Mr. Wilder and his sextuplets, all named Oscar.

In this age so hospitable to film preservation, when high-definition television means the average viewer experiences the difference between a letterboxed film and one that has been panned-and-scanned for broadcast, it’s hard to believe that fewer than 25 years ago moviemakers such as Steven Spielberg and George Lucas  testified in Congress against the scourge of “colorization.” In the 1980s Ted Turner, whose movie archives are the basis of the indispensable Turner Classic Movies, was under the impression that contemporary audiences wouldn’t watch black-and-white films, so he retroactively “colorized” titles he owned, as did many other copyright holders.

“Don’t let Ted Turner deface Citizen Kane with his crayons!” Orson Welles is said to have said. At the other end of the color spectrum, Frank Capra was all for a dye job on It’s a Wonderful Life. Billy Wilder stood with Welles.

“Those idiots were ready, their paintbrushes poised to paint over our work,” Billy Wilder told me in 1989, the day Sunset Boulevard and Some Like It Hot were among the first 25 films named to the National Film Registry, essentially giving them landmark status. The Film Registry grew out of the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, prohibiting distribution or exhibition of any black-and-white film in the Registry that had been altered in any way.

I was the first reporter to reach Wilder the morning of the Registry’s first induction of landmark films. “To have two out of 25 films is great,” he said in that Viennese accent that was halfway between Sigmund Freud and Arnold Schwarzenegger. “But even better is that the government has acknowledged that colorizing has to stop!”

Wilder was garrulous that morning, very happy that at least two of his films would not longer look “like strumpets at the Max Factor counter.” While I had him on the line it occurred to me that I had an opportunity to ask him sone questions about what happened in 1933 when he left Berlin, “the hot breath of Hitlerism” at his heels, and his years in France where he directed his first film (Mauvaise Graine, with Danielle Darrieux, age 18) and reputedly worked as a gigolo/eintanzer in Nice. I was writing his advance obituary, and it was a challenge to describe his transition from Europe to America.

I steered the conversation that way and for about three minutes he answered me with practiced anecdotes I had read in other biographies. Then he paused and said, “Mees Reekey, what do my years in France have to do with colorization?”

I figured that a guy with Wilder’s strain of black humor could handle the truth. I took a deep breath and said, “Mr. Wilder, as a former journalist of course you’ve intuited that I’m working on an advance obituary. That’s a good thing. Because in the same way if you carry an umbrella, it never rains, if there’s an advance obituary, the subject is immortal.”

He cackled with glee, responding,  “Okay, Mees Reekey, I cancel Mutual of Omaha and I go with you.” He proceeded to tell me an anecdote about his Double Indemnity research into the insurance business which I thought I would never forget and, naturally, did. Though I was on deadline we talked another 45 minutes. His version of that transition from Europe to America was very Horatio Algerish, “I came to America with little money. I listened to the radio to understand American slang. I was lucky that friends prevailed on friends to hire me….”

I endeavored, but could not get him  to talk about his immigration challenges (reputed to have influenced the screenplay of Hold Back the Dawn, in which, in order to win U.S. citizenship, a dissolute European emigre [Charles Boyer] weds a naive American schoolteacher [Olivia de Havilland] in a US/Mexico bordertown).

Given the million or so times he made me laugh, ours wasn’t exactly a reciprocal relationship. Still, to have made Billy Wilder laugh!

By the way, after our conversation he lived another 13 years. I like to think that his Mutual of Rickey policy was a factor.

My favorite Billy Wilder films: The Major and the Minor, Double Indemnity, Sabrina, The Apartment, The Fortune Cookie. Yours? Why?