Mr. Wilder and Me

July 11, 2022
English author Coe (Middle England) offers a witty elegy for the last gasp of old Hollywood. While backpacking across America in 1976, 21-year-old Greek musician Calista Frangopoulou has a chance encounter with real-life 70-year-old film director Billy Wilder at a Beverly Hills restaurant. So charmed is Wilder with Calista that he invites her to work as his interpreter on the production of his next movie, Fedora, on Corfu. After proving herself invaluable to the director, Calista travels with Wilder to Munich for further filming. There, Wilder, a Viennese Jew who fled Germany before WWII, is forced once again to confront his country’s Nazi past. Meanwhile, Calista stumbles into a romance with a young English film student. A lengthy flashback to Wilder’s life as a German émigré is affectingly rendered in screenplay format. Coe’s fictionalized account of the real-life filming of Fedora—which Wilder’s inability to finance in Hollywood his writing partner incisively attributes to the business’s youth-obsessed preference for “kids with beards,” such as Spielberg and Scorsese—is filled with hilarious anecdotes and some hard-won wisdom. As Wilder embarks on what will turn out to be his penultimate picture, Coe brings great sympathy to his touching depiction of an older artist fighting to remain relevant. Coe’s fans will fall for this one.

Starred review from July 15, 2022
A 50-something film composer meditates on the summer of 1977, when she worked with director Billy Wilder on one of his last films. As her own daughters prepare to leave home, Calista Frangopoulou, born in Athens, now living in Britain, thinks of the backpacking trip she took at 21 to the United States. A friend she made on her way west invited her along to a dinner in Hollywood arranged by her father. As it turned out, their companions were Billy Wilder, who owned the restaurant; his wife, Audrey; his writing partner, Iz Diamond; and Iz's wife, Barbara. Though the girls were wildly underdressed and totally out of their depth, and though the friend absconded halfway through the meal and the Wilders had to have the drunken Calista sleep on their couch, she made such an impression that she was brought on to be their interpreter when they went to film Fedora in Greece the following year, then continued on during shooting in Germany and France. There is so much to enjoy about this book, which is rooted in extensive research about Wilder's life and the making of Fedora, including the recollections of someone who actually lived a version of this experience--and yet it reads like a fairy tale. Calista forms deep relationships with both Billy and Iz and changes from a na�ve know-nothing to someone with a deep understanding of the impact of World War II on a generation of artists. "I realized that for a man like him, a man who was essentially melancholy...humour was not just a beautiful thing but a necessary thing, that the telling of a good joke could bring a moment, transient but lovely, when life made a rare kind of sense, and would no longer seem random and chaotic and unknowable." She also finds along the way the inspiration for her own future career as a composer of film scores. Beautifully written and full of wisdom, this unusual and fascinating book contains many treats, including a miniscreenplay done in Wilder's style and an unforgettable scene in which Calista and Billy sample Brie de Meaux on a French farm where it is made. If you love novels set in the world of moviemaking, this is as good as the best of them.

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