The last official performance I ever gave as an actress was in a French play called “Roberto Zucco,” directed by a short, spry goatee’d Parisian named Arthur Nauzyciel. Arthur was a special kind of director. He actually had us read the play.

That is, he knew how easy it was for a group of egotistical thespians to project our own interpretation onto the page without fully realizing what we were saying, or rather, what the playwright was saying.

Arthur came from a different school of thought. He put the writer first. Our first duty was to comb through the script, reading every line neutrally, listening to how it sounded if we didn’t try to control our voice; if we paid attention to the words as they were written. He didn’t even cast the play until we had worked on it for six hours a day, four days a week, for two weeks, so he could see which characters’ rhythms and personalities best fit. (I tried not to take it personally that I was given the role of the melancholy prostitute).

Some of this acute attention to detail had to do with the fact that we were using a poor translation (the only one available in English, apparently): the dark humor and social openness of the late Bernard-Marie Koltes warped by a Brit’s cultural misinterpretations and need for slapstick. Nauzyciel essentially read the words in French and then we inserted revisions to their English meaning as needed. But the original words had to remain as intact as possible.

That experience, all those years ago back in college, affected my appreciation of the words behind what I watch, on screen as well as onstage. And when it comes to movies, I’ve discovered that some of the most brilliant lines aren’t the ones spoken on screen.

Billy Wilder is one of my favorite director/screenwriter combos of all time, and his genius is apparent in this last scene from “Some Like It Hot” (I would say ’spoiler alert’ but to quote Marilyn Monroe, “It’s not how you get there, it’s who’s taking you”).

Joe E. Brown is manning a boat with his bride-to-be–Jack Lemmon in drag. As they cruise off into the sunset with Tony Curtis/Monroe making out behind them, Lemmon tries to reason with the smitten Brown as to why they can’t go through with the wedding. But I smoke. I’m not really a blonde. I can’t have kids. Finally, after none of this seems to make a dent, Lemmon takes off his wig and admits, “Alright. I’m a man.” Then Brown delivers that famous last line, “Well… nobody’s perfect.”

But here’s the thing. The screenplay gets better from there. As if Wilder wanted to sweeten the job for those special folks who would have been pouring over ever detail, like our crew did on “Zucco.” Here are the final directions, way ahead of their time:

“Jerry looks at Osgood, who is grinning from ear to ear, claps his hand to his forehead. How is he going to get himself out of this?

But that’s another story - and we’re not quite sure the public is ready for it.”

Of course, not everyone writes like Billy Wilder (sometimes not even Wilder wrote like Wilder), and not every director gives the same time and attention to getting the words right, as Arthur Nauzyciel did and presumably does. But maybe we should. It makes us see so much more.

Tags:   Alexis · Arthur Nauzyciel · movie writing · Some Like It Hot · theaterNo Comments