Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art by Gene Wilder

Author:Gene Wilder [Wilder, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780312337070
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

I squeezed his hand a little tighter and wished that I had asked my question a little earlier.

The next day I got a call from Woody Allen, at my father’s home in Milwaukee.

“I want to do a remake of Sister Carrie,” he said. “I’m thinking of either you or Laurence Olivier in the man’s part, but instead of a woman in Jennifer Jones’s part, I want to use a sheep.”

He had my number—both my father’s phone number and my acting number. I knew before reading the script why he wanted me—an actor who could believably fall in love with a sheep and play it straight.

Before I left for Los Angeles to do Woody’s film, I found out that Willy Wonka had failed at the box office. It seems strange now to think that Roald Dahl’s morality story wasn’t embraced. I was told that many mothers thought the lessons in the movie were too cruel for children to understand. As the years since have proven, children don’t have any trouble understanding the movie—they crave to know what the boundaries are. It was the mothers who had a little difficulty.

By now I had three commercial flops in a row. Four, actually—The Producers suffered because of a bad review from a reviewer named Renata Adler, who wrote for the New York Times, so Joe Levine sold the movie to television to get more money to advertise his other movie, The Graduate. Renata Adler called Mel Brooks’s movie “black college humor.” She left the Times after a short stint, but it was too late. She did go on to an illustrious career at the New Yorker, but I wish she had left the Times a year earlier.

Struggling to be a genius is endemic to young artists who are starting their careers, but after being bloodied a few times, they just hope that they won’t be ridiculed in the press or on television by those few who have the power to coronate them or tear them down.

I remembered a quote from Gary Cooper: “I need one movie out of three to be a hit.” I was leaving for California to do Woody’s film in hopes of resurrecting my career.

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