A classic Billy Wilder story told by Ivan Moffat: “When Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash, he had a man called Art Cohn with him, who was writing– with Todd’s approval, of course– a biography of him.

Now Art Cohn had been a screenwriter of no great distinction, with a few credits for ‘Additional Dialogue‘ on a few films. We don’t have that credit anymore, as the Writers’ Guild has disallowed it.

The day after the plane crash in which Art Cohn as well as Mike Todd died, I was having dinner at Charlie Feldman’s house. There were quite a lot of people there, and they were discussing the crash, and a nice woman (I forget her name) said: ‘What an awful thing for Art Cohn’s widow, that almost every account of the crash in the press hardly mentioned his name.’

And Billy Wilder said: ‘Yes, at least they should have given him credit for Additional Dying.’”

From The Ivan Moffat File