SNU Institute for Communication Research is hosting the 187th Communication Forum. The forum will be held offline and in English.

We look forward to the active participation of those who are interested.

● Theme: A Roving Reporter, a Tale of Two Cities, and the Making of Billy Wilder
● Presenter: Noah Isenberg (Univeristy of Texas at Austin)
● Time and Place: 10/5 (Thu) 10:00 ~ 12:00, IBK Communication Center Bldg No. 64, Room 304

● Abstract: Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known?and widely published, in Berlin and Vienna?as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than thirty miles southwest of Krak?w, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the y, as did her intense, infectious love for all things American. “Billie was her American boy,” insists Ed Sikov in On Sunset Boulevard, his definitive biography of the internationally acclaimed writer-director.

● About the Presenter: Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film and Associate Dean for Professional Programs at the University of Texas at Austin. He serves as the Executive Director of the university’s internship-based, study-away programs in Los Angeles (UTLA) and New York City (UTNY). The author, most recently, of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017), a Los Angeles Times bestseller, his anthology, Billy Wilder on Assignment, is now out in paperback from Princeton University Press.