His most influential film, the multi-Oscar-winning The Apartment, is the one that played it both ways. Wilder was committed to plumbing the depths but not to leaving his protagonists in the muck. Those of his characters who found their integrity did so too late to make much of a difference. Born in Austria-Hungary (in a town that’s now part of Poland), he lost his mother and grandmother in the Holocaust and had no faith in the individual capacity for heroism. In some of his best-loved scripts - Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, The Apartment - his protagonists lie, disguise their true motives (and themselves), and make rotten moral choices that end in their deaths or a terrible shock to their souls. The quality most writers (and critics) associate with Billy Wilder is cynicism, and he did have a wry view of a certain kind of American self-interest and low cunning. Won: Best Adapted Screenplay, The Lost Weekend Best Original Screenplay, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment. Oscars: Nominated: Best Original Screenplay, Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn, Ace in the Hole, and The Fortune Cookie Best Story, Ball of Fire Best Adapted Screenplay, Double Indemnity, A Foreign Affair, Sabrina, and Some Like It Hot. Notable Scripts: Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959), The Apartment (1960) Terence Winter ( Get Rich or Die Tryin’, The Wolf of Wall Street) 1. Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter ( 500 Days of Summer, The Disaster Artist) 40. Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith ( 10 Things I Hate About You, Legally Blonde) 39. Danny Strong ( Lee Daniels’ The Butler, Rebel in the Rye) 38. Paul Schrader ( Taxi Driver, Affliction) 36. Gary Ross ( Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) 34. Melissa Rosenberg ( Step Up, Twilight) 33. Angela Robinson ( D.E.B.S., Professor Marston and the Wonder Women) 32. John Ridley ( U-Turn, 12 Years a Slave) 31. Jason Reitman ( Thank You for Smoking, Up in the Air) 30. Zak Penn ( Behind Enemy Lines, X-Men: Last Stand) 29. Kimberly Peirce ( Boys Don’t Cry, Stop-Loss) 28. Larry Karaszewski ( Ed Wood, Man on the Moon) 22. Peter Landesman ( Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House) 23. Aline Brosh McKenna ( The Devil Wears Prada, I Don’t Know How She Does It) 24. Zoe Lister-Jones ( Lola Versus, Band Aid) 21. James Ivory ( A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, Call Me By Your Name) 20. Mark Heyman ( Black Swan, The Skeleton Twins) 19. David Gordon Green ( All the Real Girls, Goat) 16. Paul Haggis ( Million-Dollar Baby, Crash) 17. Sofia Coppola ( Lost in Translation, The Beguiled) 12.
Stephen Chbosky ( The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wonder) 11.
Brooks ( Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News) 9. Allison Burnett ( Autumn in New York, Underworld Awakening) 10. Mark Bomback (T he Wolverine, War for the Planet of the Apes) 8. Mike Binder ( The Upside of Anger, Black or White) 7. Andrea Berloff ( World Trade Center, Straight Outta Compton) 5. Scot Armstrong ( Old School, The Hangover Part II) 4. Judd Apatow ( Knocked-Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) 3. Scott Alexander ( Ed Wood, Man on the Moon) 2. It’s worth noting that Hollywood’s traditional exclusion of women and people of color makes it extraordinarily difficult to truly qualify the best in the craft, but acknowledging today’s urgent need for more inclusive storytelling doesn’t negate the contributions of these 100 pioneers. Here are their selections (ranked in order of popularity, with ties broken by us), and representative testimonials for each. To compile such a list is to pose a question: What is the essence of the screenwriter’s art? Plot? Dialogue? Character? All that and more? We left that judgment to those who know best - the writers. We decided to remedy that - by polling more than 40 of today’s top screenwriters on which of their predecessors (and contemporaries) they consider to be the best. “To make a good film,” Alfred Hitchcock once said, “you need three things: the script, the script, and the script.” Yet while it’s easy to find (and argue over) lists of the greatest films ever, it’s difficult to find a list of the greatest screenwriters.
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