Before Bil­ly Wilder became the screen­writer and direc­tor of icon­ic films like Sun­set Boule­vard and Some Like It Hot, he worked as a free­lance reporter, first in Vien­na and then in Weimar Berlin. Bil­ly Wilder on Assign­ment brings togeth­er more than fifty arti­cles, trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time, that Wilder (then known as ​“Bil­lie”) pub­lished in mag­a­zines and news­pa­pers between Sep­tem­ber 1925 and Novem­ber 1930. From a humor­ous account of Wilder’s stint as a hired danc­ing com­pan­ion in a posh Berlin hotel and his dis­patch­es from the inter­na­tion­al film scene, to his astute pro­files of writ­ers, per­form­ers, and polit­i­cal fig­ures, the col­lec­tion offers fresh insights into the cre­ative mind of one of Hol­ly­wood’s most revered writer-directors.