The Apartment

Film:  The Apartment

Director, Producer, Screenwriter: Billy Wilder

Year: 1960

Running Time: 125 min

Cast:

Jack Lemmon………………C.C. Baxter

Shirley MacLaine ………… Fran Kubelik

Fred MacMurray ………… J.D. Sheldrake

Ray Walston …………….. Mr. Joe Dobisch

Edie Adams ……………… Miss Olsen

David Lewis ……………… Mr. Al Kirkeby

Jack Kruschen……………. Dr. Dreyfuss

Joan Shawlee …………….. Sylvia

Hope Holiday……………. Margie MacDougall

Johnny Seven ……………. Karl Matuschka

Naomi Stevens ……………Mrs. Dreyfuss

Joyce Jameson …………… The Blonde

Willard Waterman……….. Mr. Vanderhof

David White ……………… Mr. Eichelberger

Benny Burt ………………..Bartender

Frances Lax ……………… Mrs. Lieberman

Hal Smith …………………Santa Claus

Dorothy Abbott ………….. Office Worker

Awards: The Apartment received 10 Academy Award nominations and won 5 Academy Awards. It won for Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Film Editing, and Art Direction. It was nominated for Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Cinematography, and Sound.

Vocabulary:  

 The Organization Man, Hays Production Code, Motif, Metaphor, Symbol, Mise-en-Scene, Long Shot, Long Take, Auteur Theory

“Making Of” (Pre, Production, Post Production facts):

Immediately following the success of Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wished to make another film with Jack Lemmon.

The initial concept for the film came from Brief Encounter by Noël Coward, in which Celia Johnson has an affair with Trevor Howard in his friend’s apartment. However, due to the Hays Production Code, Wilder was unable to make a film about adultery in the 1940s. Wilder and Diamond also based the film partially on a Hollywood scandal in which high-powered agent Jennings Lang was shot by producer Walter Wanger for having an affair with Wanger’s wife, actress Joan Bennett. During the affair, Lang used a low-level employee’s apartment.[2] Another element of the plot was based on the experience of one of Diamond’s friends, who returned home after breaking up with his girlfriend to find that she had committed suicide in his bed.

Actors:

Although Wilder generally required his actors to adhere exactly to the script, he allowed Jack Lemmon to improvise in two scenes: in one scene he squirted a bottle of nose drops across the room, and in another he sang while making a meal of spaghetti (which he strains through the grid of a tennis racket). In another scene, where Lemmon was supposed to mime being punched, he failed to move correctly and was accidentally knocked down. Wilder chose to use the shot of the genuine punch in the film. Lemmon also caught a cold when one scene on a park bench was filmed in sub-zero weather.

Shirley MacLaine was only given forty pages of the script because Wilder didn’t want her to know how the story would turn out. She thought it was because the script wasn’t finished.

Wilder directed Marilyn Monroe in Seven Year Itch, The (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959). He grew to despise her demands for star treatment and her poor work ethic, and thus included the party-girl Monroe-esque character in this film.

Art Direction:

Art director Alexandre Trauner used forced perspective to create the set of a large insurance company office. The set appeared to be a very long room full of desks and workers; however, successively smaller people and desks were placed to the back of the room ending up with children. He designed the set of Baxter’s apartment to appear smaller and shabbier than the spacious apartments that usually appeared in films of the day. He used items from thrift stores and even some of Wilder’s own furniture for the set.[3]

Trauner designed the production since he was the master of perspective. He placed 800 desks and then another 200 desks that were smaller with smaller actors (children), then dwarf extras, then tiny little cut out desks, things were happening with strings.

Wilder’s sets are known to be easy-going, energetic, and full of humorous interaction. He also adds touches that cater to an actor’s need for small details to make them feel secure. For instance, for MacMurray he created memo pads and stationery with his character’s name on them, even though no one but the actor ever saw them.

Directing:

Wilder and cinematographer Joseph LaShelle were occasionally at odds over the look of The Apartment. LaShelle, who had worked with directors who came primarily from television, wanted to use more close-ups, a shot Wilder prefers to avoid.

“In film making, I like the normal set-up, like Wyler uses, like John Ford, like Chaplin,” Wilder once said. “I’m against this fancy stuff. It reminds an audience that artisans have intruded. I don’t want them to grab their partner and say, ‘My God, look at that!'”

The office Christmas party scene was actually filmed on December 23, 1959, so as to catch everybody in the proper holiday mood. Billy Wilder filmed almost all of it on the first take, stating to an observer, “I wish it were always this easy. Today, I can just shout ‘action’ and stand back.”

Writing a Script:

“Billy’s scripts are amazing,” Lemmon later said. “They take a year and a half to write and everything’s in them, but everything. He sees scripts. A script is to be played, not read. So if something doesn’t look right in action, he’ll change it.”

Lemmon said he learned much about filmmaking from Wilder, particularly the director’s use of “hooks,” bits of business the audience remembers long after they’ve forgotten other aspects of the movie. One such hook was the passing of the key to Baxter’s apartment. Lemmon said for years after the picture’s release, people would come up to him and say, “Hey, Jack, can I have the key?”

Lemmon related later in life how Wilder kept his film editor, Doane Harrison, on the set with him at all times as associate producer and never made a shot until they both discussed it. As a result, he was able to shoot sparingly, cutting the film in the camera and eliminating costly set-ups that might never be used.

Director Billy Wilder:

Wilder’s directorial choices reflected his belief in the primacy of writing. He avoided, especially in the second half of his career, the exuberant cinematography of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles because, in Wilder’s opinion, shots that called attention to themselves would distract the audience from the story. Wilder’s pictures have tight plotting and memorable dialogue. Despite his conservative directorial style, his subject matter often pushed the boundaries of mainstream entertainment. Once a subject was chosen, he would begin to visualize in terms of specific artists. His belief was that no matter how talented the actor, none were without limitations and the end result would be better if you bent the script to their personality rather than force a performance beyond their limitations.[7] Wilder was skilled at working with actors, coaxing silent era legends Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim out of retirement for roles in Sunset Boulevard.

For Stalag 17, Wilder squeezed an Oscar-winning performance out of a reluctant William Holden (Holden had wanted to make his character more likeable; Wilder refused). Wilder sometimes cast against type for major parts such as Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and The Apartment. MacMurray had become Hollywood’s highest-paid actor portraying a decent, thoughtful character in light comedies, melodramas, and musicals; Wilder cast him as a womanizing schemer. Humphrey Bogart shed his tough-guy image to give one of his warmest performances in Sabrina. James Cagney, not usually known for comedy, was memorable in a high-octane comic role for Wilder’s One, Two, Three. Wilder coaxed a very effective, and in some ways memorable

performance out of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot.

Born near Vienna in a Jewish family. Started out in a career as a newspaper reporter. He then left journalism and became a script writer for silent films in Berlin. He began to get recognition, but fled to Paris when Hitler’s power started to rise in Germany and arrived in New York. He soon became a contracted script writer in Hollywood. The experience on set was that at most times directors rewrote the scripts until it didn’t look like their script. Wilder decided to go into directing, motivated by the fact that he would have control over his own scripts.

Wilder’s characters often adopted disquises to crawl out of the holes he dug for them. He made pictures that he would have liked to see, that’s what dictated the genre. Each frame, each scene, must have some dramatic explosion, some astonishing things about it, otherwise it falls down, don’t build to it. First responsibility of a director, is to get the best performances from your actors.

When writing his comedies, Wilder takes the pain and forces you (the audience) to laugh.

Discussion Questions:

1. Primarily what types of shots were used? What was the effect for the viewer and or story?
2. Think about some themes that arise in the film. What were they? How did the film technically portray them?
3. In the film, Wilder utilizes motifs, from the dialogue to a simple prop. What were some these motifs? How does it affect the viewer/story?
4. Wilder would use “hooks”, bits of business the audience remembers long after they’ve forgotten other aspects of the movie. What were one of these hooks that stuck out to you now? Why was it so effective?
5. Wilder is known for balancing light and dark themes in the film. What are some specific examples where Wilder has successfully balanced the two. What kind of effect doe it have? Do you find it effective? Why or why not?
6. Pick a scene or shot in the film that was compelling. Explain why and how you would use it in your own current or future projects.
7. What was an effective scene that revealed something through action and not through dialogue? A show- not-tell moment?
8. With every auteur, or filmmakers that has a strong sense of auteur theory, they seem to have a general philosophy or approach. This approach can be when dealing with actors, or the writing process, what you tend to write about, or even visual approach that has your own signature stamp. There are some filmmakers who do not believe in the auteur theory where the director’s signature is so obvious where the visually it becomes a distraction and pulls focus away from what is really important, the story and even performances. This was Billy Wilder. He once said, “In film making, I like the normal set-up, like Wyler uses, like John Ford, like Chaplin,” Wilder once said. “I’m against this fancy stuff. It reminds an audience that artisans have intruded. I don’t want them to grab their partner and say, ‘My God, look at that!'” As an aspiring filmmaker, what do you make of his comment? Do you agree or disagree? Why?

Vocabulary Definitions:

The Organization Man: While employed by Fortune Magazine, Whyte did extensive interviews with the CEOs of major American corporations such as General Electric and Ford. A central tenet of the book is that average Americans subscribed to a collectivist ethic rather than to the prevailing notion of rugged individualism. A key point made was that people became convinced that organizations and groups could make better decisions than individuals, and thus serving an organization became logically preferable to advancing one’s individual creativity.

Hays Production Code: Also knows as the Motion Picture Production Code, was the set of industry moral censorship guidelines that governed the production of most United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1930 to 1968.

Motif: Collections of related metaphors or symbols used to represent a related concept. is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story.

Metaphor: Action/Sound. Visual or auditory representation of a separate action, experience, or idea.

Symbol: Object/Sound. Visual or auditory representation of another object.

Mise-en-scene: refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement—composition, sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting. Also includes the positioning and movement of actors on the set, which is called blocking. These are all the areas overseen by the director, and thus, in French film credits, the director’s title is metteur en scène, “placer on scene.”

Long Shot: A framing in which the scale of the object shown is small; a standing human figure would appear nearly the height of the screen.

Long Take: A shot that continues for an unusually lengthy time before the transition to the next shot. The average lenght per shot differs greatly for different times and places, but most contemporary films tend to have faster editing rates. In general lines, any shot above one minute can be considered a long take.