On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder.On Sunset Boulevard Sunset Boulevard is a street in the western part of Los Angeles County, California, that stretches from Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Coast Highway at the Pacific Ocean in the Pacific Palisades. : The Life and Times of Billy Wilder * Ed Sikov * Hyperion * $35 Writer-director Billy Wilder--whose legacy includes such cinema classics as Double Indemnity A term of an insurance policy by which the insurance company promises to pay the insured or the beneficiary twice the amount of coverage if loss occurs due to a particular cause or set of circumstances. Double indemnity clauses are found most often in life insurance policies. (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945), and Sunset Boulevard (1950)--contributed some of the queerest stories to Hollywood's golden age. In The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), he wanted to show the master detective as a homosexual but was hemmed in by censors, and Wilder's 1974 remake of The Front Page introduced Bensinger, a conspicuously queeny character written by Wilder himself. Journalist and film scholar Ed Sikov, who is gay, reconstructs the director's contributions to the art of film as carefully as he does Wilder's notoriously heterosexual private life. While Wilder insisted that his phallocentric phal·lo·cen·tric adj. Centered on men or on a male viewpoint, especially one held to entail the domination of women by men. [phall(us) + -centric. Some Like It Hot (1959) had no gay content at all, Sikov shows us how and why Wilder was bluffing. He also uncovers the contributions of famed drag queen drag queen Female impersonator, gynemimetic Sexology A ♂ with ♀ affect–often 'overplayed'; a ♂ homosexual and ♀ wannabe, with ♂ genitalia; DQs may take hormones to ↑ breasts, and thus are hormonally, but not surgically Barbette bar·bette n. 1. A platform or mound of earth within a fort from which guns are fired over the parapet. 2. An armored protective cylinder around a revolving gun turret on a warship. , whom Wilder flew in to help mm Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon into gals for that picture. According to Sikov, Curtis was a perfect student; Lemmon, however, wouldn't follow Barbette's rules. Barbette "stormed off in a queeny huff after three days." Sikov's is an enlightened and well-researched chapter of Tinseltown history, bursting with new anecdotes from old Hollywood about one of its legendary geniuses. |
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