"Write Some Good Ones"

“I would like to believe in God in order to thank him, but I just believe in Billy Wilder, so thank you Mr. Wilder.” — Director Fernando Trueba, accepting the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for 1994’s Belle Epoque.

Inside Hollywood’s hallowed Shrine, the orchestra in the pits is hitting the crescendo just as the polite applause dies. 63-year-old Jack Lemmon has just arrived on stage, giving the audience a quick “V for Victory” salute as he reaches the podium.

It is the night of April 11, 1988. The occasion is the 60th annual Academy Awards.

By the time Lemmon reached the stage, the show was halfway through a night of mixed results, not the least of which was due to the show taking place right in the middle of a major writers strike weighing down the industry.

Chevy Chase, hosting the ceremony that night, has already bombed hard with the audience from the show’s start. (His opening line? “Good evening, Hollywood phonies.”)

Some Academy-level decorum was quickly reestablished as Chase shuffled off, and none other than Sean Connery took the stage to a standing ovation as Connery began…to present an award.

Incidentally, Sir Sean just happened to have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor that night for his performance in The Untouchables, a classic case of an actor who was “due.” If there was any doubt on who was taking that specific award that night, Connery’s early standing ovation ended that.

Before the night ends, the coveted award for Best Picture will be presented by Eddie Murphy to The Last Emperor, but only after Murphy delivers an extended speech decrying both Hollywood and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for, as Murphy explained, their racist treatment of black actors and performers of color. It was a superstar’s prepared mission statement designed to unsettle the star-studded audience.

Under the circumstances, it is unlikely that presenter Jack Lemmon’s task on stage that night will stand out in the following day’s headlines. After all, he is not even presenting an actual Oscar, either a competitive or honorary one.

What Lemmon’s presenting that night is a heavy bronze bust molded after a legendary figure who oversaw and helped craft the time lovingly known as Hollywood’s Golden Age, despite dying at a young age.

Irving G. Thalberg is a name likely lost to contemporary ears. Still, to those deeply versed in the history of classic Hollywood, he is duly marked and honored as one of the major architects behind the stretch of years when Hollywood went from the center of a novelty medium called film to a titanic industry behind the grand art form of cinema. Thalberg was also the prototype for not one but two contradictory Hollywood molds. He was both the young boy wonder and the powerful movie mogul, the latter figure more associated with older and paunchier types with the names of Goldwyn, Warner, Cohn, and Adolph Zukor.

Zukor lived to be 103. Thalberg died at 37.

Thalberg’s life was short, and his Hollywood career was even shorter, lasting 18 years (1918–1937)

It is a mark of what Thalberg achieved in his short lifetime, as a mogul and as a movie producer that, within a year of his death, the Academy’s Board of Governors voted to honor his contribution to cinema and his legacy as a producer by creating the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

The Thalberg Award, an even rarer honor than an Honorary Oscar or Jean Hershold Humanitarian Award, is given to filmmakers, specifically producers, “whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production”.

In the more than 80 years since Darryl F. Zanuck was awarded the first Thalberg Award in 1938, only 39 other filmmakers have received the honor. The list reads as a who’s who of the key figures of the movie industry. Other Thalberg honorees include Hal Wallis, Sam Speigel, Walt Disney, Steven Speilberg, George Lucas, Jack Warner, Sam Goldwyn, George Stevens, Stanley Kramer, Clint Eastwood, and many more.

(Only one woman has received the award, 2018 recipient Kathleen Kennedy. That is, sadly, another story.)

Inaugural winner Zanuck received the Thalberg award three times before the rules were changed to limit it to one Thalberg award per person. Such is the power of the Thalberg that the legendary Katherine Hepburn, despite her record four Oscars, made her one and ONLY Oscar appearance to present the Thalberg award to her friend Lawrence Weingarten in 1974.

On that April night in 1988, the powers that be decided the latest person worthy enough to bring the Thalberg Award out for another rare appearance was a producer who happened to produce movies he directed and also co-wrote.

The title of “Producer” would probably be third on how Billy Wilder would likely have ranked his occupations, behind director and especially screenwriter. As Lemmon joked in his speech introducing Wilder, some space would have to be cleared for his Thalberg since he already had a shelf full of Oscars to his name. Two Oscars for producing Best Picture (1945’s The Lost Weekend and 1960’s The Apartment), two for directing those same pictures, and two for co-writing the scripts. Wilder also had one Oscar for co-writing the 1950 classic Sunset Boulevard.

Not bad for a man who arrived in America in the mid-1930s with very limited English, and it is the crazy story of his arrival and the role that fate played in his story that Wilder remembered when he took the stage to accept his Thalberg.

When Wilder first arrived in 1934, having sold one of his scripts to a Hollywood studio, he came to town with a six-month visitor’s visa. He left behind a Europe that was already facing the threat of fascist rule. His journey up to that point had taken him from the small village in the Austria-Hungarian Empire when he was born to Vienna, where he studied to be a journalist, to Berlin, where he moved from working for a local tabloid to writing screenplays for German productions.

(There was also, as the Wilder legend goes, a period of working as a gigolo somewhere in that time.)

The Nazis’ rise sent Wilder to Paris to write more movies and even make his directorial debut (1934’s Mauvaise Graine.) Finally came a Wilder story good enough to reach Hollywood and send the filmmaker overseas. Tragically, the rest of his family would be lost to the Holocaust, the full story of which Wilder would not find out for many years.

Even without knowing his family’s fate, the fear of ending up back in Europe and close enough to Hitler’s tentacles was on Wilder’s mind when his six-month visitor’s visa was set to expire and he decided he wanted to remain in America. To gain an immigration visa, Wilder had to leave the U.S. and appeal to the U.S. consulate for a resident alien visa. So, Wilder found himself almost 200 miles away from Los Angeles to the closest consulate office outside the border, somewhere in Mexicali, Mexico.

As Wilder told the story, it was a nervous and depressing period for him, since he knew that, due to leaving Europe in a panic, he did not have the required paperwork that was necessary for obtaining a visa, from proof of previous residency papers to affidavits.

Only a passport, birth certificate, and letters from some of his new Hollywood friends would determine Wilder’s fate as he met with the American consulate in Mexico, or rather who he thought was the consulate.

Nervous and “drenched in sweat” from fear, as Wilder put it, he stood across the official, aware that his life hung in the balance of this man who, in his words, “looked a bit like Will Rogers.” As Wilder feared, the consulate saw how little paperwork he had for his case. When asked by the consulate if he had any other paperwork, Wilder, in a response perfect for the dark humor of his comedies, noted that he could go back to get the paperwork in Germany. However, it would probably be hard for him to return to Mexicali for another meeting.

After what seemed like forever, the consulate looked at Wilder and asked him a simple question. It is possible to say that Wilder’s entire life and career would be based on his answer.

“What do you do, I mean professionally?”

Wilder responded with three simple words:

“I write movies.”

After several moments of Wilder watching the consulate pacing back and forth, the man took Wilder’s passport, stamped it, and handed it back to Wilder. The consulate then gave the new American citizen a kind of command.

“Write some good ones.”

“That was 54 years ago,” Wilder told the Shrine audience that night. “I’ve tried ever since.”

Within a few years, Wilder would draw on some degree of his experience co-writing the comedy Hold Back The Dawn (1941), which was also about a man who longs to be an American citizen.

Over the years, I’ve been fascinated with the role fate can sometimes play in changing lives.

A coin toss can save Waylon Jennings from following his friend Buddy Holly into a doomed aircraft.

A neck brace from a carriage accident can prevent Secretary of State William Steward from meeting the same fate as Abraham Lincoln on that tragic night in April 1865.

(Steward surviving an attack by one of Booth’s henchmen can lead to him living to commit his great “folly” of buying Alaska from the Russians.)

Billy Wilder’s career, all the movies he blessed the world with, the actors who benefited from his work, and most importantly, his very life, all may have been due to a man who, as Wilder later found out, was only substituting for the boss that day.

A film icon’s invaluable contribution to American entertainment, all thanks to the three-word answer to a simple question.

“What do you do?”

“I write movies.”

Wilder never saw that man again, as far as we know, but I’d like to think that, speaking on behalf of all of us Billy Wilder fans, I can say that Wilder more than wrote some good ones.

Sincerely: Random Access Moods