Directing Lemmon and Matthau: On the Set with Billy Wilder (Past Times Film Close-up Series Book 9)

One day in 1965, director Billy Wilder was watching a televised football game when a fullback crashed into a spectator. “That’s a movie,” he decided on the spot, “and the guy underneath is Jack Lemmon.” The resulting film, “The Fortune Cookie,” brought about the debut of one of Hollywood’s top comedy teams when Wilder paired Lemmon with an actor virtually unknown outside the Broadway scene—though he’d tried to cast Walter Matthau in “The Seven Year Itch” more than a decade earlier.

Matthau walked off with an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the film. Following “The Odd Couple,” Wilder reteamed the actors in a remake of the classic Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur farce “The Front Page.” Their third collaboration, “Buddy Buddy,” an adaptation of a French comedy, became his unintentional swansong as a filmmaker.

“Directing Lemmon and Matthau” is based on journalist Jordan R. Young’s personal acquaintance with the team, beginning with a visit to the set of “The Front Page”—his first major assignment as a freelance writer: “Talk about a kid in a candy store. Not only was I an invited guest, I was getting paid to watch one of my favorite directors work with two of my favorite actors—an opportunity most people could not buy.”

Young later visited the set of “Buddy Buddy”—an experience he recalls as far more entertaining than the film itself—and interviewed Lemmon, who discusses working with Wilder on “Some Like It Hot.” This book also covers the team’s first picture and notes the films Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond made apart from Lemmon and Matthau, the work Wilder and Lemmon did together prior to the teaming, and those films made by the team apart from Wilder.