Wilder Times

Billy Wilder is one of the last living members of the generation of important film directors active in Hollywood’s Golden Era. His credits include such landmark films as Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, The Lost Weekend, The Apartment, and Witness for the Prosecution. Today, interest in Wilder films is at an all-time high, making his eventful life and substantial body of work an ideal subject for a full-scale biography. Filled with Hollywood’s greatest stars, the book features new interviews with Billy Wilder himself and with such famed Wilder colleagues as Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, and Kirk Douglas, among others.

As the cowriter of all his films, Wilder is a true auteur. Nearly every film makes imaginative use of the Vienna native’s life experiences, whether drawing from his early years as a journalist (Ace in the Hole) his initial struggle as a Hollywood screenwriter (Sunset Boulevard), or his ties to the Berlin he fled in 1933 (A Foreign Affair). His films’ recurring elements of disguise and deception (who can forget Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot?) reflect Wilder’s own outsider status as an immigrant who hit it big in the land of celluloid illusion. A protean talent, he is equally at home with hard-edged dramas and bright, witty romances and comedies. Wilder Times is the long-overdue biography of one of film’s finest directors.

Kevin Lally is managing editor of the movie-industry magazine Film Journal International, where he has conducted interviews with more than 100 major filmmakers. During the 1980s, he was the film critic for the Gannett newspaper The Courier-News. A graduate of Fordham University, Mr. Lally has also worked in film exhibition, distribution, and publicity in New York City. He currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Terrific ... Besides covering Wilder's life off the soundstages in snappy but biting detail, Lally's book Is also crammed with a lot of fascinating Wilderama.
-Robert Osborne

Fast-paced, entertaining biography ... Wilder Times Is especially valuable for illuminating the latter phase of its subject's career.
-The Washington Post

Magical yet even-handed critical biography ... Wilder's aphoristic wit provides many laugh-out-loud moments ... A tremendous birthday cake for Billy, all candles burning.
-The Hollywood Reporter

An enormously entertaining portrait of Hollywood's most beloved and perhaps wittiest iconoclast.
-Houston Chronicle

First-rate, four-star salute to The Great Man ... This thoughtful tome fills a Carlsbad Caverns kind of hole in the movie buff's bookshelf.
-Newark Star Ledger