Not yet 20 years old, in the summer of 1926, the Galician-born and Viennese raised “Billie” Wilder followed big-band leader Paul Whiteman and his orchestra to Berlin, where he worked as a cub reporter, budding screenwriter, occasional press agent, and dancer for hire. Like many assimilated Middle European Jews of his generation, he fell hard for American jazz and all that it represented—from the Charleston craze to exotic cocktails—making a lasting friendship with the
band’s violinist Matty Malneck and often returning to the music of his youth in his Hollywood films, most famously in Some Like It Hot (1959). This talk will explore the significance of jazz, especially the “hot” variety, for Wilder and his subsequent career as one of motion-picture history’s most celebrated writer-directors.
Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Executive Director of UTLA and UTNY, where he is currently based. Author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017), his other books include: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014; 10th-anniversary paperback, 2024), which was named a Best Film Book of 2014 by the Huffington Post; Detour (British Film Institute, 2008); and Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (Columbia University Press, 2009). His recent anthology, Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton University Press, 2021), which he edited and introduced, was selected by playwright Tom Stoppard as a 2021 Book of the Year in the TLS. Currently, he is completing two related projects, a cultural history of Some Like It Hot and the great American sex comedy for Norton, and a short interpretive biography of Wilder for the Yale Jewish Lives series.
Date: Thursday, November 6, 2025
Time: 5:00-6:30pm
Location: 142 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus