Suspense on Screen, Tension Behind the Scenes
‘Billy & Ray’ Explores the Making of ‘Double Indemnity’
Charles Isherwood
October 20, 2014: Any given five minutes of the classic film noir Double Indemnity — I am tempted to say any single frame of the classic film noir Double Indemnity — packs more heat than the torpid two hours of Billy & Ray, a play by Mike Bencivenga about the combative collaboration between Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler on the movie’s screenplay. Mr. Bencivenga’s slumberous drama, which opened at the Vineyard Theater on Monday night in a stolid production directed by the television veteran Garry Marshall, mostly takes place in the tony Paramount offices of Wilder, played by the Mad Men star Vincent Kartheiser. By this point, Wilder was an established writer-director who had just had a professional breakup with his favored screenwriting partner, Charles Brackett. (Noises suggesting their tumultuous parting are heard before the lights go up on Charlie Corcoran’s sleek set. The reason for their divorce has something to do with Wilder’s itch to film a certain pitch-black James M. Cain novel, which Brackett considered insufficiently uplifting. This is bad news for the producer Joe Sistrom (Drew Gehling), who paid a pile of Paramount’s money to option the book. But the pugnacious Wilder refuses to give in. “It’s time the movies grew up,” he scoffs. Scorning the stable of writers at the studio, he insists on finding the right guy for the material.
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