Some Like It Wilder by Gene D. Phillips

Author:Gene D. Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

13

Love on the Dole

The Apartment

Chivalry is not only dead, it is decomposed.

—Preston Sturges

“After I had finished Some Like It Hot, I wanted to make another picture with Jack Lemmon,” Wilder said.1 In considering Lemmon for his next project, Wilder began to think of him as his Everyman, says Drew Casper in the documentary Inside “The Apartment.” In the film Lemmon would represent the Average Man, a flawed hero desperately endeavoring to get ahead.2

Wilder still kept a black notebook, which was locked away in a desk drawer, in which he jotted down ideas for film scenarios. He had begun this practice in earnest while he was working for Lubitsch. When he consulted the notebook this time around, he found a reference to David Lean’s 1945 movie Brief Encounter; he remembered the picture vividly. In it Alec, a married man, is having an affair with Laura, a married woman. Alec tells Laura that he has borrowed his friend Stephen’s apartment for a rendezvous, and Laura arranges to join him there. Stephen returns unexpectedly and immediately infers what is going on. He pointedly requests that Alec return his latchkey and not use it again.

What Wilder had scribbled in his trusty notebook was, “What about the friend who owned the flat” where the lovers meet?3 Wilder saw this fellow in his proposed scenario as someone who allows other men to utilize his apartment as a place of assignation with their mistresses. As Wilder put it, “Here is a lonely bachelor who comes home to his apartment and crawls into a bed that is still warm from the lovers who had been there earlier,” while he himself has no lover.4 Wilder got together with I. A. L. Diamond to whip up a detailed proposal that he would present to the Mirisch Company and to UA. For starters, the pair decided to set the story during the Christmas holidays to provide a jarring counterpoint to the decadent atmosphere of the tale.

“We had the character and the situation,” Diamond recalled, “but we didn’t have a plot until we remembered a local scandal here.” In 1952 an agent, Jennings Lang, was having a clandestine affair with one of his clients, actress Joan Bennett, who then was married to Walter Wanger, an independent producer. Wanger finally caught them together; in a jealous rage, he “shot Lang in the balls,” though the wound was not fatal. The element of the sordid scandal that caught the writing team’s attention was that Lang was using the apartment of one of his subordinates at the agency as a love nest. That, concluded Diamond, “gave us our plot.”5

Wilder took a précis of the scenario to the studio and threw a fast pitch to Walter Mirisch and the UA front office. The proposal read in part, “This is about a young fellow who gets ahead in a big company by lending his apartment to executives for that grand old American folk ritual, the afternoon shack-up.” He further described the movie as portraying “infidelity as a way of life” and “the misuse of the American Dream.

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