When Billy Wilder died in March 2002 at 95, the French newspaper Le Monde ran a front-page headline that read simply: He is dead. Nobody is perfect. This episode traces the life of the Austro-Hungarian refugee who rewired the DNA of Hollywood storytelling, from his birth as Samuel Wilder in 1906 to a family running railroad station cafes, to a nickname inspired by Buffalo Bill, to his years as a Vienna journalist and a Berlin taxi dancer paid by the hour to simulate romance.

The conversation follows his 1930 breakthrough with People on Sunday, his flight from Hitler in 1933, his struggle with English in Hollywood, and his combustible partnership with Charles Brackett that produced Ninotchka. It examines how he outsmarted the Hays Code with Double Indemnity, treated alcoholism as horror in The Lost Weekend, learned that his mother, stepfathe ...