Not so bad, considering

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I gotta tell you, esc, I really didn't know that the original concept for ET was dark, or more precisely, I had heard vague rumors but never knew any details. Details?

I think Myles needed to get out from under the old man. Now, I always assumed that a 20-year career as a manufacturer of ladies' handbags was more than ample training for becoming a movie director, but W. Lee Wilder disappointed me a bit there. No wonder brother Billy stopped inviting him over to his swimming pool. But obviously Myles managed a long career, mainly on TV, until his death in 2010. I think he finally dropped his helmet, and so, that was that.

(A late friend used to use the expression, "He fell off his perch," to say someone had died. Maybe we should start saying, "He finally dropped his helmet.")

There have been a tiny handful of instances of brothers attempting separate careers as directors in Hollywood, but they usually had very different levels of success. Henry King was a major director with Fox, while brother Louis just limped along with small, if respectable, assignments. William Wyler was hugely successful, but his brother Robert's ambitions were ended by the unimpressed studios early on, which is why William later gave Robert work as his associate producer. Howard Hawks had a major career, but always thought his brother Kenneth would have been even more successful. Unfortunately, we'll never know, as Kenneth was killed in an airplane collision while filming a WWI movie in 1930, but the limited evidence suggests he would not have been anywhere near as good as Howard.

But I've never heard of a pair so disparate, in talent and output, as W. Lee and Billy. When Billy first arrived in America W. Lee was already very successful and living on Long Island (not far from me, in fact). Within a few years the tables had, if not exactly turned (Lee was always well-to-do), then switched their emphasis, as Billy became rich and famous. Well, the next thing you know, the kinfolk said, W. Lee, move away from there, so in 1944 he sold his business, loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Swimming pools, movie stars, phantoms, killers, snow creatures, Bluebeard and the lot.

Incidentally, W. Lee's real name was Willy. Originally Wilhelm, diminutive Willi. Billy's real name was Samuel. But his mother, who as a young girl had spent two years in America before inexplicably returning to Austria-Hungary, nicknamed him "Billi" after Buffalo Bill, and used to fill him with tales of the wondrous land across the ocean she had once lived in. Willi went over around 1924, settled in NYC and became very successful, even during the Depression. When Billi fled Nazi Germany ten years later, he first came to New York and spent a month with his brother. (He had a contract to write for Columbia Pictures, who didn't know that their new catch didn't speak a word of English.) Anyway, it was his brother who informed him that, in English, "Billi" was a girl's name, so Billi promptly became Billy. (He also had to learn that his last name was now pronounced "WY-ld-er" and not "VIL-der".) A decade after that, when Willy came to Tinseltown, he realized that it wouldn't sit well if he tried too hard to capitalize on the similarity of the names Billy and Willy, so he altered his screen moniker to what he considered the more distinguished W. Lee Wilder.

On a not-funny note, the boys' mother always talked about going back to America, but even when her sons were successful there and could have brought her over, for some reason she refused to leave Austria. Billy made a last-ditch effort right after the Anschluss, managing to get into what was now the German province of Ostmark and telling his mother he could get her, his sister and his stepfather (his father had died in 1928) out and to the US. But they all declined, preferring to stay where they were. Billy never heard from them again. After the war, he received an officer's commission to go to Germany to work with Army Intelligence, and went to look at the Germans' own records of concentration camp victims. There, not surprisingly, he found the names of all three of his relatives, murdered in Auschwitz.

Compared to that, having an embarrassing brother on the fringes of the film industry was nothing.

I've often wondered why their mother didn't stay in America when she was here, around 1900. (Let alone why she and her family so obstinately refused to leave Germany when they had the chance.) But had she not gone back and met Mr. Wilder, the man she'd marry, we would never have had such films as The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17, The Apartment...or, for that matter, Phantom From Space.