On Sunset Boulevard, the Life and Times of Billy Wilder.

• Author: Kurtz, Steve
• Position: Review

by Ed Sikov, Hyperion, 675 pages, $35.00

When discussing the success of immigrants, the phrase "only in America" often comes to mind. It takes on an added urgency in the case of filmmaker Billy Wilder since, in some ways, his was a choice between America and annihilation.

That stark reality energizes Wilder's immensely entertaining and influential body of work. His appreciation for the glittering surface of pre-Nazi European society and what lay just underneath it - poverty, prejudice, and mass death - helped shape a worldview that created some of the most caustic portraits of humanity ever to come out of Hollywood. As significant, his hand-to-mouth living experiences, first as a Jew in the remains of the Austro-Hungarian empire and later as an immigrant in the American movie business, taught him the need to deliver, to please an audience. Such experiences - and immense talent, of course - helped create arguably the most distinguished career a Hollywood writer-director has ever had.

Ed Sikov's book, On Sunset Boulevard, The Life And Times of Billy Wilder, tells a classic Hollywood tale of rags to riches - and of self-invention. Sikov has unearthed many new facts and dutifully sets the record straight on the false tales Wilder spread about himself. It turns out, for instance, the young journalist Wilder didn't interview Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alfred Adler all in the same day; nor did he live in the ladies' room at the Chateau Marmont in his early Hollywood life.

But Wilder's true life story, it turns out, is as interesting as anything he might have made up. Wilder was born in 1906 in Poland. Though that society was openly anti-Semitic - after World War I, Wilder's father requested Austrian citizenship but was summarily denied for being a "Polish Jew" - young Billy was a go-getter and before the age of 20 was making a living in Vienna as a journalist. His writing was lively and caustic, a style that would serve him well throughout most of his lengthy career. Working as a guide for Paul Whiteman's jazz band, he traveled to Berlin, the center of German filmmaking, and insinuated himself into the industry, writing numerous screenplays and treatments. By the early '30s, he was one of the top screenwriters in Germany.

But Wilder could read the writing on the wall. He left Germany in 1933, first for Paris, then for New York, and, finally, for Los Angeles. There, director Joe May, another German refugee, helped Wilder...