it out, admiring Chandler's gift with words and knowing that his dialogue would translate very well to the screen. Chandler and Wilder made considerable changes to Cain's story. For one thing, the ending was overhauled. For another, the character of Barton Keyes was changed from a fairly clueless co-worker into an enemy mentor. Initially, Wilder and Chandler had intended to retain as much of Cain's original dialogue as possible. It was Chandler who first realized that the dialogue from the novella did not translate well to the screen. Wilder disagreed and was annoyed that Chandler was not putting more of it into the script. To settle it, Wilder hired a couple of contract players from the studio to read passages of Cain's original dialogue aloud. To Wilder's astonishment, Chandler was right, and in the end, the movie's cynical and provocative dialogue was more Chandler and Wilder than it was Cain. Chandler also did a lot of fieldwork while working on the script and took large volumes of notes. By visiting various locations that figured into the film, he brought a sense of realism about Los Angeles that seeped into the script. For example, he hung around Jerry's Market on Melrose Avenue in preparation for the scene during which Phyllis and Walter discreetly meet to plan the murder. The tumultuous relationship between Wilder and Chandler only enhanced the product of their collaboration. Wilder, in fact, believed that discord, a tug-of-war, was a vital ingredient, necessary for a fruitful collaboration: "If two people think alike," he once said, "it's like two men pulling at one end of a rope. If you are going to collaborate, you need an opponent to bounce things off of." His tugging with Chandler did have a softer side, it seems: Over 60 years after the film's initial release, mystery writer and Chandler scholar Mark Coggins documented the fact that Chandler had agreed to appear in a cameo at 16 minutes into the film, glancing up from a magazine as Neff walks past outside Keyes' office. This is significant because, other than a snippet from a home movie, there is no other footage of Chandler known anywhere. When Chandler came to work with Wilder, he was a recovering alcoholic. Wilder said: "He was in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I think he had a tough time with me – I drove him back into drinking." By the time the picture