TASCHEN Magazine Fall/Winter 2001/02

Thank you, Mr. Wilder I was first introduced to Billy Wilder by my friend Helmut Newton. So I sent Billy Wilder my favorite book at the time, Elmer Batters’ From the tip of the toes to the top of the hose, with a note addressed to ‘Mr. Hollywood’. The next morning, I called him. He said that he thought the book was so fantastic that he had shown it to his friends the night before. He said, ‘By the way, what do you want from me? Are you a writer?

Do you want to interview me?’ I said ‘No, I just love and admire your movies, Sabrina made me cry when it saw it on the plane to Los Angeles, and my intuition tells me, I have to meet you.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve never met a publisher, so why don’t you meet me at my office and we’ll go for lunch?’

That was in 1995, when I decided to learn everything I could about movies (and that was saying a lot, because I didn’t know anything). And now I was sitting next to the greatest director of all time and my instinct hadn’t been wrong. It was instant love and admiration for this charming genius.

Some years later, I decided to publish a huge book about one of his best films. We first talked about Sunset Boulevard because Billy Wilder was not sure that a comedy could be the subject of a big book. But my wife insisted that it HAD to be Some Like It Hot. Modest as Billy Wilder is, he said ‘All right, but who would buy such a book? You will certainly make no money with it.’ I said, ‘We will surely find some people out there, from young girls to elderly gentlemen, gay, straight, and from all walks of life, whose all time favorite cult-movie is Some Like It Hot. There can’t be more than two billion. And if it doesn’t sell, we will have great gifts to give for years to come.’

It’s three years later and the book is finally ready, just in time for Billy Wilder’s 95th birthday, June 22, 2001. He once said ‘As a director you don’t have to be able to write, but it helps if you can read.’ For me, being a publisher, it’s similar; I can read quite well but I can hardly write. Therefore I’ll borrow this wonderful quote which sums up Billy Wilder’s gift: ‘... he has those rarest of human attributes, eyes and ears which look and hear with fresh-ness, looking upon all things as if he is seeing them for the first time, looking with the eyes of a child and hearing with the ears of a musician who can hear melodies not heard by everyone. He has the sensitivities of a musician and a painter.’ * Variety is the spice of life and his films prove it: he has explored every genre, from film noir to comedy to romance and just about everything in between. As he says, ‘I am not a comedy director, I am not a serious picture director. I am a director.’ I would add that he is the director’s director.

Thank you, Billy Wilder.

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