Billy Wilder Profile – Episode #35 (July 7th, 2015)

Popcorn Talk proudly presents Profiles with Malone and Mantz! In this vodcast series hosts Alicia Malone and Scott “Movie” Mantz break down and focus on some of the most prolific Hollywood directors, writers and actors in the entertainment industry – past & present. Billy Wilder was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age. Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director and screenwriter for the same film (The Apartment), and was the first person to accomplish this. Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of the Nazi Party, Wilder, who wasJewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He moved to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay for the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation with Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with crime novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend(1945), about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Blvd. From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), satires such as The Apartment (1960), and the drama comedy Sabrina (1954). He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded theIrving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. Follow Alicia on Twitter! Follow Scott on Twitter! SUBSCRIBE TO PROFILES ON ITUNES!