Billy Wilder

With director Billy Wilder's announcement of the pending auction of his art collection, the powers that be at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art have again fumbled the ball ("Wilder to Sell a Treasure-Trove of Art," Aug. 30, by Suzanne Muchnic). His collection will not be donated. Wilder's collection, although not of the stature of the Simon or Hammer collections (two earlier LACMA "fumbles"), is surely one that was assembled with imagination and taste. LACMA's machinations with six pictures he had donated (the museum kept two and "deaccessioned" the other four without telling him)

For three decades filmmaker Nina Menkes has made poetic, evocative films that have placed her in the forefront of American experimentalists. She's a visionary who trusts in the power of image, movement and composition to communicate narrative, meaning and emotion. Her work has received awards and acclaim in international film festivals, but only her most recent film, "Dissolution," has received a theatrical release. On Saturday that film kicks off a UCLA Film and Television Archive retrospective of her work, "Nina Menkes: Cinema as Sorcery," that runs through March 7 at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater.

"Don't give me logic, give me emotion," Billy Wilder always told his collaborator, I. A. L. Diamond ("Some Like It Hot," "The Apartment"). Thursday night at the Beverly Hilton the Hollywood community en masse gave Wilder what he asked for--and then some. Somewhere in the middle of the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award to the writer-director-producer-wit, the Hollywood clock stood still.

He might be the most influential filmmaker hardly anyone knows anything about. Though his admirers have run the gamut — Charlie Chaplin, Jean-Luc Godard, those who venerate cinéma vérité — his innovative documentaries are close to impossible to see. Which is what makes "Kino-Eye: The Revolutionary Cinema of Dziga Vertov" such a significant event. Starting Saturday night, the UCLA Film & Television archive will present, courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum's impressive collection, 11 Vertov programs at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood.

With no major feature-film releases scheduled for this week, it's a good time to catch up on less-heralded releases. * "Kiss Me, Stupid" (MGM/UA, 1964, $20): This racy and suggestive Billy Wilder film, full of burlesque humor, was attacked by some in the conservative early '60s but seems tame by today's standards. It still retains its humor. Dean Martin stars as an oversexed singer who is preyed upon by two songwriters, including one (Ray Walston) who has a gorgeous wife (Felicia Farr).

The Life Achievement Award of the American Film Institute is transparently and unapologetically a fund-raising device for the organization. Big name, conspicuous friends, big TV special, big revenue. But it's fund-raising in a very admirable cause. For its work in film preservation as well as for the lengthening list of significant young film makers it has trained, the AFI in its second decade has become an important force.

Billy Wilder was having trouble finding a teaspoon--in his own kitchen yet--so finally, sheepishly, he curled a finger and led a visitor to the Wilder dining room. There, Hollywood's most mischievous immigrant borrowed a spoon from the impeccably set table. That night, Audrey and Billy Wilder were entertaining for 10. ("A nice group of right-wing Democrats," joshed the host.) As Wilder swiped the spoon, he did a double take, making very sure his wife wasn't around.

A $32.6-million auction of film maker Billy Wilder's collection Monday night at Christie's kicked off a heady week of Impressionist and modern art sales. Enormous prices are on the agenda this week and Christie's and Sotheby's are predicting record sales, but the Wilder affair got off to a shaky start. Several pieces brought less than their low estimates and a few others failed to sell.

"Double Indemnity" begins with a confession. Fred MacMurray, playing insurance agent-turned-murderer Walter Neff, puts a low fire under the pot with this: "Yes, I killed him. For money. For a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?" From there, we're off, watching Neff crawl to self-destruction. The movie is smoky, dank and nasty . . . it's also a masterpiece of sorts, killer-cold film noir.

Billy Wilder has a message for all you sourpusses, stick-in-the-muds and snobs: "If you don't have a sense of humor, don't come." * The legendary film director isn't talking about his movies--or re-creations of them. While Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical version of Wilder's classic 1950 motion picture "Sunset Boulevard" is causing a stir at the Shubert Theatre stage in Century City, Wilder is making his debut as a curator and visual artist.

The tale of Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb is one of the most lurid and perpetually compelling in crime noir. Collegiate lovers who murdered a child for kicks in 1924, their sexual relationship had gone under-explored in dramatic retellings. 1992's "Swoon" takes a whole look at the psychology of the relationship that resulted in one of America's most famous murder cases. It's preceded by the decidedly more cheery "Jollies," a documentary of a young lesbian's self-discovery. Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. 7:30 p.m. Fri. $9. http://www.cinema.ucla.edu

Books can teach you plenty about Los Angeles. In fact, we've been getting readers to help us make lists of the best L.A. fiction and nonfiction . But as many people will tell you (just before asking you to read their screenplay), this is a movie town. So if I'm a stranger in town and I need movies to school me, what films would you suggest? What films show and say the most about Los Angeles, from the way it looks to the way it behaves, where it's been and where it might be headed?

Tom Holland's "Fright Night" Cinefamily at Silent Movie Theatre | L.A. Thursday | 7:30 p.m. | $10 The original 1985 horror comedy with Chris Sarandon as a vampire Jamaa Fanaka's "Penitentiary" Billy Wilder Theater | Westwood Friday | 7:30 p.m. | $9 Fanaka will appear in person at screening of his 1979 prison drama Roberto Rossellini's "Rome, Open City" Billy Wilder Theater | Westwood ...

Resplendent in a Dior sleeveless kimono, Givenchy leopard-print tights and funky Rick Owens boots, the violin virtuoso Hahn-Bin brings to mind an ultra-chic Buddhist monk as he strolls through the Hammer Museum in Westwood. His eyes and lips, outlined in black, give his face a mask-like delicacy, and his tuft of black hair sweeps upward like a candle flame. But despite his obvious flair for the dramatic, there's nothing remotely standoff-ish about the 22-year-old musician and performance artist, who'll appear Thursday night in "The Five Poisons," a semi-staged cultural mash-up of works ranging from Chopin's "Nocturne #20" to John Cage's "In a Landscape," in the Billy Wilder Theater.

It was Orson Welles who gave Jackie Gleason the moniker "The Great One" when the filmmaker and the comic genius were out on the town one night. Gleason, who died in 1987 at age 71, was also known as "Mr. Saturday Night" because he dominated Saturday night programming on CBS from 1951 until 1970. Just as with Lucille Ball in "I Love Lucy," the former nightclub performer became a superstar on TV in the medium's earliest days, creating such beloved characters as the poignant Poor Soul, the exuberant Reggie Van Gleason III and the chatty Joe the Bartender.

Tony Curtis was a strikingly handsome 23-year-old native New Yorker playing the lead in an off-Broadway production of "Golden Boy" in 1948 when he was spotted by a Universal Pictures talent scout. Sent west for a screen test, he signed a seven-year contract at $75 a week. "I got into movies so easy it was scary," Curtis told the Denver Post in 1996. The former Bernie Schwartz went on to become one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1950s and '60s, one whose early reputation as a "pretty boy" tended to blur recognition of his growth and range as an actor who starred in some of his era's landmark films.

I. A. L. Diamond, whose initials stood for nothing in particular but whose screen-writing credits amounted to a great deal, died of cancer Thursday at his Beverly Hills home. The Oscar-winning ("The Apartment") longtime collaborator of writer-director Billy Wilder was 67. Born Itek Dommnici in Ungheni, Romania, Diamond came to this country when he was 9. His father, a grocer, had preceded him to New York, where he was raising his family in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

his wife, Audrey, cinema and collecting art. So it only seems natural that UCLA Film & Television Archive's new home, titled the Billy Wilder Theater and made possible by a $5-million donation from his widow, is inside the Hammer Museum in Westwood. "Also, Billy lived a few blocks east," says Oscar-winning writer-director Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential"), honorary chair of the archive. "And in fact is buried a few blocks south. I'm sure he would get a kick out of it."

Renowned acting teacher and director Jack Garfein learned survival instincts as a teenager in the Auschwitz concentration camp. "In my case, one night I lost everybody," says the 80-year-old as the memories of the horrific night are reflected in his eyes. "I was 13. My first love — my mother, my sister, my grandparents and aunts and uncles …. I was the only one who survived. " But he didn't know then what had happened to them. "The people already in the camp said they went to the 'old age home.