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Billy Wilder, Dudley Moore
Dudley Moore (1935-2002) & Billy Wilder (1906-2002)
When you live in LA, you hear stories about famous people. Strange little stories, anecdotes and rumors, many of which don't make it into the gossip columns or tabloids, but wander around town with the defiance of a thick neighborhood stray cat. And because we live so close to the subjects-sometimes blocks away, sometimes on the other side of a taco stand-the stories somehow feel more authentic because a friend of a friend of an associate was actually there. The rest of the world wonders who Halle Berry was talking about on Barbara Walters when she refused to name the movie star ex-beau who hit her so hard that she has lost partial hearing. If you live in LA, toss a Tic Tac and it'll bounce off three people who can tell you with great certainty who she was sniping at.
Dudley Moore (1935 - 2002) |
For years, everyone in town "knew" that Dudley Moore had deteriorated into a forgetful, stumbling drunk. The most public whisper involved him getting fired from the set of what could have been his comeback role-as Barbra Streisand's male confidante in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). He was hurriedly replaced by George Segal. In 1979, Moore had, in fact, replaced Segal after the latter walked off the set of Blake Edwards' 10. If Hollywood is anything, it's ironic. An acquaintance told me similar sad stories from the set of Dudley, Moore's short-lived 1993 TV series. Still another comrade spoke to me with regret about Moore's "drunken" state in 1995 at a tribute to his recently deceased friend and Bedazzled collaborator, Peter Cook.
But Dudley wasn't drunk. Yes he was slurring his words, falling and unable to remember the very lines he had memorized, but he wasn't drunk. In 1996, after performing a troubling piano concert in Australia where he couldn't quite get his fingers to do what he wanted, he finally decided to see a doctor. After much head scratching, a specialist diagnosed Dudley with PSP, progressive supranuclear palsy, a disease similar to Parkinson's. We all owed him a big apology for thinking him a drunk. We should have known it was all too neat to believe that Dudley had become Arthur Bach, the character he so brilliantly realized in Arthur (1981), for which he received a much-deserved Oscar nomination.
Moore won the Golden Globe for Arthur, as he did two years later for his underappreciated high wire act in Blake Edwards' risky Micki and Maude, a confoundingly sweet comedy about a bigamist with not only two wives, but two pregnancies as well. There's a sequence of true comic danger in an OB-Gyn's office that Moore performs so impeccably, it must be seen. But wait for the inevitable widescreen DVD since Edwards' comic use of the full cinemascope frame suffers terribly in the "pan & scan" video format. Between those two films, though, and for years afterward, Moore's filmography could represent a community college course in Wrong Movie Choices 101.
Oddly, Dudley Moore would have been the perfect actor for Billy Wilder to rescue, if only their careers had crisscrossed. There is certainly more than a little of Jack Lemmon's seminal C.C. Baxter from The Apartment in Moore's overall appeal. Although Moore was a working actor, musician and stage comedian for more than 10 years before 10, Wilder's shining career was indeed played out by the time he made his painful anti-comedy, Buddy, Buddy in 1981.
Yet how can you quibble with one turkey when the same man delivered the ultimate film noirs Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard (yes, it is a film noir) before the term was even coined? And this is to say nothing of his dramatic powerhouses like Ace in the Hole (Kirk Douglas at his most dynamic), Stalag 17 and The Lost Weekend. As well as such pantheon romantic comedies as Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and Love in the Afternoon, which all offer up Wilder's grudging-and thus all the more affecting-romanticism. None of these have shown even the slightest signs of age, either... with the possible exception of The Lost Weekend, arguably the least Wilder Wilder movie.
Yet what registers most profoundly about his movies is something so many filmmakers strive for, yet Wilder achieved: he figured us humans out. In doing so, he could seamlessly segue (whether from film to film or scene to scene) from comedy to drama, from cynicism to romance, from a final gunshot to a closing one-liner, from heartbreak to the triumph of odds-defying love. He could make you love a bastard or hate the guy with "principles." He showed us that the only consistency among humans is their inconsistency, the contradictions housed in one soul, the stuff that development people hate but audiences have always understood when served with Wilder's level of craft and insight.
Billy Wilder (1906 - 2002) |
Like Moore, Wilder ultimately succumbed to pneumonia after battling a list of illnesses. Since his death, much has been written about his unfathomably exceptional body of work, his tragic youth, (during which his mother and stepfather died in the Auschwitz concentration camp), his famous quotes about Hollywood in specific and life in general, his lucrative art collecting, his extensive wardrobe and his daily religious pilgrimage to his Beverly Hills office well into his 90s.
But I have a strange little LA story you haven't heard...
In 1998, the venerable, indestructible American Cinematheque was finally going to move from its road show screening facilities to a permanent home at the newly restored Egyptian Theatre, which it had worked tirelessly to bring about. A commemorative booklet was created and Hollywood notables were asked for quotes of endorsement. Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, Spike Lee, execs like Eisner, Diller and Sheinberg all offered sincere but standard "We need the American Cinematheque because..." testimonials.
On January 14, 1998, Cinematheque programmer Dennis Bartok was sitting in his office. Billy Wilder, all of 91 years old, walked in with his equally ancient assistant and asked, "Young man, do you take dictation?" Dennis said yes, and began to write Wilder's Cinematheque endorsement. It reads: "Once upon a time, I knew a blind director.
He was legally blind. He didn't want any guide, anybody with a white cane or a seeing-eye dog. He directed a few good pictures, really remarkable for a blind man. Then one day-wonder of wonders-he saw. The idea that he could now see what he directed before, instead of just shadows and walls. What's more, he could write. Boy, did he rewrite! Two pictures altogether-one is still on the shelf at the studio, the other went straight to the toilet. He died before he was 70. Poor schnook!" Wilder proofread it, adamantly detailed every bit of punctuation and underlining, dated it, signed it and then he left.
Was he writing a parable about himself? Fears that
once he recognized what "A Billy Wilder Film" was, he could no
longer make one? Or was it all just a lark? I certainly don't
know, but it's a story you've now heard, as I did, from the source.
In LA, you hear stories about famous people. Take it in like the
whispers we all heard about Dudley Moore. Maybe it means something,
maybe it doesn't. Us poor schnooks!? MM
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This story was published in the Summer 2002 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Stories You Hear in LA / Dudley Moore (1935-2002) & Billy Wilder (1906-2002)
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