Sick at home with (not sick from) Gene Wilder

15 June 2005

I missed several days of work last week due to cold and flu-like illness, and filled in the time during which I was awake largely with reading. Herewith a few stray thoughts.

(Note: This was the only title I actually got to writing about. So shoot me.)

Kiss Me Like a Stranger—Gene Wilder's sweet little memoir, this month's package from Zooba.com

Wilder's approach to the book, punctuating his memories with a few asides and several conversations with his old psychiatrist, gives the material a kick. It's a gentle, humane little book—rather like the man himself, or at least my sense of what he must be like. It might have been just a bit longer; Wilder's observations on his movie projects and stage performances, and on the people with whom he's worked, are rather maddeningly brief—especially concerning the movies he wrote and directed himself, which generally get a passing nod. I adored Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother and The Woman in Red, and I'd love to know more about their writing and filming. Conversely, Wilder provides just enough about his two most famous collaborators, Richard Pryor and Gilda Radner. I always thought Radner and Wilder make an adorable couple, but I wasn't aware of Gilda's clutching need for validation nor that Wilder and Pryor, although a superb team on-screen, were (like Laurel and Hardy) little more than friendly acquaintances off the set. In keeping with his image, or at least with my image of him, Wilder has few bad things to say about people, and when he does they're either dead or anonymous. Which is probably as it should be.