“Everything is a Remix” — Billy Wilder style

On Sundays, I’ve been taking a leisurely tour through the wonderful book “Conversations with Wilder” which captures a series of talks between filmmaker Cameron Crowe (Say Anything, Singles, Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire) and writer-director Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17, Witness for the Prosecution).

The last two posts just so happen to put a spotlight on one aspect of Wilder’s creative process: He took story ideas from preexisting movies.

If you go here, you can read about how Wilder’s inspiration for The Apartment derived from the 1945 movie Brief Encounter.

If you go here, you can see how Wilder took a good story concept from what he called an “absolutely terrible” movie Fanfare of Love (1932) and used that as the basis for Some Like It Hot.

In both cases, Wilder put his own creative stamp on the source material.

In terms of Brief Encounter, this is what Wilder had to say:

The origin of The Apartment was my seeing the very fine picture by David Lean, Brief Encounter [1945]. It was the story of a man who is having an affair with a married woman and comes by train to London. They go to the apartment of a friend of his. I saw it and I said, “What about the guy who has to crawl into the warm bed…?” That’s an interesting character. Then I put that down, and put down some other things in my notebook. The hero of that thing was the guy who endured this, who was introduced to it all by a lie. One guy in his company needed to change his clothes, he said, and used the apartment…and that was it.

Wilder switched points of narrative perspective. He wasn’t interested in either party having the affair, rather what caught his creative imagination was the poor guy whose apartment the couple was using to conduct their tryst.

Likewise with Fanfare of Love, a German movie, Wilder said this:

The genesis of the idea was a very low-budget, very third-class German picture [Fanfares of Love, 1932] where two guys who need a job go into blackface to get into a band…they also dress up to go into a female band. But there was not one other thing that came from this terrible picture. We had to find, I thought, the key to why they go into that band and what keeps them there. If the gangsters who are chasing them see them as women, only as women, then…once they are seen as men, they are dead. It’s life and death. They cannot come out into the open. It’s a question of life and death. That triggered everything. So we began to have a picture.

Again Wilder put his stamp on an existing story conceit — guys dressed as women musicians — by elevating the stakes into a life or death situation.

Pondering the fact that Wilder, my favorite filmmaker of all time, openly admitted to in effect cribbing story ideas from other movies led me to a series of posts I did between 2010–2012, tracking the evolution of what became a 4-part video series called “Everything is a Remix” from Kirby Ferguson. Here are those four videos:

Part 1: The Song Remains the Same

Part 2: Remix Inc.

Part 3: Elements of Creativity

Part 4: System Failure

Takeaways? Well, the first thing is to remind ourselves everything has basically been done before. Any time we come up with a story concept, we are, whether we know it or not, standing on the shoulders of ideas similar to the ones which emerge into our consciousness.

The second thing is this: That reality just so happens to fit into Hollywood’s longstanding business ethos — similar but different. They prefer projects which are similar to films or TV series which have already proved to be successful, yet different enough to stand on their own two creative feet.

Clearly Wilder found the sweet ‘similar but different’ spot with both Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. There’s a lesson there for all of us which I’d like to apply when we reach the end of our current classic 1950’s movies, maybe try a bit of Wilder brainstorming. Look for that in a few days.

Personally I love the idea of looking at movies with great concepts poorly executed, then ‘rescuing’ them with a new treatment. The Bitter Script Reader just tweeted something on this yesterday:

What other inferior movies with great story concepts can you think of to rescue from the trash heap? Let’s see if we can come up with a list of them, movies that should be remade, only better, rather than great movies which should not be remade if only to make a buck.

Comment Archive