I’ve never read Conversations with Wilder, the hell is wrong with me? Man, I need to correct that. I’m  grateful that I tuned in to Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing interview with Cameron Crowe, who put the book together, and has some funny Billy Wilder stories to tell. Baldwin conducts an entertaining conversation with the filmmaker, charting Crowe’s career from the precocious boy reporter at Rolling Stone to screenwriter and director. Think you’ll appreciate it. In the meantime, for a taste of Wilder, we turn to David Freeman’s terrific 1993 feature, “Sunset Blvd. Revisited”:

After sixty years in Southern California, Wilder looks like a libidinous owl and is almost as famous as a raconteur as he is for his movies. He uses a highly personal international syntax, which doesn’t always include transitions. Wilder has a tendency to mumble and then to explode into his point, which is often a punch line. His stories of the Hollywood that was are enthralling in ways that go beyond such subjective matters as truth. He may repeat a story, but never the same way twice. Wilder’s remarks circulate in Hollywood, savored and retold for years. Before her marriage, his wife, Audrey, lived with her mother in modest circumstances. Wilder told her, “I’d worship the ground you walk on, if you lived in a better neighborhood.”

[Photo Credit: Norman Seef via Wikimedia Commons]

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