lost Weekend in the insular surroundings of Hollywood, Europe was suffering through its fifth catastrophic year of war. The Allied invasion of Normandy in early June had been bloody but successful, and by November Allied troops had advanced well into Belgium and even as far as Aachen in Germany itself. On the Eastern Front, the Red Army was pushing toward Warsaw. The carnage would continue for months, but in the United States, at least, a mood of optimism was spreading. Across the country people began to think (un-realistically, as it turned out) that the war was all but over.

  As encouraging as a lot of war news was, however, a series of shocking reports surfaced in the world press.

  The Final Solution was known, or could have been known, as early as the summer of 1942, when Gerhard Riegner sent a cable from Switzerland and told the world about the Holocaust. But it was not until August 1944, when the Red Army overran Majdanek, a concentration camp near Lublin, that there was hard evidence. What the Soviets found at Majdanek was not just a concentration camp. It was a murder factory. Soviet authorities soon allowed American reporters on the scene to see for themselves the mechanics of the Nazis’ continuing massacre of Jews: gas chambers, ovens to burn the bodies, piles of ashes, unmarked graves. By November, a detailed report of the mass murder at Auschwitz reached the Allied press. It was written by two young Slovak Jews named Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, who had managed to escape the killing center in April. Vrba and Wetzler survived for two years at Auschwitz; once safe and free, they wrote a thirty-page report on what they saw and did. News of a death camp at Auschwitz surfaced in June 1944; the report itself was released in November.

  “A bit like the old court Jews,” Anthony Heilbut has written, the Hollywood refugees “exerted great authority in some areas, but in other places they remained vulnerable: their ultimate vision was composed of alarm and betrayal.” These were men and women who escaped persecution, built lives for themselves, worked, made money, thrived. They wrote or sang or conducted business in a new language. They directed films or acted in them. They won awards; people knew who they were. In late 1944, these successful émigrés were made to understand, mercilessly, that had they not been free to exercise their paranoia in 1933 they would have ended up in a Nazi gas chamber along with millions of others.

  The Lost Weekend worked its way toward completion in December. Jane Wyman’s daughter, Maureen Reagan, visited the set for the filming of a scene with Wyman, Milland, and Philip Terry. It was a typically frustrating process, just another day on a Hollywood soundstage, and it took an hour to get one single usable take. Billy called for time out. Maureen was amazed. “Is that all you got to do to be an actress?” she asked her mother. “It’s just make believe!”

  It was make believe, but of a decidedly grim nature. When Birnam meets Helen, he couldn’t be more rude and obnoxious. Their overcoats have been mixed up in the coatroom of the opera. They find each other when everyone else has gone. “My umbrella, if you don’t mind?” she asks, coldly. “Catch,” he says, and tosses it in her general direction, not even bothering to see if she can snare it. It falls on the floor in front of her feet. “Thanks very much,” she says. He responds with a snarl: “I’m terribly sorry.” It’s Wyman’s best moment in The Lost Weekend. After this initial burst of well-deserved contempt for the abusive and self-centered Don, she retreats into an ever-smiling, ever-gracious mode of forgiveness that lasts for the rest of the film. Hepburn would have played it harder.

  Don Birnam’s solo scenes are more brutal than any of the ones he shares with other characters. When he returns home from the bar to restart his novel, he gets as far as the title page and the dedication. After that it’s every writer’s nightmare. First, he lights a cigarette. Then he paces, rubbing his neck. Then he goes for the bottle, only it’s missing, and that’s all the writing he does. The film’s producer and director must have recognized the feeling. They decided to enhance their own sense of realism by decorating the walls of Don’s apartment with childhood pictures of themselves. A three-year-old Billy poses with his brother; Charlie, age two, stands in front of a Christmas tree with his mother. The photos were placed there for Billy and Charlie’s own benefit; they are impossible to pick out when watching the film itself.

  The Lost Weekend’s representation of solitude reaches its most harrowing level when Don hallucinates two rodents in his apartment. The scene was meant to look demented, and it does, th
ough probably more so now than it did at the time. In the 1990s, when elaborate special effects are often the entire point of a string of summer blockbusters, it may be difficult not to snicker at the artificial bat that flaps its way into Don Birnam’s apartment courtesy of his alcoholic delirium. When the mechanical bat ends up chewing a mouse to death in front of Birnam’s horrified eyes, the effect can seem more bizarre even than the filmmakers intended. It was less risible at the time. Contemporary accounts don’t call attention to the sequence’s fakery. Today, if one can get beyond anachronistic expectations about cinematic special effects, the hallucination sequence is still legitimately mad. The bat may look phony, but the mouse is all too real. The props crew pushed it through a crack in the wall of the set and held it by the tail as it frantically squirmed. This alone is terrifying. When the bat swoops down and devours it, leaving a trail of thick blood dripping down the wall, the sequence looks like a druggie fun house. As long as one doesn’t expect unqualified mimesis, the sequence graphically and grotesquely expresses the horror of addiction and dementia.

  Bim, the gay Bellevue nurse, sets the mood in an earlier scene. Milland had actually spent half a night in the Bellevue drunk tank to see firsthand what his character was up against; after hours of screaming, moaning, crying, and “a long ululating howl,” all accompanied by the smell of piss and sweat, Milland decided he’d had enough and escaped in his bathrobe. “You’re just a freshman,” Bim tells a terrified Don. “Wait’ll you’re a sophomore. That’s when you start seeing the little animals. You know that stuff about pink elephants? That’s the bunk. It’s little animals! Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes. See that guy over there? With him it’s beetles. Come the night he sees beetles crawling all over him. Has to be dark though.” Bim concludes with a remark that is pure Billy Wilder: “It’s like the doctor was just telling me—delirium is a disease of the night. Good night.”

  The vicious bat and the pathetic mouse became a central theme in Paramount’s promotion of The Lost Weekend. In 1944 and 1945, Freudian psychoanalytic theory was finding wide support in the United States, and Don Birnam’s rodent hallucination was one of its primary illustrations in the popular imagination. Paramount’s own press people went beyond their usual puffery by announcing to the public that the hero’s subconscious mind expresses his inferiority complex by way of the mouse, while the bat is the successful writer Birnam imagines himself to be while drunk. “The stronger ego kills the weaker and that is the tragedy’s dramatic climax,” Paramount’s flacks explained. Wilder himself said that Jackson had spelled out the symbolism to him: “Birnam’s hallucination is a result of his schizophrenia, or split personality. The mouse represents the everyday Birnam, the bat—or mouse with wings—the artist he dreams of being. The bat, of course, destroys the mouse. No, we don’t explain it in the picture, either. It will give people a chance to use their heads, and besides, there isn’t time.”

  The script still wasn’t done in November, but already there was talk of the next Brackett and Wilder film. Olympia was still a good possibility. Joan Fontaine was now out; Greta Garbo had become interested. According to one contemporary report, Brackett and Wilder wanted Garbo but shelved the film again when Garbo decided instead to do some sort of Viking tale for another director. When she backed out of that project she was free to do Olympia with Brackett and Wilder. The film, of course, never got made. As for The Lost Weekend, Wilder and Brackett dealt with the PCA’s objections over Gloria by ignoring them entirely. The PCA was irritated. Breen fired off a letter to Luraschi noting that the script Paramount had submitted only went up to page 46. He urged that the rest of the screenplay be turned over as soon as possible to avoid problems. The Gloria problem was still nagging at Joseph Breen. “It must be established,” he insisted, “that Gloria is not a prostitute.” The “present flavor,” he observed, “seems to indicate that she is.” Revisions were still being made in December, when, in addition to Gloria, the mouse and the bat were creating doubts in the minds of the censors. Breen was worried about “undue gruesomeness” as well as prostitution.

  The final draft of the hospital sequences was completed on December 6 and went before the cameras on December 11. The company worked throughout the next two weeks, took a day off for Christmas, and resumed filming the following day. Scenes were still being written. On December 27, the final four pages of The Lost Weekend were received by Buddy Coleman and distributed to all the interested parties. The shooting schedule was pushed back through the 29th; the production was five days behind schedule. The need for retakes pushed it another day behind. On December 30, 1944, The Lost Weekend wrapped. Or so they thought.

  At this point, the film was more or less on budget—$1,250,000, of which more than $90,000 went to Billy Wilder for writing and directing it. It was the first time he had earned more than his actors.

  With The Lost Weekend in the can, at least for the time being, Brackett and Wilder announced their next project—a Danny Kaye musical. The Count of Luxembourg, from the Lehár operetta, would be light and pretty and fun—everything The Lost Weekend was not. Kaye hadn’t committed to the film yet, but as Billy told the Los Angeles Examiner, the popular song-and-dance man could do one film per year “outside of what he does for Goldwyn, and he is very interested in our musical.” In February Billy and Charlie began working on the script; Billy put in thirty-six days of work for $12,000. Soon, however, The Count of Luxembourg was put on hold owing to complications over musical rights, so Brackett and Wilder made another announcement. They told Louella Parsons, who told everyone else, that they were putting together a film adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, with Ronald Colman as Phineas Fogg. They’d invited Paramount’s leading exotic, Dorothy Lamour, to do one of the extended cameos. But that project didn’t get off the ground either.

  In February 1945, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the contenders for the 1944 Oscars. Double Indemnity was nominated as Best Picture, Billy as Best Director, and Wilder and Raymond Chandler as authors of the Best Screenplay. In addition, Barbara Stanwyck was nominated as Best Actress, John Seitz was named in the category of Best Black-and-White Cinematography (he had nine other competitors), and Miklós Rózsa was a candidate for the award for Best Score. Finally, the film’s sound man, Loren Ryder, was a nominee in the Sound Recording category, bringing the total of Double Indemnity’s Oscar nominations to seven.

  Wilder actually thought he might win. He was very disappointed when he didn’t. His chances were never very good: apart from the fact that his film was much too nasty to win an Oscar, he had fierce competition from within his own studio. Paramount’s Going My Way, directed by Leo McCarey, had several lovely things going for it, not the least of which were the five words that sum it up: Bing Crosby as a priest. Going My Way was heartwarming; Double Indemnity was not. Going My Way was reverential; Double Indemnity was not. In terms of drumming up Oscar votes, Paramount was throwing its weight behind Going My Way. It was not only a safer bet but a more moralistic one as well.

  Even without this betrayal from Billy’s own studio, Double Indemnity stood little chance of winning. The Oscars were essentially a public relations event for Hollywood, and the Academy inevitably picked Best Pictures that made Hollywood look good. Twentieth Century–Fox’s Wilson, a now-all-but-forgotten biopic about America’s twenty-eighth president, had just been honored by the American Nobel Committee as “a vital contribution to the cause of world peace.” How could a movie about adulterous killers compete with that? The whole point of the Oscars was to elevate Hollywood’s always questionable ethical standards in the eyes of the world to which they strenuously marketed. Double Indemnity did not serve that purpose.

  The awards ceremony was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on March 15. Mervyn LeRoy announced the winner of the Best Director award: Leo McCarey. What happened next is a matter of some dispute. It has never been independently confirmed, but Billy claimed to have stuck his fo
ot into the aisle and tripped McCarey as the jubilant winner made his way to the podium. McCarey fell flat on his face, said Billy. (Wilder later drew back a bit from this outrageous claim, saying simply that McCarey “stumbled perceptibly.”) When the writing awards were announced, there, again, was Leo McCarey striding to the stage, grinning, and accepting the award for Best Original Story (though nobody, not even Billy, has ever said he tripped him twice). Most annoying of all was the fact that Going My Way also won in Wilder’s own writing category; he and Chandler lost to somebody named Frank Butler and his collaborator, Frank Cavett. For Billy, the 1944 Oscar ceremony was a series of bitter moments.

  Whether or not Billy actually did put his foot out and caused a less talented rival to fall, he was still fuming when the ceremony was over. On the way out to his limo, he’s said to have shouted (to nobody in particular), “What the hell does the Academy Award mean, for God’s sake? After all—Luise Rainer won it two times. Luise Rainer!”

  Wilder’s mood darkened further that spring at a Santa Barbara preview of The Lost Weekend. At first the audience laughed. When they finally stopped giggling they were repulsed by what they saw, and they said so, again and again, on the cards they filled out after the lights came up. They came expecting the usual light-comedy drunk routine, and when they didn’t get it, they grew resentful and mean. Years later, Brackett reminisced about the film’s initial failure: “The studio was against it right from the start. When it was finished we had numerous sneak showings and the reaction was unanimously poor. Henry Ginsburg [a Paramount executive] was wonderful about it. He told me, ‘We all make a bad one now and then.’ He was sympathetic.” Wilder remembers a suspect detail: one of the preview cards for The Lost Weekend “told me it was a great movie but I should take out all the stuff about drinking and alcoholism.”