They Wouldn't Let Wilder Make Any Movies After 'Buddy, Buddy'

Billy Wilder made "Buddy, Buddy" in 1981, when he was 75 or so.

He lived another 20 years-plus(2002) when he was 95 or so.

Wilder was by all reports, robust and in good health for those last 20 years, and likely could have worked until at least age 80 on a few more films after "Buddy, Buddy."

But he did not get to. As Wilder put it a few years later, "Everybody tells me how great I am, but nobody will give me work."

Wilder didn't have to worry about work at that time. He was well past the age when civilians retire, and rich. But he was regretful that "they would not give me work."

Well, that's show biz.

Rare was the aged director who got to keep working until death. Alfred Hitchcock got that nod -- Universal kept him on contract and he was working on "a new film" up until only a few months before he died(he officially retired first, thus getting to officially end his own career.)

Stanley Kubrick died right ahead of the release of his final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," and he was "merely" 70, and certainly expected to get to work again(he was making movies every 12 years by then).

But Billy Wilder had to suffer the ignomy of being "retired" without really wanting to be.

The thing with Hollywood and directors is: they are usually entrusting directors with millions of dollars, and hoping for a profit -- and Billy Wilder had stopped doing that.

It was a long, long time coming though -- which only proved how great a name Wilder was.

With the back-to-back hits of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment in 1959 and 1960, and The Apartment winning Picture, Director and Screenplay for '60, Wilder was advised "Time to stop" by an Oscar presenter standing behind him on the Oscar stage.

But of course he didn't. Why would he? He would make "One, Two,Three"(not much of a hit, but nobody cared) and the the coarse hooker love story "Irma La Duce"( not on the level of SLIH or The Apartment, but Wilder's biggest hit!)

But then the trouble started: Kiss Me Stupid was considered "too dirty" to get United Artists to release it, it went out as an indie from "Lopert Art Films." The Fortune Cookie won Walter Matthau and Oscar and made him a star, but, said Wilder later "That movie was the beginning of my downfall."

A few years later, having failed to get Peters O'Toole and Sellers as Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Wilder went with unknowns Robert Stephens and Colin Blakely and watched the whole great big roadshow production "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" get cut to pieces and fail.

In 1972, Wilder teamed with the fading Jack Lemmon(naked!) for a charming sex comedy called "Avanti" that nobody saw.

In 1974, Lemmon and Matthau helped make "The Front Page" a bit of a hit(while looking kinda old versus Newman and Redford in The Sting), but Universal cut Wilder's deal off after this one Universal film (even as Hitchcock remained on a long contract, working very little.)

Now struggling, Wilder managed a foreign-produced movie called "Fedora" and then finally got to set up "Buddy Buddy" at a newly reestablished "MGM" -- which was not the MGM of years past, but rather a small bank making a small slate of movies.

Now some of us like the movies from "Kiss Me Stupid" through "Fedora," but none of them made much money and to some extent, Billy Wilder was "carried" on his past and his name longer than his produced work from 1964 on merited. Which was a good thing -- its still good to have all those movies(as it is good to have Hitchcock's somewhat better crop from roughly the same period).

But "Buddy Buddy" was Wilder's first movie of the 80's and a new generation of film execs could not but notice how out of date the movie was(a 1981 movie with jokes out of a 1968 Bob Hope TV special), how overdirected Lemmon and Matthau were, how aged and unattractive Matthau suddenly looked, and how generally unfunny, amateurish and embarrassing this production was, coming from the director of Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot.

It was almost as if the studios conspired to save Billy Wilder from himself.


One thing I read that surprised me about Wilder's longevity into the sixties and seventies was how a famous-but-fading production company("The Mirsch Brothers') whose names had been on many Best Pictures and classics(including Some Like It Hot and The Apartment) NEEDED Wilder to get greenlights for movies in the late sixties and seventies. HE was the name, not them, so they propped him up as being as good as he ever was. In a lesser vein, Wilder helped get paychecks for Jack Lemmon in the 70's when HIS stardom was on the fade(though Lemmon would save himself as a dramatic actor right on through the 90's.)

The badness of "Buddy Buddy" revealed another weakness for Wilder: he did his own writing in the main, always with a partner but he was the main joke man, and it was hard to stay current with 1981. Guys like Hitchcock hired other, younger people to write their movies.

I write this as a Billy Wilder fan, in the main, but there it is: all writer-directors run the risk of age. Modernly, Clint Eastwood can "fake it" as an old director because he films the scripts of younger people; he's just a craftsman. But an auteur's work ages with the auteur.

In the 70's, Billy Wilder groused "They say I'm not of these times. Who would WANT to be of these times?" But ironically, the Young Hollywood folk didn't throw him out right away. Wilder worked and worked, for producers(The Mirshes) who remembered him, and older stars who valued the work(Lemmon, Matthau, William Holden.)

It was Billy Wilder who ended Billy Wilder's career. And probably just at the right time.