Some like It Hot

Introduction

In spite of Billy Wilder’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most stalwart directors, he created one of the greatest movies of all time along with screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond with Some Like It Hot (1959). Some Like It Hot is a rich, multifaceted confection of parodies and ironies. It is a parody of gangster films as it is even complete with George Raft as the mobster and Pat O’Brien as the cop. It is also a parody of sexual love and romance with Tony Curtis as the male idol and Marilyn Monroe as his female counterpart. But beneath the obvious parodies of these two genres of Hollywood film, Billy Wilder plays some very clever games. Wilder’s sardonic wit is infamous, and often it seems as though he is more noted for his quips, rather than his films.

Although Wilder’s cynicism is undeniable, it is a posture that has all too frequently been interpreted as misanthropy by his critics and detractors. One of the narrative hallmarks of Wilder’s style is the recurrent plot structure centered around duplicity, dementia, role confusion and disguise. Self-deceit or public fraud form the core of Wilder’s narratives, a base upon which many more layers of deception are built. It’s a quality, which has contributed to Wilder’s notoriety as a cynic and misanthrope. Another characteristic of the Wilder style is his absorption of Hollywood legends within the context of his films. Wilder’s acute awareness of Hollywood’s genres, stars and myths continually surfaces throughout his work; this tendency is displayed in an assortment of ways in Some Like It Hot. As a period piece set in 1929, Wilder exhibits his fluency in the generic stylizations of both the slapstick comedy and gangster films of the period.

Pre-production

Early in 1958, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. “Izzy” Diamond began their work on what would eventually become Some Like It Hot. They began with the premise borrowed from an old German film called Fanfaren der Liebe. Billy thought the director’s job was important but at the same token he needed help from others (writer) to make it successful. The picture came together when Wilder and Diamond came up with the time and location for the filmвЂ"the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Chicago, 1929. The breakthrough gave them something to work with and the story began to grow. They wrote the screenplayвЂ"working 9 to 6вЂ"through casting to the start of picture in August 1958 at the Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood and in August on location in San Diego, California at the Hotel Del Coronado. In addition to working 9 to 6, after a breather for supper and a change of scenery he and Mr. Wilder meet again at night to work on the screenplay, usually from 8:30 to 11 o’clock.

The pair often worked late into the night after filming started to rewrite and complete the screenplay. Billy Wilder recalls, “We would sit around the table with the typewriter there and we did everything together. We would act out some of the things, just like exchange talkвЂ"but it was a real collaboration. It was not that he went his way and I went my way and then we would meet and we would compare notesвЂ"not at all. We did everything together.”

Billy Wilder was well known for being attentive to detail throughout the film making process. I.A.L. wife, Barbara Diamond, remembers how Wilder and her husband would interact during the writing process. She remembers, during an interview, “They met every morning, as Billy has said, вЂ?like two bank tellers,’ and over the course of weeks they would talk the whole movie out, the complete structure, the individual scenes, and no work would be on paper until they were sufficiently worked out, Iz would write a draft of the script and bring it back to Billy who would say, вЂ?Now we make it better.’ And they rewrote together. Actually, since their discussion beforehand had been so intensive, there is very little difference between this first draft and the shooting script. Really just fine-tuning. Billy was funny. He loved the act of creation and there was no one who was better at it, full of wit and imagination and ideas, but I think he loathed the physical labor of actually putting the words down on paper. It was too sedentary a task for them, he needed to be up out oh his chair and moving about. Iz, on the other hand, could sit happily at a desk for hours on end. It makes for a happy match.”

Billy thought writing was the most importantly aspect of the film so the screenplay took about three months to complete and when they made changes it was usually the night before shooting. They rarely came up with anything better then what was already on the script. Diamond came to the set often, they kept the connection beyond the final script. For Wilder and Diamond, it was impossible for them to separate one person’s work from the others. The first draft of Some Like It Hot was completed in the spring of 1958. According to Barbara Diamond, I.A.L. Diamond’s wife, it was only after months of discussing the plot that Wilder and her husband began writing. There are remarkably few structural differences between the first and final draftвЂ"the most notable changes were dialog revisions and shortening/lengthening of scenes. The first draft seems to have largely been written chronologically, being rewritten at the same time as it was written, such that it was in a continual state of evolution; often, notes made in pencil are reflected in type later on in a scene, indicating that changes were immediately noted and taken into account during the writing process. Only occasionally were new pages laid out before writing commenced. In many cases, whole scenes of dialogue in the first draft were left untouched and made it all the way through to the final film. Once finished, a little tweaking was all that was needed to turn this hilarious draft into a fine-tuned work of comic genius.

Billy and Izzy worked in an office that was across the hall from Walter Mirisch, so they had lunched together frequently. The three talked all the time and Mirisch would listen to the progress they were making and the direction the story was going in. Billy’s concern was that he required a strong motivation to take two healthy heterosexual men to resort to the extreme of dressing as women. Then one day he came up with the inspirational idea of their having witnessed the St. Valentines Day massacre and in order to escape the wrath of the mob had no alternative but