Behind the Scenes: The Apartment (Wilder, 1960) with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine

Billy Wilder became a real Hollywood player and even though he had an extremely caustic, acerbic wit, he was a very social creature and people loved him. He's a man who understood the direst drama and the most farcical comedy. He had successes all along, a string of hits, The Major and the Minor, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, a whole list of great films, but he was really on top now. He'd just done Some Like It Hot, which was a huge sensation. He does this slapstick comedy, Some Like It Hot, that's this raging success. You would think that he would capitalize on that and do another comedy, but he didn't. He did this very touching drama that had comic elements. He certainly didn't want to go remake Some Like It Hot. He wanted to have something else that would challenge his audience in a different way. What's new, what's daring, that's where The Apartment came from. So I figure a man in his position, he'll take me to El Morocco, maybe 21. Instead he takes me to Hamburg Heaven in some schnook's apartment. Billy told me that the basic idea had sort of been in his mind for a considerable period of time. He had gone to see the movie Brief Encounter in the 40s and it's a story of a man and a woman who are each married and have an affair and borrow a friend's apartment. In David Lean's Brief Encounter, there's a very short scene involving the married lovers meeting in an apartment and Wilder thought, I'm curious about the guy who would lend out his apartment to this cheating couple. He wasn't that interested in the two people in Brief Encounter. He was interested in the guy who had the apartment that he loaned to these people. You know, what does this guy do when he comes home and his apartment's been used for this illicit romance? What's it like for him to get back into that warm bed? He was touched by this character and he wanted to pursue it more. But he knew in the 40s that he could never get away with a concept like that. And then in the mid 50s, there was a very highly publicized incident involving the producer Walter Wanger and the agent Jennings Lang. Lang had been sleeping with Wanger's wife, the actress Joan Bennett, and Wanger shot Lang. Billy Wilder was very, very aware of the scandal and everybody knew Jennings Lang would often take Joan Bennett to an apartment out of the way. And it turned out that Lang had been using the apartment of one of his subordinates at the talent agency. So here suddenly the notion came, well, you know, maybe this subordinate agent was using his apartment to help his career get ahead. And that intrigued Billy Wilder and he says that was the genesis of the apartment. But with the apartment, I think what kept it from coming together until 1960 was censorship. This is an adultery comedy. By the time of the apartment, it was a little bit easier to deal with questions of infidelity and adultery in a mainstream Hollywood film. The production code is losing its grip now, so movies are getting a little bit more adventurous sexually. But still, it was controversial and Wilder was a bit of a provocateur. He loved to shock. Wilder felt that the production code and what it stood for, the do's and the don'ts were very, very bourgeois. And he was there to explode it. The production code, they were stronger on marriage, that marriage has to be respected. That two people in a marriage relationship, we shouldn't see them having affairs. The apartment flew in the face of that. Suddenly you had this film where people are very clearly having sex and this really was novel, unprecedented. The apartment really was a sort of bellwether of the changing times. Well, that's the panic. I'm going to have another martini. Oh, please, Sylvia, it's a quarter of nine. In the apartment, it's all very accepted, the liaisoning of the married men with these women. They never bring up the morality of it. They just didn't refer to it with any coyness. It's that lack of coyness that scared people, but it's what the picture demanded. This is 1960, seven years after Playboy was published. Sex, Playboy philosophizes, is no longer just for marriage. Sex is not a means to an end. Marriage in a family, it is an end in itself. And these guys in the apartment, the people at the firm, and to a certain extent, Baxter, they all subscribe to that. They're all Playboys. All for one and one for all. Know what I mean? Yeah, I have a vague idea. And this is what drives need for the apartment. For a very simple reason, one of the more important people in New York at that time was the hotel detective. If you started allowing short stays in a New York hotel, then pretty soon you were filled with hookers and you were running not a hotel, but a brothel. That's why they had a guy walking up and down the halls, knocking on doors. Hey, you got a woman in there that's not your wife? You're out on the street. So if you wanted to duck out of the office for a quickie, you didn't go anywhere but someplace safe like an apartment. The apartment was the third film that Wilder did with his partner, Izzy Diamond, or I-A-L Diamond. Isadore Diamond was what his name was Americanized to when he came to this country in 1929. The I-A-L is now lost in myth. It may have stood for Interscholastic Algebra League, which was a prize he did win in 1937. But you hear him called Izzy a lot. My father was not scared of Billy. Some of the other writers were. They were just too intimidated to work on an equal basis with him. And you really can't separate the contributions of either of these two guys on any one of the pictures they wrote. In certain ways, Diamond was his twin, although a much more gentle, sweet-tempered man than Billy Wilder, who was actually quite sharp. Diamond brought a warmth to Wilder. He brought melodrama to Wilder in these brittle social satires. He made Wilder less sour. Not long before this was Ace in the Hole, which was probably his grimace film altogether. But then once he joined forces with Diamond, a sweetness that was there all along came out. And the apartment, here you have a fairly sordid situation. Here's a guy who's lending his apartment to the corporate executive so they can have trice. And then you have a girl who's having an affair with the boss. So that could have been just purely sordid or seedy or slimy, and it's not. You're locked out of your apartment? No, no, just waiting for a friend. Good night, Mrs. Lieberman. Good night, Mr. Baxter. The apartment is a really special film in the way it juggles darkness and light all the way through. The overriding thing that is incredible about The Apartment and that makes it a groundbreaking film for its time was the ability to show enormous scope, not just via comedy, not just via drama, not just via sarcastic social comment, but all of those things put together. It's a definite tightrope they're walking here between comedy and melodrama. There are jokes within dramatic beats, drama within comedy beats, which is basically what life is like, and it doesn't neatly line up for you. They went where the drama took them. It's made a number of lists of the greatest comedies of all time, but it's a comedy with a devastating suicide attempt right at the center. Wake up! It's a risk to throw a suicide attempt into a comedy, but the suicide comes about an hour plus into the picture. If you're leading in these characters, this is just another turn. That was something that was kind of pushing the envelope a little bit, and there were some people that didn't go to movies for that. They wanted escapist entertainment. The Apartment opened things up and life became realistic in the movies. You started to find out what was really happening, and it took a very daring person to do a movie like The Apartment. And also Wilder elected to make it in widescreen black and white, which gave it a certain drama that most comedies of that era really didn't have. They were brighter and prettier than The Apartment, but this brought a certain reality to the film. There was a realism in Wilder's work, a realism in so many ways, but one way was in the characters. He always picked average people, people who were like you and me, so we could see ourselves. Jack Lemmon, we could identify with him, but he was an actor who could be funny, and that was very rare. The minute Wilder saw what Jack Lemmon did in Some Like It Hot, he wanted him for the rest of his life because he brought something that Wilder needed. Some Like It Hot was the breakthrough for Jack Lemmon. He got a nomination as Best Actor, and it's one of the great comic performances of all time. But in The Apartment, Lemmon really got a chance to show everything he could do. The film that showed the breadth of his talent, I think it had to be The Apartment because in that wonderfully comedic performance, there was so much pathos. And my father once said something, drama's tough, comedy's tougher, but being funny in a drama is one of the most difficult things of all. And there's so much pathos in The Apartment, and so much of that was supplied by Jack Lemmon's performance. Are you sure this is the right way to wear this? I think so. Here. You don't think it's tilted a little too much? I mean, after all, this is a conservative firm. I don't want people to think I'm an entertainer. I used to go in and watch Jack work when I wasn't called that day. I loved watching how good he was on the first 10 takes, and then Billy was so in love with him that he would shoot to take 73. Billy, he had Jack in mind before he started to write the script. He wrote it for Jack. It would not have been made with anybody else. There was not a prayer that anybody else could step into that role. He was totally different. He had a certain appeal that the other actors didn't have. Well, considering the era from which he emerged, on one hand, you had the He-Man actors, you know, like Robert Mitchum and John Wayne, and on the other hand, you had the romantic leads like Rock Hudson and Todi Curtis and Cary Grant, and you had Jack Lemmon. The other guys were all handsome, tall, Barbie doll types. He was cute, cuddly, and warm. You loved him. People really empathized with Jack Lemmon and would accept anything he would do, and that's why he made the apartment so likable and so acceptable. There's something deeply honorable about him that you feel all along. So the casting has a lot to do with the redemptiveness that the film has. People say Marilyn Monroe is being considered for the apartment. As a matter of fact, when Dobidge is calling to use the apartment, and on the right hand of the screen is this Marilyn Monroe figure. I'm getting lonely. Who are you talking to anyway? And she acts as Ditsy, and she talks as Ditsy as Marilyn Monroe does. Listen, kid, I can't pass this up. She looks like Marilyn Monroe. That Fran has to be played by a cute, fairly innocent-projecting young girl. A bombshell's not going to work, and there's no way you could glam Marilyn down that far. And I've always thought it would be fairly funny to see them try and get the elevator doors closed with her standing in the front of one of those crowded elevators. Blasting off! Diamond, at the time, said we needed an actress who could be sexy, funny, and sad. And there were very few actresses who could pull off that combination in a film. It needed this great pixie-like kind of humor, charm, warmth, and Shirley MacLaine brought it all abundantly to the role. I think Pop and Billy both saw that right off the top. And especially since it was one of her earlier performances, the command that she was able to bring on screen and the discipline, and yet that marvelous gypsy soul of hers shone through. And it was a wonderful juxtaposition to Pop's character, who was so self-serving. What did you do to your hair? It was making me nervous, so I chopped it off. Big mistake, huh? No, I sort of like it. You've got a lulet, huh? Yeah, better not get too close. Billy Wilder had a great eye for getting the best person for a part. And I think, again, the casting of Fred McMurray is an example of that. He did want Paul Douglas for the Fred McMurray part because Paul Douglas had played a sort of philandering executive in Executive Suite, but he died right before the shooting. In 1960, you did not think of Fred McMurray as somebody who would play somebody who's cheating on his wife. Billy Wilder saw something in Fred McMurray nobody else did. I mean, Fred McMurray had kind of a good guy image. He was working at Disney, and he had My Three Sons. And he was concerned, but, you know, he had done pretty well with Billy before with Double Indemnity. Billy saw darkness in him, which was pretty cool. He got darkness. You know, you see a girl a couple of times a week just for laughs, and right away, they think you're going to divorce your wife. No, I ask you, is that fair? Fred McMurray actually went to the Magic Kingdom shortly after The Apartment was released, and a woman came up to him and said, how could you? You spoiled the Disney image. And she hit him over the head with a pocketbook. It was one incident I remember with Fred McMurray. Fred McMurray is at the desk, and he's talking to his family, one of his children. And he's saying, no cavities. And Billy says, I didn't write that. Billy Wilder and Izzy Diamond would never let anybody change a word of dialogue in their script. And I had one line where I had to say, poor Mickey, he's kind of like a little chihuahua. The line was, he's like a little chihuahua. So they said, Hope, he's like a little chihuahua. He's not kind of like a little chihuahua. I said, OK. Poor Mickey, he's kind of like a little chihuahua. Diamond jumped up over the side of the brownstone, over the stairs. He jumped up over the side. And he said, uh-uh, uh-uh, like a little chihuahua. Not kind of. I said, OK. He's so cute. Five foot two, 99 pounds, like a little chihuahua. If you take a look at Billy and Izzy Diamond's writing, that's where it all comes from, man. Every beat, every comma was a gem. And if there is anybody who deserves to have his words said just right, it would be Billy and Izzy. But at the same time, Lemon would bring a tremendous physicality to that script. While sticking to the script, he brought so much of his own comic genius to the film. What was not in the script that Jack Lemon improvised was the nasal spray, which he had the props department fill with milk. And at a given moment in Sheldrake's office, he squeezes it and an arc flies across the cinemascope screen. Do you realize if this ever leaked out? It won't. And Wilder realized that it made the scene better. Believe me, never again. Nobody is going to use my apartment from now on. That's another reason why he loved Lemon. Lemon was so inventive with business. The bit about the spaghetti in the tennis racket, that's another image that you can't forget. That was in the script. What was added was his singing while he was tossing the spaghetti. That was pure Lemon. But Billy Wilder and I, A. L. Diamond, were constantly writing. Even when we were shooting, their minds were moving. They'd see something in an act and say, hey, that looks real good. Let's feed that a little bit. So we would get a few more pages, then a few more pages. Billy Wilder, often when he was filming, he may not have had a completed screenplay. He was a writer who worked hard and could work every day writing. So due to the fact that he tended to film somewhat in script order, he didn't feel that he was under terrible pressure if he started to film without a completed screenplay. Billy and Izzy started to write the script for the apartment. With 29 pages, we went to work. And what they were saying was they wanted to see the chemistry develop between myself and Jack Lemon and possibly Fred McMurray and see what happened. We didn't know how it was going to end. We didn't know what essentially the plot was. We trusted Billy and Izzy. I never saw a screenplay. It wasn't done. I think that's the only way that Billy can really work. And if he gets to know somebody, then he writes for them. Wilder learned that Shirley MacLaine had been playing Gin Rummy with her friends in the Rat Pack. I was hanging out with Dean and Frank and they were teaching me how to play Gin Rummy and Billy put that scene in. He thought it might be a good way to kind of develop the relationship between Fran and Baxter to have them after this crisis when she tries to commit suicide to have them just be at ease in each other's company. What do you call it when somebody keeps getting smashed up in automobile accidents? Bad insurance risk? It's me with men. There was a wonderful scene that came in later when we were having lunch at the cafe at Goldwyn Studios and I was having some kind of disastrous love affair and I said, oh, why do people have to be in love with people anyway? Why can't they be in love with kangaroos or something? Billy said, that's it, that's it. We went back and he rebuilt the set. He was very flexible, that German-Austrian scientist of comedy person. Why do people have to love people anyway? There were two phases to the production. One was the location phase which started the production in New York and the weather in the apartment is generally speaking pretty bad and unfortunately it turned out that the weather didn't cooperate at all and was too cold and too miserable. Well, there's a certain scene Jack Lemon was sitting outside on the park bench drenched waiting for somebody to vacate his apartment and the water that was supposed to be rain was actually freezing on him. It was so cold the night that they shot it, it was 14 degrees below zero. So the story goes that they got some grip with some antifreeze to spray him with the antifreeze in between takes. This poor guy. Look, buddy boy, if there wasn't a lady present, I'd clobber you. All right, Carl. And in one scene, supposedly I come in and I find out that Jack may have been seducing my sister-in-law, Shirley, and I get upset about it and I hit him. But Jack wasn't a very physical guy. So Billy said, explain to him what he has to do. I said, Jack, it's like a ballet. One, two. And I go, one, two. I miss you by that much. You never get hurt. You fall down and we got a shot. He says, got it, got it. He says, by Jove, I've got it. I says, okay, let's do it. Billy yells, action. And Jack is saying in his mind, one, one. And he forgets the two. I came across with this one, came across with this one, and on the second one, caught him with these two fingers. He went up horizontal like this down to the floor. We all ran over because star of the show. My God, I might've killed him. I said, Jack, Jack, I only hit you with these two fingers. He says, I'm glad you didn't hit me with the fist. So the cameraman says, is that a print, Mr. Wilder? He says, he hit him right in the kisser. We can't do any better than that. The day that we shot the brother, I had never really seen the scene. We'd never done a master of it. You see, Billy would never shoot a master shot. He would know where he was going to cut. So he didn't want to waste any time. So sometimes the artist wouldn't know the emotional buildup of the scene. Billy knew. And so what he did was break a piece of wood real loud underneath the camera. It scared the dick inside of me. And that's how he got that reaction. That was not acting. That was bending to Billy's Austrian will. In Billy Wilder's cinema, everybody talks about it's a cinema of words. It's also a cinema of images. Wilder developed a very important collaborator in Alexander Trauner, his production designer. He created all those wonderful sets in the apartment. The apartment is meant to be as personal as you can get for Bud Baxter. It comes in contrast to years of cinema in which you have these grand, you know, Central Park West, MGM Art Deco apartments. It's a little run down, but that makes it comfortable and warm. The warm lighting and the warm decor. But the apartment is in dire contrast to this opening set, Consolidated Life, that office building. Billy Wilder, he used to talk about the set. And he said, this is our chariot race, referring to Ben-Hur, which won the Oscar Award the year previously. He said, this is our chariot race. The set was enormous and elaborate. And it was a trick of perspective. They staggered it so that you had very tall people and big desks in the front and gradually smaller. Until the very end, they either had dwarfs or children. It was on a set at Goldwyn, which I was on when I was like nine years old, and just marveled. Look, things get smaller when you go back. And then at some point, it ends in a painted backdrop, which disappears into infinity. And of course, Lemon is the archetypal work of B. You just feel this complete sense of frustration and unfulfillment and being one of a crowd. The visual scheme of the film emphasizes the plight of the two main characters. C.C. Baxter and Fran Kubelik are these cogs in this much greater machine, and both kind of vulnerable victims of it. Both Wilder and Lemon believed that this was a film about two people being emancipated from the traps in their lives. It was also a wonderful observation of the American culture and where we place our values and what's important to us. Billy Wilder saw America as few people in America saw it because we're too close. He became an Americophile and told us what our culture was like. Coming from a foreign culture, he felt he was perhaps a keener observer of American behavior and American culture than one who was born here and takes it for granted. Wilder's take on the business culture is heartless, cold, everyone for himself. How do we rise above the crowd and rise in the corporate ladder? How far will you go? How sordid or seedy a thing will you do in order to accomplish your end? Why don't you grow up, Baxter? Be a mensch. You know what that means? I'm not sure. A mensch, a human being. Don't lose your humanity. Don't lose your humanity in return for the key to the executive washroom. The Dr. Dreyfuss character, he speaks for all of us, I think. And as true as it was at the time the film was made, it is just as true today. That is the great strength of Billy. He addressed subjects that continue to bedevil our society. The ending in the apartment is one of the great endings. First of all, it's anti-cliche, which is what Wilder was always trying to do. He hated sentimentality and he didn't want this to be sentimental. And at the time, too, I think partly because of the incredible success of the final line in Some Like It Hot, Nobody's Perfect, he wanted to have something that perhaps people would also remember. Wilder always wanted to leave you with one of these knockout lines that you'll remember forever. These lines that you can't tell. Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you. Shut up and deal. That's real. It's tangible. It's not, oh, yes, I love you too. No. Maybe they'll get to that place. Who knows? But for now, this is it. Shut up and deal. The apartment had an extremely mixed reaction from critics. There were headlines. Wilder's latest film is revolting, said one headline in Chicago. Pauline Kael called it a dirty fairy tale and found it unpleasant. Somebody in England said it was an example of glorious bad taste. Billy didn't know where it was going to go, what was going to be a success, whether it was going to be a failure. He had no idea. I remember Bosley Crowther writing an interview for the New York Times saying, Shirley and Jack and Billy Wilder don't know if they're making a comedy or a drama. He didn't get it. There were other critics who could really see the film for what it was, as a very complex portrait of life in the corporate world and what it takes to hold on to your humanity. Lemon always said, Wilder grew a rose in a garbage pail. People were moved by it and it hit home. Just as it does today. And of course, it went on to win Academy Awards. The film won the Oscars for best picture, best screenplay and best director. Wilder was only the second person in Oscar history to win three personal Oscars in one night. So this was a great triumph. This to me is the most perfect Oscar acceptance speech in history because Mr. Wilder, Mr. Diamond, they heard their names, they walked up on stage, received their Oscars, leaned over the one mic at the podium and my father said, Thank you, Billy Wilder. And Billy Wilder said, Thank you, I.E.L. Diamond. And they walked off. That was it. The apartment was really sort of the peak for Billy Wilder. Certainly, he considered it one of the major films of his career. This film endures because it doesn't follow a model and creates its own model. It mixes genres in a way that people appreciate now more than even at the time. You can't really tell whether a film is a great film until time goes by. But this movie was good when it came out and it's even greater today.