Billy Wilder on Writing "Some Like It Hot," and Directing Tony Curtis

Tony Curtis died yesterday. His career included roles in The Sweet Smell of Success, Spartacus, The Defiant Ones, and many others, but he’ll be best remembered as Joe (and Josephine) in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.
   Some years ago, when I was an editor at The Paris Review and was visiting Los Angeles, I learned that Billy Wilder went to the same office every day from ten to twelve in the morning. For two year I’d been trying to get the filmmaker to agree to an interview for the Writers at Work Series, and he’d steadfastly refused. I finally decided simply to show up and introduce myself, to “door-step him,” as he had done, years before, as a young journalist in Vienna.
   The office was a simple suite on the second floor of a low-rise office building. Mr. Wilder, a restless man, even at ninety then, taller than expected, blinked behind large black-framed glasses, and was not quite as surprised to see me as I’d expected. With wonderful Old World manners, he ushered me in, nodding as I gave my name. The mail had just arrived and with the air of a benevolent, even exuberant, dictator, he instructed me to pick it up and carry it over to his desk. He motioned to a leather chair beside it.
   On the wall across from his desk, in gilt letters eight inches high was the question "HOW WOULD LUBITSCH DO IT?" A day bed, like an analyst's couch, was set against one wall. The opposite wall was decorated with personal photos, including a number of him with some of cinema's other great writer-directors--John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini.
   When firmly settled in a large chair behind his desk, we chatted for a half hour while he sorted his mail. Finally, the mail sorted and opened, he peered over his glasses and said, "You wanted to ask me a question."
   Thus began a series of four meetings over ten days, after which we composed and, with my boss George Plimpton, edited a text that became “The Art of Screenwriting.” The edited interview can read in Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, published by Picador. I include below one of the many out-takes from the published piece that were removed due to their concern with the craft of directing, and so outside purview of the magazine’s interviews series, the craft of writing. For Wilder, of course, those two were one and the same, or rather one melded into the other. (Plimpton would have none of this argument unfortunately, and so out these anecdotes went, removed from publication, until now.)
   Sometime into our second meeting I asked Mr. Wilder what happens between the script and the filming of a script.

BILLY WILDER: You have to work with the actors to make sure the dialogue meshes, that there are no pauses. Or, if there is going to be a laugh you need to make a pause there for the audience response, some bit of action maybe.
   When the Marx Brothers were about to shoot A Night at the Opera, Irving Thalberg of MGM did something very intelligent. He had some of the brothers take routines from the movie and play them between vaudeville acts to an audience. Somebody from the studio would be there to analyze the laughter and time everything: "This is good for seven seconds." "This is only good for four." "This falls flat. That we cut."
   So, for instance, when we had the scene in Some Like it Hot where Tony Curtis after a night with Marilyn Monroe, using that Cary Grant accent on her, climbs into the window of his hotel room, where he finds lying in bed Mr. Lemmon, who had just danced the night away, the tango, everything, with Joe E. Brown.
   Curtis says, "What's new?"
   Lemmon says, "I'm engaged."
   "What do you mean you're engaged, for Christ's sake. Who's going to marry you?" In fact, this millionaire guy, Joe E. Brown, wants to marry Jack Lemmon.
   I knew it was a very funny scene and people were going to laugh at all this. There was a group of tourists on the set while we shooting who didn't know the script. As soon as they saw Curtis dressed as a Shell Oil heir-kind of yacht captain, and Lemmon in the dress with the hairdo, there was constant laughter from the sidelines. People were having to leave the stage so as not to disrupt shots. We figured that we had written in about twenty laugh lines, and I knew I would need to slow down, to retard the dialogue to give people time to recoup.
   On the stage, someone will say a straight line to set up a whallop of a joke. Right? Then you need to wait for the laughter to subside before you start in with the next straight line to feed the next joke.
   In pictures, it's almost impossible to stop the laughter, to slow things down. The next joke will come while people are still laughing. So I came up with the idea of Lemmon playing with some Cuban maracas.
   So Curtis: "Why would you want to marry a guy?"
   Lemmon: "Security!" Rum, bum, bum, bah, with the maracas.
   I spread the lines out with the maracas.
   It wasn't so easy when we first showed the guys in disguise. First you see the heels, walking, very high heels, then the legs.
   Slowly I disclose that these two are carrying instruments, and then you figure out it's our two musicians on the run, Lemmon and Curtis. On the MGM lot number three where they had the train, they only had a locomotive and three cars. We wanted to spread the walking out, so we used three takes four times--a train's a train, you can't even tell.
   The audience now has enough time to recover, we're back to a medium shot, the feet and the bottom of a dress. The feet stop walking, and Lemmon says, "It's so drafty!"

[During another meeting I asked Mr. Wilder if when he wrote something whether he could tell when he had it right. – JSL]

BILLY WILDER: Izzy Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like it Hot the week before we shot it. We'd come to the situation where Jack Lemmon tries to convince Joe E. Brown that he cannot marry him.
   "Why?" Brown says.
   "Because I smoke!"
   "That's all right as far as I'm concerned..."
   Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, "I'm a boy! Because I'm a boy!"
   Diamond and I were in our room working together waiting for the next line--Joe E. Brown's response, the final line, the curtain line of the film--to come to us.
   Then I heard Diamond say, "Nobody's perfect."
   I thought about it, and I said, "Well, let's put in 'nobody's perfect' for now. But only for the time being.     We have a whole weeks to think about it." We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied.
   When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn't trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn't see it. "Nobody's perfect." The line had come too easily, just popped out.
   Now if I go to Europe or if I am in New York sometimes somebody will suddenly stare at me, and without saying my name, maybe not even knowing who I am but just that I had something to do with that movie, they'll say, "Nobody's perfect."

Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden"

... also forthcoming... news of, and a release for, the feature film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel "The Garden of Eden." [For update info, see recent post.]

"Garden" has long been my favorite of Hemingway's novels.  Like all his best work, it gives you the look and feel of places (in this case the Cote d'azur in the 1920s), but also the sensuous thrill of what the world offers, the excitement of complex relationships, and the tension of sexual intrigue.  I only hope the film lives up to this great book.  (Disclosure: I wrote the film adaptation.)

The trailer can be seen here, or here.

And more information here.  Announcement here, here with commentary here... by ace blogger Liberty London Girl here.

And The Paris Review Daily reports on a New York screening at Tribeca Grand Hotel here.

Harold Brodkey - Be Patient with Him

JL

What do you hold up as a literary ideal?


HAROLD BRODKEY

Ideals are for greeting cards. I am trying to change consciousness, change language in such a way that the modes of behavior I am opposed to become unpopular, absurd, unlikely. You try to work toward a culture that takes time and conscience seriously in a real way and not as part of a tidal flow of hype.


JL

Is that really your belief?


BRODKEY

Yes. Be patient with me. Most of the furniture in my house comes from a period in American history called The Era of Good Feeling....

Writing that is meant solely for the public forum is often less interesting than writing where the writer has invented the public space inside the text, in the tone of the address, in the tone of the language. Public language is never new. But in good writing there is something absolutely new in the tone of what I think of as the public space in which the narrator addresses the reader. In a piece of writing the language runs along on the page and in the mind of a reader; in that language there is no actual physical space, but the language should carry the implication of a physical-social location. If you've been to a large Edwardian house you may have seen a small room with a fireplace and a couch, and perhaps two chairs-not a formal, large room, but one where you can sit and talk, where you gossip. Henry James has a tone of address as if he's arrived at such a house, not his own, and he is seated by the fire; an invisible interlocutor or audience listens closely. Walt Whitman speaks outdoors, it seems to me. The space Whitman suggests is complex and American and I think beautiful and a completely new invention. One thing that is unique about it is that there's no tinge of social class in it whatsoever. Jane Austen's writing suggests a drawing-room sort of space; Hemingway's, on a barstool or in a club car; it changes: he's complicated. Emily Dickinson creates a marvelous public space, too, and one of the marvelous things about it is that it is so clearly an invention since it isn't based on being public; it is without a sense of the public. D. H. Lawrence is an absolutely amazing writer, with a fantastic sense of the language, but his sense of public space wavers, and sometimes a whole book or long story of his will collapse when he shifts the public space too drastically and becomes churchly-fascistic, or starts yelling as if in a corral, then muttering in a hallway—no order in it at all.

—from my interview with Harold Brodkey in the Winter 1991 Paris Review (Issue 121), The Art of Fiction, No. 126

Hat tip to Peter Mclachlin, on whose blog I re-encountered a portion of the interview I conducted. Mclachlin also posts HERE.

James Linville is...

... now posting primarily at STANDPOINT magazine, HERE... still as James Scott Linville... me, as described HERE.

All Main Point archives remain here.

James Linville is

... now posting here, as James Scott Linville... me. My writing will also be featured in STANDPOINT magazine and on its website.

The Greenhawk Moment

... in STANDPOINT, a London-based journal of opinion that debuts today, "The Greenhawk Moment," an article by the undersigned about the convergence in thinking between renewable energy advocates and national security strategists.

As one Greenhawk puts it:

"Wahabis and friends of Ahmadinejad sit atop two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. Dependence makes the US vulnerable from both a security and environmental perspective. In buying oil from Islamic theocracies that sponsor terror, we are funding our enemies."

Read the whole thing HERE.

Halitosis, and George Plimpton

Nicole Burdette's reminiscence, received this morning (posted here) took me back to my time at Paris Review with Plimpton.

There was a time when at the office on East 72nd Street all manner of diverse gossip swirled. Even, so I gathered, about me... patently false rumors I should add. At the time I found all this talk a little upsetting, but George made a concerted to effort to instruct me in an important life lesson, to teach me to ignore gossip... some of which, of course, he being a mischief-maker probably had a hand in unleashing. In his office upstairs he adopted a sage-like pose, leaned back in his chair, and offered this bit of wisdom: "James, halitosis is better than no breath at all. You know, just as long as they're talking about you, it’s all right." I could only shake my head.

One night, a week or so later, a work drink with a young woman in publicity from Random House turned, at her suggestion, into dinner, and then a sort of date. At one point, she put her fork down, stared at me intently and asked “Is it true you procure black transvestites for George Plimpton?" I burst out laughing. It was so absurd. But oddly I suddenly had a free feeling. I realized there came a time in life when attention began to be paid, even in a small way, and there really was little you could do to control what people said about you. It really was much better just to learn to let it slide off your back. The very life lesson George had tried to impart.

The next morning I went into George’s office to tell him I finally saw that, after all, he’d been right. Well, I told him the story of the night before, the dinner, and he hit the roof—“She said WHAT?!” Who is this?” I had to back out of his office saying, "Halitosis. George, remember halitosis!"

- James Linville

Billy Wilder: How Lubitsch Did It

James Linville: You have a gold-framed legend on the wall across from your desk. "How would Lubitsch do it?" That confronts you every day. Is it a question you often asked yourself?

Billy Wilder: When I would write a romantic comedy along the Lubitschian line, stopped in the middle of a scene, I'd think, "How would Lubitsch do it?"

JSL: Well, how did he do it?

Billy Wilder: One example I can give you of Lubitsch's thinking was in Ninotchka, a romantic comedy which Brackett and I wrote for him. Ninotchka was to be a really straight Leninist, a strong and immovable Russian commisar, and we were wondering how could we dramatize that, without wanting to, she was falling in love. How could we do it? My partner, Charles Brackett and I wrote twenty pages, thirty pages, forty pages! All very laboriously.
Lubitsch didn't like what we'd done, didn't like it all. So he called us in to have another conference at his house. We talked about it, but of course we were still, well... blocked. In any case, Lubitsch excused himself to go to the bathroom and when he came back into the living room he announced, "Boys, I've got it."
It's funny, but we noticed that whenever he'd come up with an idea, I mean a really great idea, it was after he came out of the can. I started to suspect that he had a little ghostwriter in the bowl of the toilet there.
"I've got the answer," he said. "It's the hat."
"The hat? No, what do you mean the hat?"
He explained that when Ninotchka arrives in Paris the porter carries her things from the train. She asks, "Why would you want to do this? Why would you want to carry this?" He says, "Money."
She says, "You should be ashamed. It's undignified for a man to carry someone else things. I'll carry them myself."
At the Ritz Hotel where the three other commissars are staying, there's a long corridor of vitrines with windows showing various objects. Just windows, no store. She passes one window with three crazy hats. She stops in front of it and says, "That is ludicrous. How can a civilization that puts things like that on their head survive?" Later she plans to see the sights of Paris - the Louvre, the Alexander III bridge, the Place de la Concorde. Instead she'll visit the electricity works, the shops with practical things they can put to use back in Moscow. On the way out of the hotel she passes that window again with the three crazy hats.
Now the story starts to develop between Ninotchka, or Garbo, and Melvin Douglas, all sorts of little things which add up, but we haven't seen the change yet. She opens the window of her hotel room, overlooking the Place Vendome. It's beautiful, and she smiles. The three commissars come to her room. They're finally prepared to get down to work. But she says, "No, no, no, it's too beautiful to work. We have the rules, but they have the weather. Why don't you go to the races. It's Sunday. It's beautiful in Longchamps," and she gives them money to gamble.
As they leave for the track at Longchamps, she locks the door to the suite, then the door to the room. She goes back into the bedroom, opens a drawer, and out of the drawer she takes the craziest of the hats! She picks it up, puts it on, looks at herself in the mirror. That's it. Not a word. Nothing. But she has fallen into the trap of capitalism, and we know where we're going from there. . . all from a half page of description and one line of dialogue. "Beautiful weather. Why don't you go have yourselves a wonderful day?"

Mamet's SPEED-THE-PLOW

Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic has given London another smash, this time a revival that flirts with being the definitive production of David Mamet’s brimstone-tinged 1988 satire of Hollywood culture, “Speed-the-Plow.” The hectic, jiving, over-the-top performances of Jeff Goldblum and Spacey himself are by turns obnoxious, scary, hilarious, and pathetic, but always superb, as was the actor-producer’s notion to bring two American film stars to play Hollywood buddies, two coffee-and-coke-addled bottom-feeding producers with the prospect of a commercial hit, along with attendant riches, booty, and opportunities for revenge, finally close at hand. The actors are so riveting, all overlapping dialogue and with a physical performance that the stage seems more a gym, and Mamet’s dialogue so kinetic, that they camoflage the fact that this is a thin, almost insubstantial play, in the form of a fractured parable object lesson.
Spacey’s Charlie Fox bursts into the studio office of his old friend Bobby Gould (Goldblum) to announce he’s got his hands on a hot script—”it has blood, action, a social theme.” Bobby a newly knighted executive, a species with a life expectancy akin to a first lieutenant in a trench at Ypres, listens intently, and when he hears that Dougie Brown, a much sought after actor has agreed to take the part, or in their Hollywood journeyman parlance, “to cross the street,” Bobby explodes. With Dougie on board the film will be not just another exploitive piece of junk about prison rape, but box office gold. Charlie only has Dougie’s commitment for 24 hours, but Bobby is scheduled to meet with the president of production the next morning. Their ship has come in. “We’re going to have to hire someone to tell us how to spend our money.” This calls for celebration, compliments (“You old whore”), this calls for coffee! Bobby rings for Karen (Laura Michelle Kelly), his temporary assistant, an unsullied ingenue hired, though she can’t work the phone or make coffee and doesn’t recognize the studio president’s name when he calls, because she looks good in a sweater. This, by the way, was the role implausibly filled by Madonna when she made her acting debut at the drama’s premiere in NY’s Lincoln Center. Charlie comments that if they put this one over Bobby ought to get so rich he’d be able to get a girl like her. Bobby, seriously miffed and mock-disillusioned, responds that it’s possible she’d like him for his own self. Long pause, return to reality, they laugh.
It’s not all backslapping and misogynistic secretary-ogling, however; there’s work to be done. The studio president has asked Bobby to provide a report, a “courtesy read,” on a “worthy” literary novel by a “cissy east coast writer”—a poetically written story about radiation, religion, and the end of the world, a pretentious-sounding work that sounds like just another… pardon my lingua franca… “piece of *&#@.” Bobby delegates the reading and reporting to Karen, and his work is done for the day.
Upon that implausible literary novel, and the question of whether Karen could like, and make herself available to, Bobby for himself, this story turns. Between an exploitive piece of trash and an equally hollow pretentious bit of junk, the play sets a not exactly Faustian pitting of Art vs. Commerce, though Mamet does an accurate if grotesque caricature of the overlapping warp and woof of how such dream-peddlars speak. What’s more, the play offers the occasion for one of the greatest theatrical pairings since Matthau and Lemon in “The Odd Couple.”

The Old Vic, London SE1, Until late Aril. Box Office 0870 060 6628
James Linville

the slow writing movement

"I write so slowly I could write in my own blood without hurting myself."
- Fran Lebowitz, from interview by James Linville, in Paris Review "The Art of Humor"

Reading, watching

Have been reading Natasha Randall's just-published translation of the early Soviet writer Yevgeny Zamyatin's WE. A few days ago, on the northern underground line I saw another rider put down a give-away tabloid and pull out his bag a copy of WE. Natasha was thrilled to hear this. It reminded me of John Mortimer's anecdote of sitting on a bus next to someone reading one of his novels. His stop was approaching, but he knew that just two pages ahead from where his neighbor was reading there was a joke...

Am also reading Elizabeth Gray's translations of Hafiz. My favorite poet, and these are the sorts of translations I've long been looking for. Attempting Lajos Egri's formidable The Art of Dramatic Writing. Am looking forward to seeing on Monday David Hare's play The Vertical Hour, just transferred to the Royal Court Theater. Was it trenchant in NY, or just polemical? Is it still timely now? Looking forward to seeing Israeli director Joseph Cedar's BEAUFORT, about Israeli soldiers stranded under fire during the 2006 Lebanon war. Cedar won the Silver Bear for best director at last year's Berlin festival, and now his film is up for an Oscar for best foreign film. The next project he's circling, or so I hear, sounds provocative, and a little bit brilliant. Want to see the new cut of BladeRunner (!). Am liking the Hospital members club, and their new magazine... featuring as it does writers Sasha Wilkins, Hephzibah Anderson, and Jessica Gearhart. Heard wonderful things about the Jaipur Literary Festival.

Also saw director John Irvin's cut of The Garden of Eden, and while I found it hard to trust my own judgment I was liked it very much. And happy to see that Irvin, a veteran, was quietly proud of what he'd done. Meanwhile, at least one constituency has twigged to the themes of the film and appears to be looking forward to it. A very informed reading of Hemingway's work here.

Food historian Carolin Young's emails about the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery have made me hungry. Have been saving my pennies, though, for an EasyJet flight to Fez to visit my old friend Karina, a designer, who's just bought a ramshackle riad in the medina, the medieval quarter. Speaking of fashion, beloved LibertyLondonGirl is up for best insider blog at the Fashion Blog Award. Vote for her here.

Otherwise, have been liking Obama, especially the tone of his campaign. Such an elegant guy. In his televised response to the Bush State of the Union speech, with that gray suit and skinny lapels, the grainy low-fi video feed, I thought his people were channeling an early 1960s thing, reinforcing JFK comparisons. But the JFK comparison is apt for another reason... as my friend Nora Maccoby said, "He speaks and the soul lifts." My friend Susan Eisenhower is expansive here on the subject in today's Washington Post. (Novelist and historian Caleb Carr, a sometime-contributor to this blog, heatedly disagrees. Liz Wurtzel too... her comments, the funniest of this campaign-season, could be found at WSJ opinion last week.) All hats off to John McCain for his recent (finance-free) resurgence. I'd been sure the Republicans were going to choose the baptist minister or the fellow who looks as if he's about to announce layoffs. It suddenly feels lucky that the US might have two such presidential candidates facing off. Lucky for the world. But I think Obama will win the general election in a landslide.

The Big Smoke is sunny today, and not at all smokey. I'd put this in a Facebook status, but it's a bit much. What's more, with all those zombie hugs, and superwall posts leading to blind alleys, I'm over FB, for the moment. Oh, have just been reminded of one good thing from FB... Zyzzyva magazine editor Howard Junker just tracked me down, friended me, and sent me his latest issue, which looks better than ever.

- JSL

Paris Review anniversary at Square Books

... a friend who saw Square Books profiled in the current issue of Vanity Fair just dug out and sent me this, a Paris Review anniversary celebration at the supreme bookstore in Oxford, MS. In the pic above is author William Styron (a friend to the magazine since before day one), Paris Review Editor and co-founder George Plimpton, and the undersigned, James Linville. After the cake was cut, the mayor of Oxford made a speech proclaiming it Paris Review Day in the city, and then launched into a campaign speech in anticipation of an upcoming election, til he was drowned out in boos.

Weeks later, Square Books owner, Richard Howorth, resoundingly beat the incumbent for the mayorship.

- JSL

Charles Burnett's "The Killer of Sheep"

Last Sunday saw the legendarily unavailable film "The Killer of Sheep" by Charles Burnett. What a wonderful movie. Not much in the way of story, but the film has a gaze that's penetrating yet generous to its characters. One thing I especially loved was the constant stream of oblique glimpses into their lives. Example... filmmakers are always taught to get into a scene quickly without entrances and exits, to begin "in medias res." Burnett, instead, begins one scene with kids in a little handstand competition on their front porch. Clearly they're bored out of their skulls. After a good while of this, the father, coming home from work and in a "mood,' enters the frame, distractedly brushes their hovering feet away from his face, dumping the kids over, and lumbers in the front door. Somehow hilarious, and an entrance invested with so much psychological material. Genius rarely comes so offhand.

See it! Meanwhile, a good broad assessment of the film here, excerpted below:

The legendary South Central film “Killer of Sheep,” will be released for the first time in theaters on its 30th anniversary. The film, now in a beautifully restored 35mm print, will be commercially distributed for the first time.

Directed by Charles Burnett, “Killer of Sheep” examines the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse. Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a teacup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife to the radio, holding his daughter. The film offers no solutions; it merely presents life -- sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle humor.

“Killer of Sheep” played at a handful of colleges around the United States and in some small European festivals before receiving the Critics' Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1981. In 1990, the Library of Congress declared it a national treasure and placed it among the first 50 films entered in the National Film Registry for its historical significance. In 2002, the National Society of Film Critics also selected the film as one of the 100 Essential Films of all time.

“Killer of Sheep” was shot on location in Watts in a series of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000, most of which was grant money. Finished in 1977 and shown sporadically, its reputation grew and grew until it won a prize at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival.

Thanks to Selva for calling my attention to that piece, and to Natalie for taking me to the pictures. - JSL

Charles Burnett!

to a screening last night, with French Natalie, of Charles Burnett's "The Killer of Sheep," which oddly this month celebrates is thirtieth anniversary, and its first theatrical release. It'd been in Limbo all that time because of a rights issue, a music rights issue I expect. What a brilliant film... or rather what brilliant filmmaking. More about this later.

the noise outside the window

... this month I'm reminded just how noisy New York can be. too easy to forget that the literary life is what happens between someone at a desk and a blank piece of paper. or between a person and a book they're reading. probably happens, the forgetting, when all that blank white paper just gets too scary.

Hemingway's THE GARDEN OF EDEN

... some old news via... “Page Six,” NY Post, July 28, 2006

REVIVING PAPA
Former Paris Review Editor James Linville is writing a movie adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden" for Berwick Street Productions, a UK indie film company. Hemingway kept that novel, a boundaries-breaking erotic drama about a young American triangle in the South of France, under lock and key, publishing it posthumously, only after all the real-life models were departed. Linville was a longtime protégé of the Review's George Plimpton, who himself was mentored by "Papa." When Plimpton visited Hemingway in '50s Havana, the older writer told him, "There are three good rules you can trust for writing. The first: Write about what you know. The second and third? No one ever remembers what they are."

more from interview with Andres Velasco

Among the people behind the [1988] opposition campaign were a team of ad people, journalists, economists, and data analysts who came together to brainstorm. I was a small part of that. The symbol of our campaign was a rainbow. The slogan of the campaign, which to this day sounds a bit “much,” was simply “Happiness is coming.” And the campaign emphasized young people, walking down the street together, running on beaches, something like the old Coca-Cola ads but it was important, and it worked. There was another ad that was remarkably subtle but powerful. It just shows faces of boys singing in a school choir. The camera pans across the choir: all the boys are blonde and blue-eyed and singing in a foreign language, until the camera comes on one boy with brown eyes and brown hair and it stops, and you see that the boy is struggling and doesn’t know the words to the song. The camera pulls back and the voice-over says simply: “Exiled. Never again.” You didn't need to say more. Everyone in Chile knew people who were exiled in far off lands, and knew that they wanted to return. Many would return… but many would not.

last Friday Night in Santiago, Chile

to Santiago... Chile... then

... arrived yesterday in Santiago, Chile, to interview the Finance Minister Andres Velasco for Monocle magazine.

After the overnight, I rocked up at NH hotel... to find no reservation.

The wonderful Andrea at the front desk searched and searched, only to discover a reservation for me at their hotel in Santiago... de Campostella, Spain.

Still a few bugs in the system. Let us speak of this no more.

--Linville

... while looking for DeLorenzo's Tomatoe Pies, Trenton, NJ