I.A.L. Diamond The Apartment (1960)

I.A.L. Diamond (1920–1988) was Billy Wilder's writing partner from 1957 until Wilder's last film in 1981, and the co-author of The Apartment. He shared the 1960 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay with Wilder, his second of three Oscar nominations. Their twenty-four-year collaboration produced twelve films, including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Irma la Douce, The Fortune Cookie, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

The name

Diamond was born Itek Domnici in Ungheni, then in Romania (now Moldova), and emigrated to Brooklyn at age nine. He attended Boys High School in Brooklyn and Columbia University, where he edited the Columbia Daily Spectator and the humor magazine Jester. He took the writing name "I.A.L. Diamond" — the initials variously explained as "Interscholastic Algebra League" (for math competitions he had won as a student), "It Always Loses," or simply chosen for sound — and used it for the rest of his career.

"I.A.L. doesn't stand for anything. I made it up. I was tired of people asking me what it stood for, so now I tell them it stands for whatever they want it to stand for." — I.A.L. Diamond, The New York Times (obituary, 1988)

Before Wilder

Diamond worked steadily in Hollywood from 1944, contributing to programmers and second features at Warner Bros. and other studios. The pre-Wilder credits include Murder in the Blue Room (1944), Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946), Love and Learn (1947), and Monkey Business (1952, co-written with Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer). He had an Oscar nomination for Monkey Business and a reputation as a careful structural writer who could fix other people's broken scripts.

He was not yet a star screenwriter. Wilder, looking for a new partner after the 1950 split with Charles Brackett, found Diamond through a mutual friend in 1957 and recruited him for Love in the Afternoon (1957) opposite Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper.

The collaboration with Wilder

Wilder and Diamond wrote together in the same room, line by line, with Wilder pacing and Diamond at the typewriter. The method was famously slow. They produced an average of two pages a day on a good day, and they could spend a week on a single sequence. The output across twenty-four years was twelve produced films:

  • Love in the Afternoon (1957)
  • Some Like It Hot (1959)
  • The Apartment (1960) — Best Original Screenplay Oscar
  • One, Two, Three (1961)
  • Irma la Douce (1963)
  • Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
  • The Fortune Cookie (1966)
  • The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
  • Avanti! (1972)
  • The Front Page (1974)
  • Fedora (1978)
  • Buddy Buddy (1981)

The collaboration is widely considered one of the great writer-director partnerships in American film, comparable to Brackett-Wilder, Hawks-Faulkner, or the Coen Brothers' partnership with themselves.

"Iz Diamond was the perfect partner for me. He had a wonderful instinct for structure, and he was a great economist of words. Two words from him were better than ten from anyone else." — Billy Wilder, The New York Times (1988)

The two men were temperamental opposites. Wilder was ebullient, theatrical, German-accented, restless. Diamond was quiet, dry, exact, often described as "the silent partner" who said three words to Wilder's hundred but whose three words ended up in the script.

"Billy talked. Iz wrote. Billy paced. Iz typed. The deal was that nothing went on the page until they both agreed it should be there." — Walter Mirisch (producer), I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (2008) (book, not available online)

What Diamond contributed to The Apartment

The structural elegance of The Apartment — the way every detail in the first half pays off in the second, the way the cracked compact and the executive washroom key and the fruitcake all become moral instruments — bears Diamond's fingerprints. Wilder was the satirist and the visual storyteller; Diamond was the architect.

The "-wise" suffix language that infects the film's corporate dialogue — "premiumwise," "billingwise," "decencywise, and otherwisewise" — was a Diamond invention. He had been collecting examples of Madison Avenue corporate speech and proposed using the suffix as a marker of how completely the firm had colonized its employees' grammar.

"The 'wise' joke was Iz's. He had been collecting them. By the time we shot the picture, you couldn't open a magazine without finding a new one." — Billy Wilder, American Film Institute (1986)

The fruitcake-as-evidence-of-survival gag in beat 29 — Baxter producing a physical fruitcake to prove that the Cincinnati woman is alive and over him — is also typical Diamond construction: a literal object made to bear thematic weight without commentary.

After The Apartment

Diamond and Wilder continued working together for another twenty-one years. The post-Apartment films had varying critical fortunes — One, Two, Three (1961) and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) are among the most underrated in the canon, while Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) was a critical disaster on release and has since been reappraised. Diamond never wrote a script away from Wilder after 1957; the partnership was exclusive on both sides.

Diamond died in 1988 at sixty-seven, less than a decade after the partnership's last film.

"Iz was the best partner I could have had. We finished each other's sentences. When he died, I lost half of myself." — Billy Wilder, Los Angeles Times (1988)

Awards

Diamond received three Academy Award nominations — Monkey Business (1952), Some Like It Hot (1959), and The Apartment (1960, won) — and the Writers Guild of America Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1980, presented to him jointly with Wilder.

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