by Ed Sikov
According to Carlson, Brackett and Wilder specifically asked her to give them a copy of her manuscript, and—again according to Carlson—they kept it for several weeks before returning it to her. There seems to have been no more contact between Carlson, Brackett, and Wilder. But after seeing Sunset Boulevard—or more pointedly, after seeing that Sunset Boulevard was a hit—Carlson came to believe that she had a right to some of the proceeds. She asked the court for $100,000 in general damages, $250,000 in exemplary damages, and an additional $700,000 based on the box office returns; $350,000 was thrown in for good measure, bringing the total of Carlson’s claims against Brackett, Wilder, and Paramount to $1,400,000.
Hollywood plagiarism suits became commonplace in the 1970s and have remained so. In the 1950s, however, they were relatively rare, and they received little press attention. Carlson’s suit, which went unreported at the time, was eventually dismissed, though in the characteristically supine fashion of American justice it took another two and a half years before the matter was officially settled. (A second, completely nonsensical suit over Sunset Boulevard was filed in 1954 by a frustrated playwright, Edra Buckler, who claimed that Paramount had actually swiped her material; Miss Buckler’s suit was thrown out the following year.) Carlson’s allegations seem outlandish in retrospect. While there is no doubt that Billy and Charlie needed a third writer to pull their script together, they scarcely required the additional assistance of an accountant in the writing of Sunset Boulevard.
Billy began preparing his first solo film in October 1949, before Sunset Boulevard even finished shooting. This meant, of course, that he was breaking in a new screenwriting partner before the old one was out the door. There must have been a certain awkwardness in the office. Then again, the new collaboration was of a rather different nature. Wilder was now the sole executive writer; his new partner—if one can even call him a partner—was more like a draftsman. Twenty-year-old Walter Newman, a radio writer, suggested a script idea to Billy, and Billy took it. It was about a cave, an accident, and a cynical newspaper reporter. The more Wilder thought about it, the more he liked the premise. He’d met Newman after hearing one of his dramas on the car radio. (Newman, shocked that the famous director wanted to meet him, remembered two things about their first meeting: Billy’s incessant pacing and the black velour Tyrolean hat he wore and never took off.) First they kicked around a few of Billy’s wackier ideas: a gangster who can’t stop crying sees a shrink, then plots to kill him because he knows too much; and a comedy for Charles Laughton—an impoverished British nobleman keeps up appearances thanks to his secret identity as a TV studio wrestler. Laughton is said to have loved the idea of playing the “Masked Marvel” to the point of being reduced to helpless hysterics, but Wilder and Newman couldn’t flesh out the idea. Then Newman suggested the cave accident story.
It was an idea close to Billy’s heart: a fiercely ambitious newspaper reporter stuck in the middle of nowhere pulls a scam and ends up stewing, then dying, in his own self-contempt. Ace in the Hole would not be relieved by light comedy. It would, instead, reveal American culture as the shithole Wilder saw it to be. And thanks to his own authority as the nation’s most successful writer-director, Billy would finally be able to shove Americans’ faces right into it. Newman was soon charged with laying out a basic story line and developing characters under Billy’s supervision while Billy himself finished up with Sunset Boulevard. Gone were the days of cribbage and flying telephone books. In their place was a less intimate, more corporate kind of composition. Newman began punching the clock on Ace in the Hole at the end of November.
Free from the burden of writing and producing films with the cultivated president of the Academy, Wilder jumped at the chance to make a truly mean movie. The first story he told entirely on his own would be an unrelievedly sour immorality play about two men who are buried alive—one physically, when an Indian cliff dwelling falls in on him as he attempts to steal artifacts from a burial site, the other morally, when his insatiable ambition and self-contempt close in and crush him. The naive victim lies trapped in a dank pit that threatens to engulf him completely; the cynical reporter, aided by the victim’s sleazy wife, parlays the disaster to his own advantage and winds up dead himself. Ace in the Hole would be Billy’s most closely conceived and personally expressive film to date. He drew the title of the film (as yet unannounced) from a poker hand. “I don’t like the looks of it, Chuck,” the reporter’s young assistant remarks soon after discovering a life-threatening catastrophe. “I don’t either, fan,” Chuck says with a grin, “but I like the odds.”
Loosely based on both a 1920s cave-in accident and an even more hearttugging, paper-selling tragedy in 1949, Ace in the Hole bears a passing resemblance to history, but its merciless slant is Wilder’s own. In 1925, Floyd Collins, the owner of the Crystal Cave in central Kentucky, was trapped inside after a landslide. Due to the Louisville Courier-Journal reporter who helped command the rescue operation, covering the story all the while, Floyd’s misfortune was America’s entertainment. The story gripped the nation for several weeks before (and immediately after) Collins died in the cave. Roaring Twenties readers never tired of the ghastly details, especially when certain oddities began to sweeten the story. One of the supposed rescuers lied about having reached Collins with food; items meant for Collins were found tucked into niches in the cave wall. A man claiming to be Floyd Collins turned up in Kansas one week into the rescue operation. (He was not Collins.) Finally, Floyd’s brother Homer, who doggedly and heroically attempted to aid his brother during the crisis, announced upon Floyd’s death that he was putting a road show together to tell his own version of the tragedy for anyone willing to buy a ticket.
The tragedy of Kathy Fiscus, both sadder and more farcical, was more influential on Ace in the Hole. In April 1949, in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino (just south of Pasadena), a three-year-old girl fell into an abandoned well and launched a media sensation. Her mother, summoned by the girl’s frightened friends, rushed to the well and spoke with her terrified daughter. An hour later a rescue operation was well under way, and before too long several thousand people showed up to watch the excitement unfold. Rescue efforts continued for the next few days as workers attempted to dig a parallel shaft to reach the child. Cave-ins and seeping water delayed the operation, which included klieg lights donated by Hollywood studios, power drills, earth movers, and a host of engineers, miners, and cesspool experts. Jockeys from the Santa Anita racetrack showed up and volunteered to be lowered into the well. Johnny, the Philip Morris cigarette midget, appeared, too, as did an earnest contingent of dwarf clowns from the Cole Bros. Circus. When the rescuers finally reached her, Kathy Fiscus was dead, and the disappointed crowds dispersed.
As hard-hitting as Wilder’s realism may be, Ace in the Hole is not a docudrama. The carnival that sprouts around Wilder’s cave-in disaster certainly found its inspiration in Johnny and the other volunteer midgets who crowded around Kathy Fiscus’s well, but they, at least, had an authentic purpose in rushing to the scene, however bizarre and useless their presence may have been. In Wilder’s vision, the true grotesques are neither the selfish reporter who covers the story nor even the victim’s trashy wife but the thousands of heartless dopes who turn a man’s suffering into a tourist curiosity, not to mention the millions of faceless readers who derive the same degree of safe, vicarious fun from their living rooms—and movie theaters. Wilder’s future collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, asked in 1960 about whether or not Ace in the Hole was a cynical film, stated the case simply: “Sure, they called it cynical. And then you see thousands and thousands of people turning up at Idlewild airport in New York to watch a plane coming down with bad landing gear. People clog the runway waiting for it to crash—and you ask yourself how cynical Ace in the Hole really was.”
In the beginning of March 1950, Newman submitted a treatment called “The Human Interest Story.” In the opening sequence, on-the-skids reporter Charlie Tatum drives from his dreary, d
ull newspaper office in Albuquerque to a remote gas station near a cliff dwelling in the desert. Tatum, once a successful journalist back East until “a libel suit tossed him out of his job,” has been a small-time failure ever since—all the way to Albuquerque. He stops at a filling station but is told that there’s no gas available on account of an accident. Tatum thinks nothing of it and drives away, then smells a whiff of a story, wheels the car around, and heads back to investigate and exploit.
“The Human Interest Story” is credited to Newman alone, but a second assistant writer had already signed on to the project the week before he turned in his treatment. Lesser Samuels, a chubby, cigar-smoking former playwright, began working with Newman at the end of February. Samuels offered the following observation immediately after finishing work on Ace in the Hole: “The dramatist who sets out to write on a social theme should not get angry. He should keep his own temper while driving his audience to anger.… In Ace in the Hole we indict morbidity and lust for others, but we try to do it so subtly that the onlooker will both laugh at and deride some of our characters before slowly realizing he is, perhaps, pointing the finger of scorn at himself.” Samuels may have thought he was indicting morbidity and lust. Wilder himself balances the indictment by reveling in them.
As with Sunset Boulevard, Wilder imposed a code of strict confidentiality on his Ace in the Hole team. “Do not give out under any circumstances—to anyone!!” reads a handwritten notation stapled to the partial first draft, dated May 31, 1950. Secrecy was not the only similarity between Ace in the Hole and Sunset Boulevard. Billy saw fit to begin yet another film with a talking cadaver.
In a busy western train station, “we see a baggage truck being wheeled down the platform, on it a pine box containing a coffin. Behind it walk two men”—Mr. Boot, a newspaper publisher, and Herbie, a young photographer. “The coffin reaches the baggage car. A couple of baggage men deftly and unceremoniously lift it onto the train.” Chuck Tatum, whose body is now cargo, speaks in voice-over: “Good-bye, Mr. Boot. So long, Herbie. Thanks for seeing me off. I always wanted to go back. Only I never figured on the baggage car. There’s one more thing I want you to do for me. When you write the obituary—lay it on the line! All you got on me! What I wanted and how bad I wanted it—put that in! What I did to get it—that goes in too! Friendship—pity—conscience—don’t let any of those things stop you! I never let them stop me! Not me! Not Chuck Tatum! Not since the very first day I hit this God-forsaken town of yours, remember.…” A dissolve flashes back to Tatum’s arrival in Albuquerque in a convertible with a New York license plate.
With the catastrophic previews of Sunset Boulevard still ringing in recent memory, Billy Wilder’s insistence on repeating the talking corpse conceit in his very next film seems all the more compulsive. The fact that audiences and executives detested the device made no difference. Billy had to repeat it. He may not even have believed he would film the sequence, but the lavish, macabre irony of a man describing the circumstances of his own death was something he had to get out of his system, if only in a first draft. A voice inside him demanded to speak—a dead voice. Tatum’s postmortem narration is, if anything, even more bitter and self-incriminating than Sunset Boulevard’s. Joe Gillis regards his death with bemused distance; Chuck Tatum not only despises himself but sees the need to proclaim it to the world.
By this point, Billy had already cast his surrogate. Chuck Tatum, the fiercely self-centered, ambitious, wisecracking writer, would be played by a muscular heartthrob—a Jewish one at that. By 1950, Issur Danielovitch had changed his name twice—first to Isidore Demsky, then to Kirk Douglas. A wrestler turned actor, Douglas appeared on Broadway in the early- and mid-1940s, then moved to Hollywood and, with his dynamic on-screen physicality (not to mention his notorious offscreen ballsiness), Douglas soon made a name for himself in the movies. Champion (1949), Stanley Kramer’s tough boxing drama, turned him into a star. By 1951, Douglas was a very hot property in Hollywood, and Warner Bros., to which Douglas was contracted, did not make it especially easy for him to appear in Ace in the Hole. Only after a protracted series of angry, threatening letters between Warner’s lawyers and the star’s own was Douglas officially free to take the role. He earned $150,000 for his appearance.
Douglas was set to play opposite Jan Sterling, a well-educated, talented New Yorker with a face she could turn cheap-looking with a well-timed sneer. Trained in dramatic arts in London, Sterling tended to play scum; one of her recent roles was that of the jailbird “Smoochie” in the women’s prison spectacle Caged (1950). Ace in the Hole “was the first really good part I’d had,” Sterling says. “It was really just a question of meeting him. I didn’t even read for it. He said he only had fifty pages of the script, so we might as well all go down to Arizona and get it together.” She was paid $11,750.
By mid-June, Newman, Samuels, and Wilder had developed their screenplay to the point at which Tatum, having turned Leo Minosa’s burial into the hottest story in the country, gets his old New York job back at $1,000 a week. (Ace in the Hole no longer began with a voice from beyond the grave.) A so-called final script was ready in early July, but an important new scene turned up two weeks later—a crucial scene between Tatum and Leo’s wife, Lorraine (Sterling). With Leo safely trapped under a fallen beam in the deserted cave, Tatum and Lorraine plot to keep him there as long as possible, but the contemptible Lorraine is so miserably cheap that she continually needs to have the scheme spelled out for her:
“Look,” says Tatum, after motioning her away from a crowd of people outside the trading post. “They’re having a rosary at that little church this evening. I want you to be there.” “I don’t go to church,” she explains. “Kneeling bags my nylons.”
Under the force of Chuck’s persuasion (which includes a slap in the face) as well as her own greed, Lorraine agrees to become religious—“But only because you wrote me up so pretty in today’s paper. You can sure make with the words—‘a figure of fair-haired loveliness in the lengthening shadows of the cursed mountain.’” “Don’t kid yourself,” Tatum responds. “Tomorrow this’ll be yesterday’s paper and they’ll wrap a fish in it.”
As Tatum turns to leave, Lorraine looks at him and adds a sweet kicker to the scene: “And another thing, Mister. Don’t ever slap me again. I may get to like it.”
As Wilder, Newman, and Samuels polished the script, the star offered the writer-director some advice—just a few things he’d like to see changed. Douglas wrote to Billy on June 19, expressing his enthusiasm for the project and saying how much he loved what he’d read so far, but, he added, he did think the whole scene from the bottom of page 7 to page 10 wasn’t up to par. Tatum, Douglas wrote, shouldn’t be so hard-edged. He had, after all, been working in Albuquerque for a full year at that point, and he really should have a better relationship with his coworkers—especially Herbie (Robert Arthur), the baby-faced young photographer who idolizes him. Douglas had no way of knowing it, but Herbie, the direct descendant of Eddie Polo’s apprentice in Der Teufelsreporter, was another of Billy’s alter egos—the boyish, impressionable lamb Wilder would never allow himself to be. Douglas, unaware of his director’s unconscious quirks, complained that Herbie’s relationship with Tatum was too one-sided, and he suggested that Billy add at least a new line to the effect that Tatum planned to take Herbie with him when he returned to the limelight in New York.
There was one more thing: “What the hell is Yogi Berra?” Douglas demanded to know. “I asked several people who don’t know, and now I must admit that my secretary, who is taking this down, is amused that I don’t know. She says that he’s a catcher.” Douglas closed his letter with a heartfelt plea: “For God’s sake, Billy, please understand that I am not becoming one of those typical actors who is trying to write a screenplay.”
Wilder did end up suggesting more of a bond between Tatum and Herbie, but it may well have evolved on its own without Douglas’s input. In Wilder’s films even the prickliest, most ruthless men tend
to forge links with other men. For the most part, though, Billy insisted on keeping Chuck Tatum as hard as possible. Kirk Douglas may have been tough, but Billy Wilder was tougher. “Give it both knees,” Billy told the former wrestler—“right from the beginning.”
Makeup and wardrobe tests commenced on June 28 in preparation for a July 10 start date on location in Albuquerque, the sleepy southwestern city to which Tatum has been exiled. (Regarding the town’s newspaper with dismissive contempt, Tatum tells its publisher, “Even for Albuquerque this is pretty Albuquerque.”) The script, of course, wasn’t truly finished as late as July 6. It still required Code approval, but by 1951 the censoring office was starting to lose its clout, a fact evidenced by Joseph Breen’s unusually mealymouthed response: he thought there should be “a proper voice for morality” at the end. He also didn’t like the word “lousy” on page 3.
Ace in the Hole went into production with a budget of $1,538,000, of which Billy’s fee alone was $250,000. This figure covered Wilder’s services not only as a writer and director but also as a producer: it was his first real one-man show. As the film’s executive writer, Wilder paid Samuels out of his own pocket, whereas Newman’s fee appears to have been covered at least in part by Paramount. The film required several vast crowd scenes, and the preliminary budget reflected the need for as many as 550 extras in the desert. So $150,000 was budgeted for location shooting, including the replication of Escadero, New Mexico—an ancient cliff dwelling, a dusty trading post, and eventually an enormous carnival.
Production of Ace in the Hole began on July 10 with the filming of Albuquerque street scenes. The opening sequence of the film nails Chuck Tatum’s personality—Billy’s, too. In the film’s first shot the camera stares morosely at the ground. But after the credits finish rolling, Wilder cuts away from his dejection to a visual joke told in a single tracking shot—an auto repair truck heads left across the screen, the camera moving alongside the truck and then panning to the right to reveal a jacked-up car on the rear of the truck and a man in the car with his hat thrown back on his head reading a newspaper from the driver’s seat. Chuck Tatum is a man who turns adversity to his advantage. He may have broken down, but he’s shrewd enough—and opportunistic enough—to turn a repair truck into his own personal chauffeur.
