Screenwriting Quote of the Day #36 (Billy Wilder)

“You see, I have this little problem with my apartment.”
                                                          Jack Lemmon’s character
                                                          The Apartment 

One of the sad things about the invention of DVDs is it came too late because many of the great old writers and directors are long gone, so most old films won’t have their added insights and commentaries. But last week I came across a commentary on Billy Wilder’s 1960 film The Apartment that caught my eye. The commentary is by Bruce Block who was a teacher of mine in film school.

Block was great at explaining visual design and went on to write the book  The Visual Story; Seeing the Structure of Film, TV and New Media. (I will have to give Block some credit for opening my eyes to visual design which has resulted in three cinematography awards in the last three short films I’ve shot. As well as the sweeping farm photograph that I took and use as a header for this blog and that I searched for days to find.)

The DVD lists him as a film historian, but he also has a 30 year career as a film producer and visual consultant and has worked on such films as As Good As It Gets, What Women Want, and Father of the Bride. (I should have kept in contact with him, right?) He is also currently an Adjunct Faculty member at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

What I didn’t know until I started to write this post is Block is a native of Cincinnati and received his Associates Degree from Lincoln College in Lincoln, Illinois and earned a best actor award there in 1968. (Everyone in Hollywood doesn’t have a Midwest connection, but it feels like it at times. And for the record, Lincoln is just a little over 100 miles from the Iowa state line.) Block went on to get his BA from Carnegie Mellon University and his MFA from USC Film School.

His commentary is excellent and  well worth your time. (And if you’ve never seen The Apartment, a good start would be to watch the movie, then watch the movie with Block’s commentary, and then watch the movie again. I think for any writer/filmmaker it’s as required viewing as Casablanca and Citizen Kane.) 

Block, of course, addresses the visual design of The Apartment, but it’s his comment about the impetus of the story that I want to pass on to you, because writers have a special curiosity when it comes to where story ideas come from;

“The story for The Apartment is from a David Lean movie called The Encounter (Brief Encounter) which was based on an old (Noel) Coward play. Billy Wilder actually saw the movie in 1945 and the plot is a married man and a married woman are having an affair in a friend’s apartment and the friend only had a scene or two and Wilder thought to himself—he said in an interview—‘Who was that guy who owned that flat where those lovers meet? Who is the friend who would let himself be exploited that way?’

And so Wilder put that aside back in 1945 and didn’t bring it back to the top of the table until 1958-59 when he wrote The Apartment (with I.A.L. Diamond). Diamond said, ‘Although we had the character and the situation we didn’t have a plot until we heard about a local Hollywood scandal.”

The agent Jennings Lang was having an affair with Joan Bennett, who was his client, who was married to Walter Wanger.  Lang had been using the apartment of an underling at the agency—a lowly employee at a big company—to have his rendezvous, so he said, ‘What if the lending was not an act of friendship, but rather but rather a career promotion tactic?’ He said, “What would it take to get ahead in the corporate world?” And so they now had a plot.

It was now about a guy who was going to lend his apartment to his boss so that he could go up the corporate ladder.”
                                         Bruce Block
                                         Film Historian
                                         The Apartment  2008 Special Edition DVD Commentary   

Related post: Where Do Ideas Come From? (A+B=C)

 

Scott W. Smith