Requiem for a Tuesday

The Pirate (1948)

Wilder and Diamond were precise writers. But when it came time to Some Like It Hot’s punch line, they were absolutely indecisive. They got as far as Lemmon ripping off his wig and saying he can’t marry Osgood Fielding III because, “I’m a man.” What comes next? Diamond suggested “Nobody’s perfect,” and Wilder said to keep it in so they could send the script to the mimeographer. But then they were really going to settle it. “We have a whole week to think about it,” Wilder said. “We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied.” Viewers felt entirely differently. “The audience just exploded,” Wilder said. “That line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ The line had come too easily, just popped out.”