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Why we'll miss Billy Wilder....



Billy Wilder, Master of Caustic Films, Dies at 95



In Love With Words Mr. Wilder was a director who protected his scripts. The look of a movie was less important to him than its language. "I don't like the audience to be aware of camera tricks," he told one interviewer. "Why shoot a scene from a bird's-eye view, or a bug's? It's all done to astonish the bourgeois, to amaze the middle-class critic."
If only more movie makers would remember, "It's the story, stupid!" Maybe Titanic would have at least been good....



But newspapers can't even get an obit right these days:



"Ace in the Hole" (1951, and also known as "The Big Carnival"), which followed "Sunset Boulevard," was Mr. Wilder's most savage satire about the greed of American free enterprise. The antihero (Kirk Douglas) is a reporter who uses a man trapped in a cave to create headlines, in the process causing the man's death. "Americans expected a cocktail and felt I was giving them a shot of vinegar instead," Mr. Wilder said. A brilliant film, it was a box-office failure, and Mr. Wilder was careful never to be so downbeat again.
Now, I haven't seen the film, so maybe it is some sort of indictment of free enterprise, but the description given here shows it's more an indictment of the media, its rush to sensationalize for the sake of a headline, to get the scoop, and hang the consequences. Sort of like how NPR declared they would reveal US military actions and locations in Afghanistan, even if it put US troops in danger.

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