Billy Wilder on Previews

Excerpt from Conversations with Wilder:

I’ll tell you my best story, which has something to do with previews. We were previewing Ninotchka, and Lubitsch took the writers along too, in Long Beach. And they are outside in the lobby there, a stack of cards, with the audience invited to put down their thoughts. So the picture starts playing, and it plays very well. Now Lubitsch takes the cards, a heap of the cards, doesn’t let anybody else touch them. We get into the big MGM limousine. We turn the light up. Now, so, he takes the preview cards and he starts reading. “Very good…brilliant …” Twenty cards. But when he comes to the 21st card, he starts laughing as hard as I ever saw him laugh, and we say, “What is it?” He keeps the cards to himself; he does not let anybody even look. Then, finally, he calms down a little and starts reading. And what he read was — I have the card — “Funniest picture I ever saw. So funny that I peed in my girlfriend’s hand.”