 Okay, welcome everyone. Once again to Bedford Playhouse Virtual Edition and Classic Tuesdays. We're going to have a lot of fun tonight talking about a really, really great film, Some Like It Hot. I want to just remind everybody if you're new to Zoom and you have not familiar with how we do these things, there was a Q&A button which is on the bottom of your screen on the laptop or PC. It's at the top of your screen on an iPad or iPhone. If you are at any point, want to ask a question, comment, make an observation, please feel free to do so. We're going to do things slightly differently tonight than we normally do, but I think you'll enjoy it. I also just should mention coming up over the next couple of days we have some really, really great programming again virtually through the Bedford Playhouse Virtual Playhouse platform. Tomorrow night with the Katona Museum of Art, we're presenting a documentary film conversation on Audrey Flack, the artist Audrey Flack. She and the director of the film will be on board. If you register on our website, you can get a link to watch the film and then a link to join for the Q&A. And then on Thursday, we're going to be my partner in crime, Bijan, and I are going to be talking about Galaxy Quest as part of our Laugh Out Loud series. And if you've never seen Galaxy Quest, you are probably in for a treat if you are so inclined to watch it because it's really, really a great, great movie. But back to the business at hand, tonight we're here to talk about one of the really great, great all-time comedies from 1959. It's Some Like It Hot, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon, directed by Billy Wilder. Any conversation on this film has to start with the man at the top, Billy Wilder. He was born in Austria. And as a young man, he had started as a screenwriter in Berlin, working for Ufa, which was the German equivalent of Warner Brothers or MGM in the States. His most well-known work for them was a film called People on Sunday, which portrayed how average citizens spent their leisure time, their day off on Sunday. It was done with a cast of amateurs. And it's a very, very interesting film. It's probably still available in some streaming portals. But as he was Jewish, he had the good sense to leave Germany when the Nazis took control in the early 30s. So he landed in Hollywood, speaking virtually no English and having nothing but his determination to get him through. It's said that he learned English by constantly watching movies and listening to baseball games on the radio. But however he did it, he managed to reestablish himself as a much-in-demand screenwriter. He worked mainly in partnership with a man named Charles Brackett. And Brackett and Wilder were kind of an odd couple. They were really an unusual pair. They were a generation apart in age and most of their sensibilities. Wilder was younger. He was full of energy. It's been said that on Billy Wilder's best day, you could call him cranky, whereas Brackett was much more patrician and reserved. But together they wrote a lot of classic films, most of them for the great German director Ernst Lubitsch, who was known for doing light comedies. They wrote Blue Beards, Eighth Wife, the film Midnight. There's a very underrated film they did called Hold Back the Dawn. And it culminated, the writing portion of their career culminated with Ninochka in 1939, which is the movie that was billed as Garbo Laughs in that great movie year of 1939. But during this time, Wilder was becoming really frustrated by what he perceived as the mangling of his scripts by the directors who were assigned to film them. And this was also coinciding with the rise of two figures who had started breaking down the barrier between writers and directors by serving in both roles. And that was Preston Sturges, folks who have been doing classic twos with us know that we did The Lady Eve, not all that long ago, which was a Preston Sturges comedy, and John Houston, who had done the Maltese Falcon and of course went on to have a really amazing career on his own. So Wilder resolved to direct his own screenplays with Brackett as his producer, and as well as his co-author. And their first film in that new capacity was called The Major and the Minor with Ginger Rogers, and it really doesn't hold up very well. Ginger Rogers basically is impersonating a 12-year-old, which is exactly what it sounds like. But at least he was on his way, and he used, tried to use Lubage as the model for how to be a director. And then from there, Wilder and Brackett had a pretty impressive track record. They did Five Grades to Cairo, which is a very entertaining war movie. They did The Lost Weekend with Rayma Land, which won multiple Oscars in the year. It came out, it did one best picture, actor, adapted screenplay, and director for Billy Wilder. And my personal favorite, Sunset Boulevard, just to name a few. Interestingly enough, another Wilder classic from that era was Double Indemnity, which we did last year as part of Classic Tuesdays. That was written by Wilder, and he worked on that particular script with the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler, because Brackett found the material distasteful, and he wanted no part of that. So that was sort of the relationship they had. Brackett could bow out when he felt that the work was not to his taste. But Brackett ended up retiring after Sunset Boulevard, which kind of left Wilder to his own devices. And he made a number of really great films after that, working with different collaborators. He did Sabrina, he did The Seven-Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe, the famous scene of her the subway grate blowing up her dress, and Witness for the prosecution. None of these collaborators really stuck with him until Wilder was presented with the idea to remake this obscure 1932 German film, which was called Fan Fairs of Love. And he screamed it and didn't think much really about it. It was not the greatest piece of work. But he found one nugget in it, in that it was a story of two male musicians who latch onto an old girl's band. And so he needed to find a collaborator. A guy named IAL Diamond, he went by is, is Diamond, was a writer, and he was at the time working on some kind of B-picture lower level things, getting very increasingly frustrated with the life of a Hollywood screenwriter, kind of the same way that Wilder had been about a dozen years before that. And so when Wilder called and said he had an idea, Diamond all of a sudden found himself in this relationship that ended up lasting 30 years, and he would never really have to worry about protecting his material again, because Billy Wilder was there to protect it for him. So they come back to this idea of adapting Fan Fairs of Love. And then so the idea of two guys in a girl's orchestra, they thought was kind of a really flimsy piece, a theme. And they decided that the only way to raise the stakes was to make it a matter of life and death. And for those of you who are familiar with these, there's a stage classic work called Charlie's Ant. And they were familiar with Charlie's Ant. It's about a guy who puts on a dress. And they realized that whenever Charlie's Ant was staged, it was always done as a period piece, because when all of the costumes look strange, a guy in drag doesn't look any stranger than anyone else does. So they decided that the characters of Joe and Jerry, Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis, would be witnesses to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929. And that would raise the stakes for the characters. And once they came to that conclusion, the rest of the elements fell into place and it gave them ideas for characters and backgrounds that they hadn't thought of at that point. So they titled the script, Some Like It Hot, and We're Off to the Races. Now Jack Lemon was not Wilder's first choice for Jerry. And even though he had won an Oscar for Mr. Roberts, he played Ensign Pulver and won Best Supporting Actor for Mr. Roberts. He really wasn't at that time a major box office name. But he met with Wilder and Wilder told him the story. And even though he's in drag for 85% of the film thereabouts, Jack Lemon accepted without hesitation because it was an opportunity to work with Billy Wilder. The studio wasn't so sold on Jack Lemon unless they could get some bigger names for the other roles. And United Artists, which was the studio, had Tony Curtis and they figured he would be on board for either role. And they were trying to land Frank Sinatra. But as Billy Wilder later put it, Frank Sinatra developed a sudden aversion to mascara. They had a meeting schedule Frank never showed up. And that was the end of that. At that point in time, Tony Curtis was actually a far bigger star than Jack Lemon was. He had just appeared in two excellent films, Sweet Smell of Success with Burt Lancaster and the Defiant Ones with Sidney Poitier. And Wilder had actually seen Curtis before those films. He was in a, he was in a biopic of Harry Houdini. He played Harry Houdini, which was a relatively mediocre film. But Wilder thought that he had the right look and he would be able to handle some of the physical demands of the role. Marilyn Monroe had actually put herself forward for the role of sugar cane because having worked with Billy Wilder on the seven year itch, she actually wrote him a letter expressing her interest in it. And I believe the original actress that they had in mind for it was Mitzi Gaynor. If anybody remembers Mitzi Gaynor. If you have your choice between Mitzi Gaynor and Marilyn Monroe, it's probably not that difficult a decision to make. So with Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe, now Billy Wilder could hire Jack Lemon to play the role of Jerry. The general consensus at the time was that it was a crazy idea to have your two leading men in drag for most of the film. They were genuinely afraid that people were going to conclude that Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon were either homosexual or closet transvestites. But both of them put their faith in Billy Wilder and they were rewarded when after the first costume test, he sent the two of them into the ladies room to see if anybody noticed. And apparently no one gave them a second glance and that was the first clue that this might actually just work. Although it probably wasn't as great as that story makes it sound because one reason the film was shot in black and white is that Wilder concluded that it would be less believable if it was in color. And Marilyn Monroe actually had in her contract that all of her films, stipulated in her contract, all of her films were to be shot in technicolor. But she saw the color tests of the costumes of her costars and agreed to wave that clause in her contract. So that's how the film ended up in black and white. I guess maybe it wasn't as convincing as they might have thought, but it doesn't really matter all these years later. The other accepted story is that prior to shooting beginning, Tony Curtis was very much more relaxed about dressing as a woman than Jack Lemon was. But once they actually got into the gear, Jack Lemon embraced it wholeheartedly and they had to pry Tony Curtis out of his dressing room. But he obviously became more accustomed to it as the shoot went on. Marilyn Monroe at that point was coming off some difficult years for her personally. And her husband, who at that time her husband was the playwright Arthur Miller, thought that working with Billy Wilder on a comedy would be very, very therapeutic for her. And whether it was or not is an open question. But based on many, many comments and interviews Billy Wilder has given over the years, it was very traumatic for him. She was flagrantly and excessively late. Sometimes she would not show up to the set for hours after her call time. There was really no guarantee that she would actually be able to give a performance on any given day. And sometimes she would stop cold in the middle of a take. Her acting coach was Paul Strasberg, who was married to Lee Strasberg of the Method Acting School. And Paul Strasberg was always on set and sort of the Marilyn Whisperer and eventually became an obstacle between Marilyn and Billy Wilder, which didn't help the relationship between the three of them at all. There's one scene where Marilyn enters, she looks around, opens a drawer and says, where's that bourbon? You might remember that it comes a little bit towards the end. That's literally all she does. That scene took 83 takes, because she either couldn't remember the line, couldn't remember the move, 83 takes later. But as Billy Wilder summed it up sort of diplomatically, direct quote, he said, my aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my aunt Minnie? And that's true. The other analogy that he drew was that they were on a plane in mid-flight and there was a cycle on the plane. Marilyn Monroe's insecurities were so disruptive, almost constantly caused so much stress to Billy Wilder. Reportedly, he had to take suppository sedatives in order to sleep at night. And he was very, at the time, very public in his displeasure, made a lot of comments in the press that blasted her for her behavior. She was not invited to the rap party of the film, she and Arthur Miller not invited, although years later he does come around and he does, did start to praise her performance. Tony Curtis also was very vocal about not being able to really stand her antics. And in the scenes where he plays the shell oil air, as the impotent millionaire, and he does the Carrie Grant impersonation, it would require take after take after take. And so Tony Curtis is getting more and more tired and Marilyn is getting more and more ramped up. So they ended up using the scenes where she was much more, I guess, shining out than he was because that's what she wanted. Marilyn was the featured star. Tony Curtis called his love scenes with Marilyn, like kissing Hitler, which, Jack Lennon was less affected because as the film goes on, he had less and less scenes with her, so it didn't really affect him too much. The resort scenes were filmed entirely at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California. And one reason that Billy Wilder chose this location was Marilyn Monroe and her personal problems. He wanted a location where she could live on site and not have to be transported. So they wouldn't have to worry about her showing up or getting her to the set. I don't think it was quite that easy, but that was the idea anyway. And then the other notable cast members from this film are, of course, George Raft, who plays the mobster Spatz Colombo, and Joey Brown, who plays the millionaire Osgood, Fielding III, who takes a shine to Jack Lennon's female character. George Raft is probably best remembered these days for gangster films. He was the actor who turned down most of the roles that made Humphrey Bogart famous. George Raft turned down both High Sierra and the Maltese Falcon, which went to Humphrey Bogart, made Humphrey Bogart a star. He was also George Raft, very good friends in his childhood with the real-life gangsters of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, which I guess made his casting somewhat appropriate and lent it some authenticity. He was in Scarface. He did a lot of gangster films. He was also actually quite an accomplished dancer, but was more notorious for the roles that he turned down than for what he actually did in his film career. And Joey Brown was a very popular comedian. He's best remembered for a trilogy of baseball films that he did in the 1930s. And of course, he had that great rubbery expression on his face. And the scenes that he has with Jack Lennon are now considered textbook examples of timing and film comedy. Billy Wilder always maintained that he never set out to specifically write a comedy or a drama. He just wanted to tell a good story. And if it happened to be funny, then so be it. So Some Like It Hot is almost perfectly constructed in a way that it makes use of the idea of two guys dressed as women and the foibles of doing so. And the scene where Jack Lennon announces that he's engaged to Tony Curtis sort of highlights the relationship between the two of them, where Lennon is actually sort of the comedian and Tony Curtis is a straight man. And we actually have a clip we're going to play, a very short clip of that scene for you right now. Everything under control? Have I got things to tell you? What happened? I'm engaged. Congratulations. Who's the lucky girl? I am. What? Osgood proposed to me. We're planning a June wedding. What are you talking about? You can't marry Osgood. Is he too old for me? Jerry, you can't be serious. Why not? He keeps marrying girls all the time. But you're not a girl. You're a guy. And why would a guy want to marry a guy? Security. Jerry, you better lie down. You're not well. Will you stop treating me like a child? I'm not stupid. I know there's a problem. I'll say there is. His mother. We need her approval. But I'm not worried because I don't smoke. Jerry, there's another problem. What are you going to do on your honeymoon? We've been discussing that. He wants to go to the Riviera, but I kind of mean towards Niagara Falls. Jerry, you're out of your mind. How are you going to get away with this? I don't expect it to last, Joe. I'll tell him the truth when the time comes. Like when? Like right after the ceremony. Then we get a quick annulment. He makes a nice settlement on me. And I keep getting those alimony checks every month by your booth. I need you to hold it. Listen to me. Listen to me. There are laws, conventions. It's just not being done. Joe, this may be my last chance to marry a millionaire. Jerry, will you take my advice? Forget about the whole thing, will you? Just keep telling yourself you're a boy. You're a boy. I'm a boy. That's the boy. Oh, I'm a boy. I'm a boy. I wish I were dead. I'm a boy. I'm a boy. Oh boy, am I a boy. Now what am I going to do about my engagement present? What engagement present? That was good. Gave me a bracelet. Hey, these are real diamonds. Of course they're real. What do you think? My fiancé is a bum? Okay, so I have to also add that the Maracas were completely a last-minute addition to that scene. Billy Wilder just kind of tossed in the Jack Lemon and said, take them, and obviously he made the most out of it. Interestingly enough, you can see in that scene where they talk about the conventions and it's just not done, and looking back on it now with over 60 years of hindsight, how different it is, the idea of men in dressed as women being the central joke of an entire movie. And certainly that happened with Tootsie and a whole host of other films and on television, which now kind of looks a little dated. But it was really the fact that it was Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon is sort of what sold it. And of course when you have Marilyn Monroe who had herself a number of great comedic moments, the scene where she's trying to seduce Tony Curtis on the yacht, the scene on the train where she talks about how she's really not very bright and then proves it, just goes to show that Wilder was not really just being so stereotypical as it may otherwise have seen. And in a little bit, and speaking about the screenplay as we were, the final scene in the speedboat where Jack Lemon is trying to explain to Joey Brown why they can't get married, we're going to come back to that in a little bit. But that encapsulates virtually the entire film in less than a minute or a couple of minutes, which culminates in, of course, you could argue, the greatest closing line in film history. Some like it hot, wrapped in November of 1958, several weeks late, $500,000 over budget, probably most of that due to Marilyn. And at first, Billy Wilder wasn't really sure what he had. The first preview was an absolute disaster. They screened it. And there was only one person who spent the entire movie laughing, was sitting in the front row, turned out to be the comedian Steve Allen. If everybody remembers Steve Allen, who was the first host of the Tonight Show and did a lot of great stuff on television, was the only person laughing in the preview. And so Wilder did not change a thing. They get a second preview about a week later and got all the laughs and all the reactions in all of the right places and really verified to Wilder that he thought they had a hit. The film opened in March of 1959, was a tremendous popular success, and it earned six Oscar nominations, although it only won once, which was for the costumes. This film, interestingly enough, was produced without the approval of the motion picture production code. It didn't have the seal of approval from the code because of the themes of the idea of homosexuality between Joey Brown and Jack Lemmon, even though Jack Lemmon is portraying a woman and features cross-dressing. The code at that time had gradually been weakening in its scope since really the beginning of the 1950s because of the greater social tolerance that there was in society for previously taboo topics, but it was still officially enforced until the 1960s. The overwhelming success of this film is really considered one of the final nails in the coffin for the production code. There's a lot of really great inside jokes for the movie buffs amongst you who recognize it. George Raft was always very famous in his parts. He was the gangster, used to flip the coin all the time, and he encounters a character in the hotel. Another gangster who's flipping a coin, and he makes a comment, where did you pick up that trick? There's a shot in the beginning when we first meet Marilyn Monroe, where she gets blasted in the butt by a steam from the train, which kind of harkens back to the seven-year itch. There's a moment in the beginning where Tony Curtis is lamenting all these moments of that tragic things that could happen, like the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, and everything that he mentions actually did happen. It came to pass, so he was a great prognosticator. Jack Lemmon went on to work with Billy Wilder again, of course, in the apartment, which was made the following year. One Billy Wilder, his second Oscars for directing and writing, one best picture that year, and the two of them worked on later films like The Fortune Cookie and The Front Page, both of which also feature Walter Matthow. Curtis's career kind of slowly went in the other direction. He focused much more on comedies than he had in the past, and with the exception of Spartacus, which he appears in, which some people have their thoughts about Tony Curtis in Spartacus with his Brooklyn accent, and the exception of films like The Great Race, which we teamed him and Jack Lemmon, and Boeing Boeing that he did with Jerry Lewis, he started doing more and more character parts. Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe maintained a love-hate relationship for really the rest of Marilyn's life, and at the time of her death, Billy Wilder steadfastly refused to blame the exploitation by Hollywood on her passing. And again, although he sort of backed off on that over the years, he nevertheless maintained that working with her almost gave him a nervous breakdown, and it was discovered during the production that Marilyn was pregnant, and she miscarried very, very shortly after filming wrapped, and that led to a very, very public and bitter feud between Arthur Miller and Billy Wilder over who was to blame, basically. And it lasted, that feud lasted for quite a while. As I mentioned before, they were not invited to the film's wrap party, although she hadn't miscarried yet, and that feud lasted for pretty much until Marilyn passed away. And then after the apartment, Billy Wilder's pace slowed down quite a bit as well. He turned out a number of films that were very well received, but it was nothing like what he had produced in his heyday. One standout, one of my favorites is he did a film called One, Two, Three, which is a very fast-paced comedy. It's James Cagney in his final role before he retired from the screen, where he plays a Coca-Cola executive in post-war Germany, and it's a very, very funny film if you've never seen that. In 1989, Some Like It Hot was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation of the National Film Registry for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. It was number one on the American Film Institute's list of 100 years, 100 laughs, and 2000, and it was selected as the best comedy of all time by a BBC poll of critics from 52 countries back in 2017. We're going to play one more clip now, which is just sort of the ending. If you haven't seen the film yet, shame on you. You might want to turn your volume down or look away for a second, but we're going to play just a clip of the ending and then come back and wrap up the talk with that piece. So roll the second clip, please. Sugar, what do you think you're doing? I told you I'm not very bright. Let's go! You don't want me, Sugar. I'm a liar and a phony, a saxophone player, one of those no-good nicks you keep running away from. I know, every time. Sugar, do yourself a favor. Go back to where the millionaires are, the sweet end of the lollipop, not the coleslaw in the face, the old socks, and the squeezed out tuba toothpaste. That's right. Pour it on. Talk me out of it. I called Mama. She was so happy she cried. She wants you to have her wedding gown. It's white lace. Yeah, that's good. I can't get married in your mother's dress. She and I, we are not built the same way. We can have it altered. Yeah, I know you don't. That's good. I'm going to level with you. We can't get married at all. Why not? Well, in the first place, I'm not a natural blonde. Doesn't matter. I smoke. I smoke all the time. I don't care. I have a terrible past. For three years now, I've been living with a saxophone player. I forgive you. I can never have children. We can adopt some. But you don't understand. I was good. Well, I'm a man. Well, nobody's perfect. Yeah, there might be some other final lines and films that come close to that. You know, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship or what have you. That's still, I think, the best one. It's actually, that line was never intended to be in the final film. It was going to be replaced once they thought of something they liked better. But they couldn't think of anything better. And it endured not only as part of the film's legacy. It also happens to be inscribed on Billy Wilder's Tombstone in Hollywood. So it obviously grew on him enough to make it his final resting place. So that kind of concludes the talk portion of it. I hope you guys had a good time with this. Please, if you have any questions or comments or observations, you can submit them through the Q&A button. If not, if any of you are interested in Billy Wilder and want to learn more about the films that he did, there's an excellent book that came out a few years ago called Conversations with Wilder. It's by Cameron Crowe who did, he was a director of Say Anything in Jerry McGuire. And it's a series of interviews that he did with Billy Wilder. And it's really, really great. We have one question. Does Billy Wilder consider this his best film? And from what I can tell, he has three films that he considers to be the peak of his career. It's this one, The Apartment Which Followed, and Sunset Boulevard. And the three, actually really kind of different films. But again, if you think about his theory that he doesn't set out to write a comedy or a drama, he just tells a story and lets the chips fall where they may. You can see how each one of them, I mean, certainly Sunset Boulevard, as I mentioned, that's sort of my personal favorite, has enough things going on in the background to keep you interested on multiple reshowings. The Apartment is really all about Jack Lemmon and Shirley McClain. And Some Like It Hot is really better or worse from as far as Billy Wilder was concerned about Marilyn Monroe. But it was the beginning, it was sort of the new phase of his career. It was his first film with his diamond, which is what lasted for the rest of their respective careers. And certainly, I think he had an affection for it, a little surprising that it didn't win more awards than it actually was nominated for. It only won the costuming. So some people thought Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis made convincing women. And so they I guess the Academy thought so. And hopefully we will be able to revisit this film when the Bed for Playhouse reopens, not would sooner rather than later. Any other comments, questions, observations? All right, well, if not, I want to thank everybody again for coming. Hope you all stay well. In two weeks, we are going to be coming back and we're going to be talking about another really great film with Audrey Hepburn, Wait Until Dark. Also features Alan Arkin and Richie Krenna, a great thriller for those of you who know it. And we'll be having a conversation on that one on July 21st. Same bat time, same bat channel. Oh, wait, do we have one more question? Okay, thank you, Brian. And the best way to see the film, you can actually it's available for streaming right now on Apple TV or iTunes. It pops up and actually will be probably on Turner Classic Movies again. I think it's coming up next Monday. Turner Classic Movies is airing some like it hot again. But you can you can rent it from iTunes right anytime you want on Apple TV. Let's see, any other questions? All right. Well, thank you very much. I hope everybody enjoys the great weather, although I think it's going to thunder tomorrow night. But I hope everybody has a great summer. We hope to see you again in a couple of weeks. If you're interested, go to bedforplayhouse.org. You can see all of our upcoming programming. And we can also, if you are so inclined, make a donation to help us while our doors are shut in the interest of social distancing. We are hoping to reopen as soon as possible. You may know that New York State hasn't excluded movie theaters from phase four until a couple other issues are addressed. But we are working on a reopening strategy and hope to have it done soon. All right. So thanks again for coming, everybody. Have a good night.