BILLY WILDER:  How does one even start to eulogize Billy Wilder?  If he and Berle and Moore were painters, it would be like losing Andy Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat and DaVinci in the same 24 hours.  Warhol was an innovator, but rose as a reflection of the history of other forms and of great timing.  Basquiat was a genius, but little known and regarded for a few specific moments, whether he deserved better or not.  And DaVinci… not only a brilliant artist, but a master of so many forms.  I can’t think of a single other director who had or has Wilder’s range.  The only major director I know of who reaches for the range is Bob Zemeckis, though one always gets the feeling with Zemeckis that he is attacking the genre and turning it – brilliantly – just enough to make it fresh.  With Wilder, who also wrote or co-wrote most of his films, one just gets the sense that he was making movies, perhaps pushing genres, but never quite so self-aware as Zemeckis.  Of course, most directors tend to make the same movie – in subtext - over and over again.  Not Wilder.

Wilder was an auteur who never had the pretensions of an auteur.  After co-writing Ninotchka for the great Ernst Lubitsch and developing the story of Ball of Fire for Howard Hawks, Wilder hit back-to-back homers as a writer/director with The Lost Weekend and Double Indemnity, still two of the most popular and best loved catalog movies in the world.  Sunset Blvd. may be the greatest movie about Hollywood ever.  Ace in the Hole is certainly one of the most underappreciated.  Stalag 17 has been remade, unofficially, more often than Wilt Chamberlain’s water bed.  Then, Billy lightened up.  Sabrina rethought Bogart and The Seven Year Itch made Monroe.  Witness For The Prosecution was a run at glory for two classic stars near the ends of their careers.  Charles Laughton’s two major roles after it were in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (remade with breasts by Rod Lurie as The Contender).  Dietrich would make Orson Welles’ innovative take on a Wilder film, Touch of Evil and Preminger’s Judgment at Nuremberg before pretty much calling it quits. 

Then it was back to comedy, with perhaps the greatest broad movie comedy ever, Some Like It Hot, perhaps the greatest restrained movie comedy ever, The Apartment and of course, the extremely underappreciated One, Two Three, which was Cagney’s last film before his return in Ragtime twenty years later.  I’m not the biggest fan of Irma La Douce, but it was hugely successful at the time. 

Then Wilder put together the duo that he is – ridiculously – best known for by the last couple of generations.  In The Fortune Cookie, he teamed Lemmon and Matthau.  They got a sensational movie and a legendary team.  Wilder did not direct The Odd Couple.  Gene Saks did.  But he brought the duo together again for his last successful film, The Front Page.  By then he was 68 years old and had written or directed (or both) sixty films.  You won’t see that kind of resume in this industry again unless things change drastically. 

I really didn’t mean to write this much, but Wilder’s career is so rich, it was impossible to be any briefer.  You should all read the Cameron Crowe “Conversations with Billy Wilder” book for the ultimate understanding of the man who was certainly one of best ten directors ever and one of the best five writer/directors ever… if not the very best.  He’s been out of business for about 20 years, but knowing he was alive meant that one more great line, one more great insight, one more burst of life was possible.  I wish he had done the cameo in Jerry Maguire so we had that as our final record of his genius. 

There are few true movie gods.  Berle was a brilliant, incredibly driven talent who was there at the right time.  Much as I respect him, I would put Gleason and Caesar and Sulivan ahead of him when etching faces in the mountain.  There are a few others as important as Wilder.  In this generation, Spielberg’s importance as a producer, which has been another casualty of the DreamWorks experiment, probably puts him up there.  But there is no one – not Lean, not Ford, not Wyler, not DeMille, not Lubitsch, not Sturges,not Hawks – really stands above this man’s genius. 

He will be missed.

MORE FINKE-ING:  The more I get into the Nikki Finke coverage of Disney’s Winnie The Pooh problems, the more complicated things seem to get.  Every turn takes me in an unexpected direction.  Thanks to a reader who can find stuff on the web better than I know how to, I have gotten to read the two Nikki Finke articles that got her fired from the New York Post.  (You can read then too, by clicking here – and here.

The first thing that struck me, as it often does when going back to look at Post or Daily News articles that have caused trouble, is how brief the two pieces are.  (I guess not everyone is as verbose as I am.)  The first of the two stories was co-written by Linda Stasi, who as far as I know, was never in jeopardy of losing her job.  The story sticks almost exclusively to the issue of shredding and while it certainly could be seen as taking an anti-Disney stance, it does give full voice to both sides of the issue.  I feel that comparing this to Enron is absurd, but Disney’s lawyer, Dan Petrocelli, gets the opportunity to say just that, as Bert Fields, the opposition’s lawyer gets a chance to asset this rather dramatic spin.  But I see no reasonable argument for dismissal of Ms. Finke based on that story.

The second story, however, is written by Finke alone and has one major factual problem child.  She writes that the attorneys for the Slesinger family, which is suing Disney over Pooh, claims that “Pooh generates as much as a quarter of Disney’s total annual revenues.”  This seems to me to be absurd on the face of it.  Disney had revenues of $25.3 billion in 2001.  38% came from media networks.  28% came from parks and resorts.  24% came from studio entertainment.  And 10% came from consumer products. 

In a story on the problems with the Disney Stores, Retailing Today wrote that Merrill Lynch’s Jessica Reif Cohen, the most quoted financial analyst in this industry, said that  “Disney split its merchandise mix: one-third dedicated to current film tie-ins, one-third to Winnie the Pooh and one-third to Mickey and the classic characters.”  That makes sense. 

If 35% of consumer product revenues came from Pooh, that would put the revenue from Pooh at just under $900 million or almost three times what Slesinger’s attorneys say that “a sales and consumer tracking company’s figures” show as the annual value of Pooh in licensed toy sales.  Seems to me that a figure like that, while still inflated, is far more likely to be what the Slesinger’s attorneys really believe.  And it’s still a figure lower than Disney attorney Petrocelli’s admission that Pooh is a billion dollar business.

So how did Finke get numbers in the billions?  Well, according to one media report, the same Jessica Reif Cohen told Forbes in March 2000 that she estimated Pooh to account for $6 billion a year for Disney.  And according to another report in The American Reporter, Michael Eisner and Bob Iger “have said publicly that the bear earns between $3.3 and $4 billion for the studio.”

I can’t even comprehend how Pooh could be responsible for 25 percent of revenue in a company the size of Disney.  The fact that this one character is responsible for at least 2 percent of revenue is amazing.  Seems to me that one possibility is that Pooh is responsible for a much higher percentage of net revenues at Disney, given that merchandising have much higher and much more consistent profits than films or television or even the parks have been for the company lately.  Or it could just be a misunderstanding of financial terminology.  For instance, Disney’s Operating Income in 1999  was $3.4 billion.  25 percent of that?  $850,000.  Seems like a more reasonable fit.  Was that what Reiff really said?  I don’t know.  But I will continue to try to find answers to this conundrum.  (The glory of writing daily)

But as far as Nikki Finke, at worst, she is responsible for trusting information she got from other media outlets.  At best, her report is accurate.  But why wasn’t Finke’s finger simply pointed at Reif or Eisner/Iger (whether their quoted comments are accurate or not) rather than some Disney/News Corp conspiracy?  Again, I don’t know.  This seems like a big financial misunderstanding underscored by Disney trying to short the family they bought Pooh rights from.  Disney can’t afford to lose Pooh and the Slesinger’s can’t really afford to lose their relationship with a company that has exploited this character with Disney’s stunning degree of success.

There will be more of this to come…

PANIC CLUB:  My posting goddess has an early appointment today and won’t be back until the late afternoon.  I don’t have time to get into Panic Room or the other weekend movies, before she leaves.  And so, check back tonight or over the weekend if you want to read the rest of today’s column, including Reader of the Day.  Sorry for the inconvenience.