Within a short time after its release, The Apartment doubled its $3 million cost at U.S. box offices alone.

MOVIE'S ADVERTISING TAG LINE: Movie-wise, there has never been anything like it - laugh-wise, love-wise, or otherwise-wise!
The Apartment). In addition to his three Oscars for this film, he won for the screenplay of Sunset Boulevard (1950, along with Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr.), and direction and screenplay (with Brackett) of The Lost Weekend (1945). He was also presented with the Academy's Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1988.

Wilder received the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1986.

The Apartment was lauded by Soviet-bloc critics as an indictment of the American system and a story that could only have happened in a capitalistic city like New York. At a dinner honoring him in East Berlin, Wilder said the movie "could happen anywhere, in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Rome, Paris, London." When Wilder said the one place it could not have happened was Moscow, the East Germans broke into thunderous applause and cheers. When the ovation died down, Wilder continued: "The reason this picture could not have taken place in Moscow is that in Moscow nobody has his own apartment." The remark was met with grim silence.

Jack Lemmon has been nominated for seven Best Actor Academy Awards, including one for his drag performance in Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959). He won for Save the Tiger (1973). He also won a Best Supporting Actor Award for Mister Roberts (1955).

Shirley MacLaine has been nominated for Best Actress five times and won for Terms of Endearment (1983). She was also nominated for her documentary feature The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir (1975).

The Apartment was the second of Jack Lemmon's seven films with Billy Wilder. He also appeared in Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959), Irma la Douce (1963, again with MacLaine), The Fortune Cookie (1966), Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974), and Buddy Buddy (1981).

Fred MacMurray's fan mail was overwhelmingly against his role as the no-good chief executive Sheldrake. People hated seeing the usually amiable, sympathetic actor play such a heel. The response shook him so much, he vowed never to take on another such role. He spent the remainder of his career in Disney comedies and playing the good-natured dad on the television sitcom My Three Sons.

As a journalism student at Columbia University in 1941, I.A.L. Diamond's contribution to the school's annual Varsity Show resulted in a story in the New York Times. Executives at Paramount Studios read the article and offered him a ten-week contract as a junior writer. Diamond quit school and headed to Hollywood where he began his career as a screenwriter on the B-movie comedy-mystery-musical Murder in the Blue Room (1944).

Impressed with the skits Diamond wrote for a Writers Guild dinner, Billy Wilder, who had worked with several writers since his break-up with longtime writer-producer Charles Brackett, felt he had finally found the ideal collaborator.

The hugely successful 25-year collaboration between Wilder and Diamond began with Love in the Afternoon (1957). They created a total of 12 pictures together.

The Romanian-born Diamond's real name was Itek Domnici. The I.A.L. stood for Interscholastic Algebra League, in honor of his youthful wizardry at mathematics.

MacLaine once recalled meeting an interpreter for Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev, who was in the U.S. to address the United Nations. The Russian interpreter told the actress, "The Premier sends his regards, wishes to be remembered to you, and says he's just seen your new picture, The Apartment, and you've improved."

At a party in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe told Wilder how much she wished she could have played the part of Fran Kubelik in The Apartment (MacLaine's role).

Wilder and production designer/art director Alexander Trauner worked on eight films together.

The Hungarian-born Trauner began his career in France, where he worked on such classic films as Quai des Brumes (1938) and Le Jour se leve (1939). During the Nazi occupation of France, the Jewish Trauner was forced to work secretly and anonymously under difficult conditions, yet managed to contribute greatly to the look of such films as Les Visiteurs du soir (1942) and Les Enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise, 1945).

Memorable Quotes from THE APARTMENT

FRAN (Shirley MacLaine): Shall I light the candles?
BUD (Jack Lemmon): It's a must! Gracious living-wise.

FRAN: (explaining the cracked mirror in her compact) I like it that way. It makes me look the way I feel.

SHELDRAKE (Fred MacMurray): You see a girl a couple of times a week and sooner or later she thinks you'll divorce your wife. Not fair, is it?
BUD: No, especially to your wife.

SHELDRAKE: When you've been married to a woman 12 years, you don't just sit down to a breakfast table and say, "Pass the sugar, I want a divorce." It's not that easy.

FRAN: (crying) When you're in love with a married man you shouldn't wear mascara

BUD: That's the way it crumblesÉcookie-wise.

FRAN: I never catch colds.
BUD: Really. I was reading some figures from the Sickness and Accident Claims Division. You know that the average New Yorker between the ages of 20 and 50 has two and a half colds a year?
FRAN: That makes me feel just terrible.
BUD: Why?
FRAN: Well, to make the figures come out even, if I have no colds a year, some poor slob must have five colds a year.
BUD: Yeah... it's me.

BUD: Miss Kubelik, one doesn't get to be a second administrative assistant around here unless he's a pretty good judge of character, and as far as I'm concerned you're tops. I mean, decency-wise and otherwise-wise

BUD: I used to live like Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked among 8 million people, but one day I saw a footprint in the sand and there you were

FRAN: Just because I wear a uniform doesn't make me a girl scout.

BUD: You hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.
FRAN: Shut up and deal.

Compiled by Rob Nixon