Billy Wilder, the journalist

Before he was Billy Wilder, the director of “The Apartment,” “Some Like it Hot,” “Sunset Boulevard” and “Irma la Douce,” Samuel Wilder was a student, journalist and film lover.

Armed with confidence and a love of jazz and storytelling, he carved out a life for himself in Vienna between the wars and in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

The filmmaker had been born in the Austro-Hungarian empire–what is now Poland–in 1906 Austro-Hungarian empire.

His father ran several cafes and restaurants.

He spent his childhood in Krakow and his adolescence in imperial Vienna.

As a twentysomething, I have lived a life of journalistic escapades in the era's bustling cultural hotspots, full of artistic events and social events.

The book “Billy Wilder On Assignment,” recently released in Spanish by Ediciones Laertes, collects his dispatches from him from that time.

Luz Monteagudo's translation of the compilation brings together fifty articles selected and edited by Noah Isenberg in English.

Isenberg, in turn, has chosen them from two anthologies in German, one from 1996 with the writer's Berlin works and another from 2006 with his Viennese texts from him.

The then-Billie Wilder was never Austrian: after World War I, the Wilders were considered Polish citizens.

He did not appreciate the country that rejected him as a citizen, but there he discovered his passion for her: telling stories.

His father de ella, on the other hand, had another destiny in mind for his son de él: to become a lawyer, a profession that seemed perfect for a Jewish kid in the twenties.

“I didn't want to, and I saved myself by becoming a journalist, a very underpaid reporter,” he told Cameron Crowe in the book Conversations with Billy Wilder.

In Vienna and Berlin, high society and the middle class mingled with each other, and elite culture met popular entertainment.

On Christmas of 1924, at the age of 18 and a half, Wilder applied for a job at the tabloid magazine “Die Bühne.”

He got it at the beginning of 1925 after sneaking into the newsroom.

The filmmaker was never a reliable narrator about his life, having a tendency to embellish stories.

On his hiring of him at “Die Bühne,” he said that he had caught the theater critic having sex with a secretary.

Paul Whiteman's orchestra, 1926. Wilder is on the right, with his hands on his pockets.

True or not, in August of that year, Wilder had already appeared in a photo with the friends of Max Reinhardt, the film producer and theater and film director, an advocate of expressionism and a magnet for talent.

Wilder combined “Die Bühne” with “Die Stunde,” another tabloid magazine from the same publishing group, and threw himself into writing.

He explained to his biographer Hellmuth Karasek, "I was daring, I was full of assertiveness, I had a talent for exaggeration."

The new book features Wilders' stories about meetings with stars including the actress Asta Nielsen and the band Tiller Girls, as well as the prince of Wales, during their stops in Vienna.

Of the British heir Wilder writes, after chatting about fashion: “A clever fellow, this Englishman!

By the way, he's brought me around to his taste of him in clothing: I'm going to dress in the English way, starting today!

Because going English is cheap, and what is cheap enough these days?”

In the summer of 1926, the American jazz conductor Paul Whiteman visited the Austrian capital.

Wilder interviewed him for “Die Stunde,” and Whiteman invited him to hear the band in Berlin.

Wilder did not hesitate.

He went to Germany to work both as a journalist and as a press agent.

At the end of the 1920s, Berlin was a completely Americanized city, brimming with cinema and creativity.

Journalists crossed paths with figures like the millionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt IV.

Wilder spent those years writing for various publications, among them the “Berliner Zeitung” and the “Berliner Börsen-Courier.”

His byline of him appears on profiles of actors such as Adolphe Menjou and filmmakers like Erich von Stroheim, a director who would end up working with Wilder in “Five Graves to Cairo” and “Sunset Boulevard.

Billy Wilder, in a still from 'Hell of a reporter' (1929).

The new book opens with reported stories.

One article chronicles a heat wave, another explores Berliners' tastes in alcohol and another recounts a day of shooting in a movie studio.

The section includes the mythical “Waiter, A Dancer, Please!”, which gave rise to the legend that Wilder once made a living as a gigolo.

Published in January 1927, the story recounts the adventures of the then-journalist's two months moonlighting as a dancer for hire at the Eden hotel.

“Saturday is the worst day for the dancer.

All the halls are full to the very last seat.

On the dance floor fifty couples crowd together, stepping on each other's feet, panting and sparring.

One single mass of flesh, quivering in rhythm like aspic.”

There is not a note of sex.

Billy Wilder (in the middle) and Peter Lorre (right) with other Jewish refugees from Europe in Hollywood.

During that period, Wilder began to grow interested in cinema.

His film reviews of him may be the worst of this compilation, although the book includes the article that inspired “People on Sunday” (1930), one of the key films in the late Weimar Republic.

Wilder had already worked as a writer in the shadow of other screenwriters.

He even signed the script and acted in “The Daredevil Reporter” (1928), the forerunner of “The Front Page.”

But “People on Sunday” opened the doors of the industry to him.

It led him to write dozens of scripts in just three years, and he was hired at the UFA production company.

When Adolph Hitler came to power, Wilder traveled to Paris, where he made his directorial debut with “Mauvaise Graine.”

Weeks later, in January 1934, he embarked for the United States on the ocean liner SS Aquitania.

He had $20 in his pocket and English books to improve his knowledge of the language.

Across the ocean, glory awaited.

Fernando Trueba, who was a friend of Wilder, says, “I don't remember anything special about that work in our conversations.

I do n't think he valued his journalistic work at all. ”

He recommends a new book about the filmmaker, which reflects on the traces of the past in his filmography: “Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge,” by Joseph MacBridge.

As his wife Audrey put it, “Long before Billy Wilder was Billy Wilder, he was acting like Billy Wilder.”

This volume proves as much.