Production History (The Apartment) The Apartment (1960)

Brief Encounter planted the seed in 1945

The idea for The Apartment came to Wilder more than a decade before he made it, while watching David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945). The detail that lodged in his mind was not the doomed lovers but a minor character — the friend whose flat the married man borrows for the affair. Wilder kept a small notebook of unrealized ideas, and the apartment-lender stayed in it for fifteen years. See Brief Encounter as Source.

"I had this idea for The Apartment for many years. I saw a picture made by David Lean called Brief Encounter . . . and the man had a friend, and they go to the friend's apartment. And I always thought, 'Now there's a movie — what about the friend who has to crawl into the warm bed left by two lovers?' But it was a censorable idea in those days, you couldn't do a movie like that." — Billy Wilder, Cinephilia & Beyond (interview reprint)

What kept the idea on the shelf was the Production Code. A film whose hero pimps out his apartment to married executives could not have passed the Breen Office in the 1940s or early 1950s. By 1959, the Code's grip had loosened — Some Like It Hot (1959) had just been released without a seal of approval and become Wilder's biggest hit — and the door was open.

The Sheldrake Affair gave Wilder the protagonist

The second piece arrived from a real-life Hollywood scandal. Producer Walter Wanger had shot agent Jennings Lang in 1951 for having an affair with Wanger's wife, the actress Joan Bennett. The story Wilder found compelling was the small detail that Lang had been borrowing a junior agent's apartment to conduct the affair.

"There was a scandal involving the producer Walter Wanger, who shot the agent of his wife, Joan Bennett, because they were having an affair . . . the agent was using a small apartment of one of his assistants. That gave me the idea." — Billy Wilder, Conversations with Wilder (1999) by Cameron Crowe (book, not available online)

Wilder later said he would never have made the film at all if Jack Lemmon had not been available — the role required a leading man who could play moral squalor as comedy without losing the audience's sympathy.

Wilder and Diamond wrote it for Lemmon

Wilder had just finished Some Like It Hot with Lemmon and his new writing partner, I.A.L. Diamond. The collaboration with Diamond, which had begun in 1957 with Love in the Afternoon, would last until Wilder's last film, Buddy Buddy (1981). They wrote The Apartment with Lemmon already in mind for C.C. Baxter.

"The script was written for Jack Lemmon. We knew exactly what he could do." — Billy Wilder, American Film Institute (1986)

Jack Lemmon was 35 when production began. He had won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Mister Roberts (1955) and had just done Some Like It Hot opposite Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. Wilder later said he wrote three of his best films — Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and The Fortune Cookie (1966) — around the specific contours of Lemmon's persona.

MacLaine signed on without a finished script

Shirley MacLaine was cast as Fran Kubelik on the basis of about forty pages. Wilder and Diamond were still writing as production began. MacLaine has described being told the broad shape — an elevator operator who has an affair with a married executive and attempts suicide on Christmas Eve — and trusting Wilder on the rest.

"Billy didn't give me the whole script. He told me about my character and a little bit about how it would unfold, but mostly he just said, 'Trust me.' And I did." — Shirley MacLaine, Vanity Fair (2015)

The improvisational quality of the writing produced one of the film's signatures: the running gag about Fran's gin rummy. MacLaine had been playing cards with crew members between setups, and Wilder wrote the gin game into the recovery sequences after watching her shuffle. The cards became the closing image of the film — "Shut up and deal." See "Shut up and deal" (the closing line).

MacMurray was cast against type

Fred MacMurray was a surprising choice for J.D. Sheldrake. By 1960 he was best known for Disney comedies (The Shaggy Dog, 1959) and the wholesome television series My Three Sons, which premiered the same year. The casting drew on Wilder's earlier collaboration with MacMurray on Double Indemnity (1944), where MacMurray had played a different kind of moral coward. The Sheldrake role asked MacMurray to deploy his salesman charm in service of straightforward villainy.

"Billy Wilder cast Fred MacMurray as the heel because he knew that audiences would forgive MacMurray almost anything. That's what made him terrifying." — Glenn Kenny, The New York Times (2015) (paywalled, citation only)

MacMurray reportedly received hate mail from My Three Sons viewers after The Apartment opened.

The forced-perspective insurance office

Production designer Alexandre Trauner built the Consolidated Life office on a Goldwyn Studios soundstage as a single enormous set with deliberate visual deception. To make the room seem to extend further than the stage allowed, Trauner used forced perspective: progressively smaller desks toward the rear of the set, occupied by progressively shorter people, with children at miniature desks at the back.

The office is the film's most quoted image — King Vidor's The Crowd (1928) is the obvious antecedent — and it sets up the visual argument about Baxter as one statistic among eight million. (wikipedia, american cinematographer)

The censors made it through with caveats

The Production Code Administration approved the screenplay with revisions but the Catholic Legion of Decency initially gave the film a "B" rating ("morally objectionable in part for all"). Wilder made minor cuts and the rating stuck — but the film succeeded anyway. By 1960 the Legion's influence had waned, and the Best Picture campaign rendered the rating moot.

The Best Picture campaign worked

United Artists and the Mirisch Company ran a substantial Oscar campaign. The Apartment was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won five — Best Picture, Best Director (Wilder), Best Original Screenplay (Wilder/Diamond), Best Film Editing (Daniel Mandell), and Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (Trauner and Edward G. Boyle). It was the last black-and-white film to win Best Picture until Schindler's List (1993). See Critical Reception and Legacy (The Apartment).