Achievement Award. Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment are included in the AFI's greatest American films of all time. , seven of his films are preserved in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant". Anthony Lane writes that Double Indemnity, The Seven Year Itch, Sunset Boulevard and The Apartment are "part of the lexicon of moviegoing" and that Some Like It Hot is a "national treasure." Roger Ebert asked, "Of all the great directors of Hollywood's golden age, has anybody made more films that are as fresh and entertaining to this day as Billy Wilder's?...And who else can field three contenders among the greatest closing lines of all time?", citing the closing lines of Sunset Boulevard, Some Like it Hot, and The Apartment. Wilder's epitaph, a paraphrase of the last line of Some Like It Hot, is "I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect." Early life Samuel Wilder ( Shmuel Vildr) was born on June 22, 1906 to a family of Polish Jews in Sucha Beskidzka, a small town which, at that time, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Years later in Hollywood, he would describe it as being "Half an hour from Vienna. By telegraph." His parents were Eugenia (née Dittler) and Max Wilder. He was nicknamed "Billie" by his mother (he changed this to "Billy" after arriving in America). Eugenia Wilder has described her young son as a "rambunctious kid" and has been inspired by the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows that she saw while living briefly in New York. Wilder's elder brother, W. Lee Wilder, was also a filmmaker. His parents had a successful and well-known cake shop in Sucha's train station that flourished into a chain of railroad cafes. Eugenia and Max Wilder did not persuade their son to join the family business. Furthermore, Max Wilder moved to Kraków to manage a hotel before moving to Vienna. Max died when Billy was 22 years old. After the family moved to Vienna, Wilder became a journalist, instead of attending the University of Vienna. In 1926, jazz band leader Paul Whiteman was on tour in Vienna when he met and was interviewed by Wilder, a fan of Whiteman's band. Whiteman liked young Wilder enough that he took him with the band to Berlin, where Wilder was able to make more connections in the