>From a PARIS REVIEW interview with Thornton Wilder
(#15, Winter 1956):
INTERVIEWER
I understand your collaboration with Raymond Chandler was . .
. difficult?
WILDER
Yes. Chandler had never been inside a studio [when we began
working on Double Indemnity] . . . We always met at nine
o'clock, and would quit at about four-thirty. I had to
explain a lot to him as we went along, but he was very
helpful to me. What we were doing together had real
electricity. He was a very, very good writer--but not of
scripts.
One morning, I'm sitting there in the office, ten o'clock and
no Chandler. Eleven o'clock. At eleventhirty, I called Joe
Sistrom, the producer of Double Indemnity, and asked, "What
happened to Chandler?"
"I was going to call you. I just got a letter from him in
which he resigns."
Apparently he had resigned because, while we were sitting in
the office with the sun shining through, I had asked him to
close the curtains and I had not said "please." He accused me
of having as many as three martinis at lunch. Furthermore, he
wrote that he found it "very disconcerting that Mr. Wilder
gets two, three, sometimes even four calls from obviously
young girls."
(Quoted on
http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4887
It says this comes from the interview, and there's a PDF of
the entire interview, but I didn't see this section in
it.)
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
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