Interview:
Noah Isenberg,
editor,
"Billy Wilder On Assignment:
Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna”
Years before Billy Wilder relocated from interwar Europe to the United States to become one of the most famous filmmakers of the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Austrian-raised director of The Apartment, Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot spent the latter half of the 1920s earning a living and developing his writing skills as a freelance reporter in Vienna and Berlin. At 19 years old, Wilder embarked on a brief career in journalism, penning news stories, features, profiles, columns, and film and theater reviews that would prepare him for his transition to screenwriting and provide him with invaluable insight and knowledge for such films as Ace In the Hole and The Front Page. Selections of Wilder’s freelance pieces can now be found in the edited volume “Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna” by Noah Isenberg, the George Christian Centennial Professor and Chair of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas. Shelley Laura Frisch translated the selections Isenberg derived from two German-language anthologies. “Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna” is now available from Princeton University Press. “Billy Wilder on Assignment” represents the first of three published works from Noah Isenberg about the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, who died in 2002 after writing and/or directing more than 60 movies in German, French, and English. Isenberg is currently writing a book about Wilder’s classic comedy Some Like It Hot for W.W. Norton and Faber & Faber as well as a short, interpretive biography of Wilder for Yale University Press’ Yale Jewish Lives series. Isenberg previously wrote 2017’s “We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie,” the 2014 biography “Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins” and 2008 “Detour,” a study of Ulmer’s 1945 film noir. He also edited the 2009 volume “Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era.”
Aired: April 29, 2021 Web sites: https://www.noahisenberg.com https://press.princeton.edu/ |
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