Showing posts with label Billy Wilder. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Billy Wilder. Show all posts

Best Writing, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story)
(Screenplay) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Motion Picture Story)

A docudrama in a film noir style, with an introduction by J. Edgar Hoover himself, this spy story is based on the FBI's uncovering of the Duquesne espionage ring in 1941. An American student (William Eythe) is recruited by the Nazis to spy for the Germans in the United States. But he contacts the FBI and becomes a double agent, uncovering the identities of members of a spy ring trying to steal atomic bomb secrets. An interesting period piece at best, given its glorification of the FBI -- actual agents appear in many of its scenes -- and its assurances that the bureau has protected all of the bomb's secrets from theft by spies. This was the only Oscar win and nomination for Booth, who began his Hollywood writing career when a story he wrote became the basis of the 1936 film The General Died at Dawn.
William Eythe and Lloyd Nolan in The House on 42nd Street 
(Original Screenplay)

With his screenplay about a young French girl, a wartime refugee in Switzerland, and her struggle to overcome her fears, Schweizer became the first person to win an Oscar for a foreign-language film. That distinction aside, Marie-Louise is also one of the most obscure films ever to win a competitive Oscar, long out of circulation but reportedly available on DVD through various online sources. But then, almost every film nominated in this category is obscure, with the possible exception of Dillinger, a low-budget film from "poverty row" studio Monogram, starring Lawrence Tierney as the gangster. In an interview with Patrick McGilligan, Philip Yordan, who was nominated for Dillinger, claimed that his screenplay was the actual Oscar winner, but that the major studios had agreed not to make any gangster movies during wartime. Louis B. Mayer, Yordan claimed, was so angry that Monogram had ignored that agreement that he wanted the film destroyed, and when it came in first in the Oscar balloting, Yordan said that Walter Wanger, "who was high up in the academy," told him, "We pulled a switch," awarding the Oscar to Marie-Louise instead. Whatever the truth, and Yordan was a great stretcher of it, this was the first of two wins for Schweizer, whose second Oscar came three years later for The Search.    

(Screenplay) 

Brackett graduated from Harvard Law and practiced for several years before giving it up to become a writer, reviewing theater for the New Yorker and selling stories to magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, several of which were made into silent films. He came to Hollywood in 1932 to devote himself to screenwriting, and was signed by Paramount in 1935. Most of his early films are forgettable, stuff like Rose of the Rancho and Piccadilly Jim, but in 1938 he was assigned to work on an Ernst Lubitsch film, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, alongside another contract writer, Billy Wilder. It was, as many have noted, a perfect match: Brackett's patrician background merging with Wilder's European cynicism.  The role of Lubitsch in managing this seemingly volatile mix should not be underestimated, because it resulted in one of the greatest films of the 1930s, Ninotchka. Together, Brackett and Wilder worked on thirteen films, their partnership ending with Sunset Blvd., for which he won a second Oscar. Although he won a third writing Oscar for the 1953 Titanic, Brackett turned his attentions to producing. He would have been credited with an Oscar win for producing The Lost Weekend, except that the Academy presented the award to the studio rather than to the person who actually produced the film. He did most of his work as a producer for 20th Century-Fox, and was nominated for producing The King and I. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Screenplay)

  
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger 
Now usually known as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, its original British title, the film was released in Great Britain in 1943, but not in the United States until 1945, in a cut version titled either The Adventures of Colonel Blimp or just Colonel Blimp. I'm using the title from the Academy's "Reminder List of Eligible Releases" for the Oscar year 1945. But whatever you call it, Powell and Pressburger's saga of the military career of Clive Wynne-Candy (Roger Livesey) from the Boer War through World War II, stands head and shoulders above any of the original screenplay nominees of 1945. It probably got neglected by the Academy because the film had been attacked in Britain as insufficiently patriotic: Candy's closest friend is a German (Anton Walbrook) whom he meets during the Boer War. It's also said that Winston Churchill disliked the film because he saw Candy as a veiled caricature of himself -- Churchill had served in the Boer War and World War I, too. Thus the delay in releasing the film in the United States. The truncated American version also dispensed with the flashback format that is key to the film's narrative structure. In addition to Livesey and Walbrook, the film also stars Deborah Kerr, who appears in all three wartime episodes in three different characters. The movie's neglect and abuse was rectified in 2011 by Martin Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell's widow, who crafted a beautifully restored version. Powell and Pressburger's Candy, incidentally, bears only a tangential relationship to cartoonist David Low's Colonel Blimp, a satire on British jingoism. 
Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook in Colonel Blimp 


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Best Director, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Billy Wilder directing Ray Milland and Doris Dowling in The Lost Weekend
Wilder's first Oscar (or rather Oscars, for he won for the screenplay, too) marked the beginning of the writer-director's peak period, which lasted through The Apartment in 1960. a fifteen-year stretch of remarkable accomplishment. His eight nominations for directing are exceeded only by William Wyler, who racked up twelve. Because his writing partner, Charles Brackett, also produced The Lost Weekend, Wilder was able to exert more than usual control over the film. Its success at the Oscars and at the box office launched a series of adult problem dramas. Over the next four years, best picture Oscars went to films about the difficulties faced by returning servicemen (The Best Years of Our Lives), antisemitism (Gentlemen's Agreement), and political demagoguery (All the King's Men).  
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Best Director, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ... 

McCarey became the first person to produce the best picture while also winning as director and writer. (Under the Academy rules at the time, the best picture Oscar went to Paramount, and not to McCarey, so he can't technically be said to have won three Oscars for Going My Way, as Billy Wilder did for The Apartment, Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather, Part II, James L. Brooks for Terms of Endearment, Peter Jackson for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Joel and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men, the other producer-director-writer trifectas.) This was the beginning of McCarey's move into a more sentimental period than the 1930s, when he was a writer-director responsible for raucous comedies starring Laurel and Hardy, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Mae West, as well as for such screwball romantic comedies as The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife. His devout Catholicism is on display in Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary's, and his near-hysterical anticommunism resulted in the bizarre My Son John.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Barbara Stanwyck and Billy Wilder 
This was Wilder's first nomination as a director, a role he had assumed in Hollywood only two years earlier, on The Major and the Minor, though he had directed a film in France in 1933. It also signaled a move into his characteristic mode as both writer and director: a deep but usually entertaining cynicism about people and their motives. The next fifteen years would be his period of greatest achievement, resulting in such classics as The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. He idolized Ernst Lubitsch, but never quite mastered the so-called "Lubitsch touch," perhaps because Lubitsch was ironic, not cynical. As a result there are often false steps in Wilder's films, such as the suicide attempt by Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, a departure from character so glaring that it undermines the entire movie. The false steps became more frequent in his films of the 1960s and '70s, the post-censorship, post-studio era, when Wilder no longer had institutional curbs on his cynicism. But his best work sets an example that filmmakers still aspire to, as exemplified by writer-director Michel Hazanavicius's tribute to Wilder in his acceptance speech for The Artist: "I would like to thank the following three people: I would like to thank Billy Wilder, I would like to thank Billy Wilder, and I would like to thank Billy Wilder."    
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Best Writing, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 
(Original Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
... when they should have been ... 
(Original Screenplay)
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
And the Oscar went to ... 
(Original Screenplay) 

Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz
In 1971 Pauline Kael generated controversy with her New Yorker essay "Raising Kane," which was later reprinted in The Citizen Kane Book. In it, she attempted to extend greater credit for the film's artistic success to Mankiewicz, claiming that the screenplay is largely his. To some extent, Kael's argument is a riposte to the so-called auteur critics, whose chief American spokesman was Andrew Sarris, who see the director as the chief "author" of a film, and to whom Welles is one of the great heroes. Director Peter Bogdanovich led the charge against Kael, and one of the bases of the anti-Kael position was the observation that nothing else in Mankiewicz's career as a screenwriter is as good as Kane. Mankiewicz, the older brother (by eleven years) of writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz, was a former journalist who came to Hollywood in 1926, and proceeded to persuade other journalists, chief among them Ben Hecht, to move there too. In a telegram, Mankiewicz famously told Hecht, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots." Welles himself credited Mankiewicz with an "enormous" contribution to the screenplay, including the "Rosebud" device that sets the narrative in motion. Welles said that they argued, however, over the name of the central character, Mankiewicz fearing that "Kane" would be seen as a clumsy biblical allusion. John Houseman, Welles's former Mercury Theater associate, was one of those who gave Mankiewicz chief, if not sole, credit for the screenplay, but Houseman and Welles had a great falling-out, and Welles bore a grudge against Houseman until his dying day. The controversy will never be resolved, though the prevailing evidence now seems to favor Welles over Mankiewicz, but in the end it's of interest only to partisans and ideologues. 

(Original Story) 

The confusion over story and screenplay credits continued this year, with Here Comes Mr. Jordan winning in both categories. Segall, who had been a contract writer for MGM and and RKO, created the story of Here Comes Mr. Jordan first as a play called Heaven Can Wait, which is the title Warren Beatty used when he remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan in 1978. (To add to the confusion, there is an unrelated 1943 Ernst Lubitsch film also called Heaven Can Wait.) Except for the 1952 film Monkey Business, with Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe, Segall's other screenwriting efforts are forgettable.

(Screenplay) 

Buchman and Miller's version of Segall's story is brisker but more sentimental than the 1978 version written by Warren Beatty and Elaine May, who kept the names of the characters but changed the central one, Joe Pendleton, from a boxer to a quarterback. In this version, Pendleton, played by Robert Montgomery, dies in a plane crash and is whisked off to heaven by a busybody angel (played by Edward Everett Horton) who then discovers that he harvested Pendleton's soul prematurely:  He was supposed to survive the crash. Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) is the angel in charge of sorting things out, which involves returning Pendleton to Earth, but in the body of another man, a millionaire. Buchman was one of the star writers at Columbia, having been nominated previously for the screenplay of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In 1942 he became vice-president of production at Columbia, second only to Harry Cohn, but in 1951 he was summoned to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He admitted that he had belonged to the Communist Party, but refused to name names of other party members, was found guilty of contempt of Congress and blacklisted. He moved to southern France, where in 1960 20th Century Fox put him in charge of the European division of the studio. Miller, who had been a screenwriter since 1927 and had previously been nominated for his work on The Criminal Code, signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. in 1934, and is otherwise best known for his work on the screenplay of The Adventures of Robin Hood.

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Story) 

Nightclub entertainer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck) hides out from the mob with a houseful of mostly elderly bachelor professors at work on an encyclopedia. The youngest of the lot, linguistics professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper) wants to use her command of the vernacular as a source for his entry on slang, but of course falls in love with her and winds up saving her from her gangster boyfriend, played by Dana Andrews. The idea of Cooper as a professor strikes some as ludicrous, but he handles the role with great charm. Howard Hawks directed, and if it doesn't seem as lively as some of his other films, it's probably because he was under the obsessive eye of producer Sam Goldwyn. Wilder, who was under contract to Paramount, was hired for the film in a trade deal: Goldwyn got Wilder in exchange for allowing Cooper, one of Goldwyn's contract players, to appear in Paramount's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Wilder had written the story much earlier, while he was still in Germany, and called on Monroe to help him Americanize it. They sold it to MGM, but eventually it fell into Goldwyn's hands. Wilder and Charles Brackett reworked the story into a screenplay, playing on the likeness of the seven elderly professors to Walt Disney's seven dwarfs.  

Henry Travers, Oscar Homolka, Gary Cooper, Leonid Kinskey, Tully Marshall, S.Z. Sakall, Richard Haydn, and Aubrey Mather are awakened by Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire. 
(Screenplay) 

Humphrey Bogart and John Huston
It comes as a shock today to realize that not only did The Maltese Falcon receive only three nominations (picture, supporting actor, and screenplay) but that it won none of them. Huston started writing in the early 1930s, selling stories to H.L. Mencken's American Mercury and Esquire, among other publications, and when his father, Walter, decided to try acting in movies with the advent of talking pictures, John followed him to Hollywood. Although he worked on a number of scripts, he grew disillusioned with screenwriting and took off for the bohemian life in Europe. After a series of escapades, including one in which the car he was driving killed a pedestrian, he decided to settle down and returned to Hollywood in 1937, determined to become a director as well as a writer. His work earned him a contract with Warner Bros. and an Oscar nomination for Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet. Eager to keep Huston under contract as a writer, Warners agreed to let him direct a property they already owned: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon had been filmed twice before, under the same title in 1931 with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, and as Satan Met a Lady in 1936 with Warren William and Bette Davis. But it took Huston's screenplay and direction to bring out its wonderfully strange essence. It also helped that Huston cast all the right people, Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook Jr. among them.   
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Best Writing, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940


The nominees were ... 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 
(Screenplay) 
(Original Story) 

Foster's story was originally called "The Gentleman From Montana," although in the film the state Mr. Smith represents is never named. Foster had begun his career writing gags for the silent comedies produced by Hal Roach. He also began directing in 1936, but was more successful as a screenwriter. He received a second nomination for the screenplay of The More the Merrier.

(Screenplay) 

Howard was killed in a tractor accident on his Massachusetts farm a few months before Gone With the Wind premiered. His first draft of a screenplay was four hundred pages long, enough for a six-and-a-half-hour film. So other hands were turned to it: Jo Swerling, Oliver Garrett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Lee Mahin, John Van Druten, and Ben Hecht (who allegedly made his contributions without ever reading Margaret Mitchell's novel). In his biography of David O. Selznick, David Thomson puts it this way: Howard "was only designated writer, the figure around whom other efforts congregated. His was the draft to be rewritten, the wall against every other ball could be thrown." But Howard got sole credit, in part as a gesture of respect to his memory, and his widow took home the Oscar. He had previously been nominated for his screenplay for Dodsworth, and had received a Pulitzer Prize for his play They Knew What They Wanted, which had been filmed twice, in 1928 and 1930, and would be remade in 1940, though it's best known as the play on which Frank Loesser's musical The Most Happy Fella was based. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
(Original Story) 
Lamar Trotti, Young Mr. Lincoln.
Lamar Trotti
People expect this kind of historical drama/biopic to be stiff and boring. It isn't, thanks not only to Henry Fonda's terrific performance in the title role and John Ford's direction, but also to Trotti's screenplay, which focuses on the backwoods lawyer's defense of two young men accused of murder. A former journalist, Trotti came to Hollywood in 1932 and went to work at 20th Century-Fox, where he spent most of his career. In 1939 alone, he wrote the screenplays for The Story of Alexander Graham Bell and Drums Along the Mohawk, as well as Young Mr. Lincoln, all of which reflect his deep interest in American history. He won an Oscar for Wilson, and was nominated again for There's No Business Like Show Business.
Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln 
 (Screenplay)
Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder

Walter Reisch
This was the first of seven writing nominations for Brackett and twelve writing nominations for Wilder, the latter a long-held record until Woody Allen surpassed him on the way to racking up his fifteen writing nominations. Reisch accrued four nominations, and shared an Oscar with Brackett for the 1953 Titanic. Brackett won two more Oscars in collaboration with Wilder on Sunset Blvd. and The Lost Weekend. And Wilder added another writing win in his post-Brackett collaboration with I.A.L. Diamond on The Apartment. (Wilder also picked up producing and directing Oscars, bringing his total to six, plus an Irving Thalberg award.) Starting in 1938, Brackett and Wilder collaborated on thirteen screenplays -- a remarkable pairing, considering that Brackett was from a patrician family that traced its roots in America back to the seventeenth century and Wilder had arrived in the United States in 1933, fleeing the Nazi threat to his native Austria. Their collaboration was sometimes strained, and it ended in 1950 after their success with Sunset Blvd.  Brackett then turned his attention primarily to producing, though he reunited with Reisch on several screenplays, including The Mating Season, The Model and the Marriage Broker, and Niagara. Reisch had met his fellow Austrian Jew, Wilder, in Germany, where they both worked for the leading film company, UFA (Universum Film AG). He left Germany for Austria, but the Anschluss forced him to move to London, where he worked for a while with Alexander Korda before being hired by MGM. Much admired for his ability to solve problems of plotting and characterization, he remained at MGM until 1948, then reunited with Brackett at 20th Century-Fox. In addition to his work with Brackett and Wilder, he was also nominated for the screenplays for Comrade X and Gaslight.

Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas in Ninotchka 

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