You don’t know what it means to stand in front of a camera again. This picture will put me right back where I was.
—Bette Davis as Margaret Elliot in the film The Star
“I was working with Mr. Brackett, and he had the idea of doing a picture with a Hollywood background,” Wilder recalled. “Once we got hold of the character of the silent picture star, whose career is finished with the advent of the talkies, . . . we started rolling.”1 It was the comeback story, he concluded, that appealed to them, so they tackled it.
Wilder had a staunch belief in having a resourceful cowriter on every picture. During the story conferences, he said, “there is no muse coming through the window and kissing our brows. We just sit together and discuss, . . . and we fight it out.” Then too the collaborator comes in handy “when you’re arguing with the front office,” he added. “You need somebody there, preferably with a machine gun on his shoulder.”2 The aim of the writers was to make the screenplay as airtight as possible, to forestall having to improvise dialogue on the set. “Sometimes, if a scene does not work during shooting,” Wilder explained, “we withdraw into a corner and rewrite it . . . during lunchtime.” But, he emphasized, this was quite different from shooting off the cuff. They would not just “sit down and slap it together. No, never.”3
Wilder and Brackett press-ganged D. M. Marshman Jr. into joining their team, since they had much admired his insightful movie reviews for Life magazine. The trio began work on the scenario on August 9, 1948. “We closed the doors and asked ourselves, ‘What kind of story shall we do?’ ” Brackett remembered. It was Marshman who suggested “a relationship between a silent-day queen and a young man. She is living in the past, refusing to believe her days as a star are gone, and is sealed up in one of those rundown, immense mansions on Sunset Boulevard, amid a clutter of mementoes,” like a gondola-shaped bed.4 “We saw the young man as a screenwriter,” Brackett continued. “He’s a nice guy, maybe from the Middle West, a man who can’t make the grade in Hollywood.” They did not see the older woman as a horror; “she was someone who had been given the brush by thirty million fans.”5 This last sentence would find its way into the screenplay almost verbatim.
Then the writing team got stuck; they were unable to figure out what would happen next. Wilder, from the beginning of his screenwriting career in Hollywood, had kept a notebook in which he scribbled clever ideas for use in screenplays. When he consulted his notebook, he found this fragment: “Silent picture star commits murder. When they arrest her, she sees the newsreel cameras and thinks she is back in the movies.”6 Wilder remarked to his partners, “Suppose the old dame shoots the boy.”7 That suggestion put them back on track.
They decided to call the aging movie queen Norma Desmond. Her first name was a reference to Mabel Normand, the silent film comedienne. Her surname referred to William Desmond Taylor, a director of silent films who was murdered on the night of February 2, 1922. Taylor had had love affairs with several actresses, among them Normand, who was implicated in Taylor’s unsolved murder. The scandal ended her career.8 So Norma Desmond’s name was tinged with tragedy.
Joe Gillis, the aspiring screenwriter who gets involved with Norma, resembled Wilder himself at the beginning of his career in Hollywood, when he was a struggling scriptwriter. Concerning his affinities with Joe, Wilder explained, “Any writer draws on things he has seen and lived through. . . . I submitted God knows how many scripts and synopses and was turned down,” just like Joe Gillis.9 Wilder opted to have the male lead narrate Sunset Boulevard, as he had done with Double Indemnity. In the present instance, Joe Gillis would narrate the film from beyond the grave, making Sunset Boulevard one of the rare Hollywood films narrated by a dead person. “I have always been a great man for narration,” said Wilder, “and not because it is a lazy man’s crutch.” Narration allows for economical storytelling because “it saves you a lot of exposition,” he continued. “You can say in two lines something that would take twenty minutes to dramatize, to show, and to photograph.”10
On December 21, 1948, Wilder and Brackett submitted to the studio a sixty-one-page preliminary draft of the screenplay. They attached a cautionary note: “Due to the peculiar nature of the project, we ask all our coworkers to regard it as top secret.” To disguise the true nature of the film’s plot, Wilder and Brackett employed the spurious working title “A Can of Beans.”11 They feared that, if word got out that they were planning a movie about Hollywood, members of the film colony would assume that it was to be a film à clef— that is, a sardonic tale presenting unflattering portraits of individuals whom Wilder and Brackett had known and worked with.
Paramount tendered a vote of confidence to Wilder and Brackett by green-lighting the project on the basis of their preliminary draft. On March 21, 1949, they turned in a script of 126 pages, the standard length for a feature picture. Wilder, Brackett, and Marshman continued revising the script throughout production. Sometimes they found it difficult to stay one jump ahead of the shooting schedule. Consequently, they would dole out pages of the screenplay to the cast and crew for a scene only a day or two before it was to be shot. The revisions were mostly the work of Brackett and Wilder, with occasional assists from Marshman, according to Wilder.
Wilder sent the screenplay to Joseph Breen on April 11, 1949, a mere week before production was scheduled to start. Wilder indicated that the script at that point did not contain the final sequence. “We’re still working on it,” Wilder explained. “We haven’t quite decided how the picture ends.”12 Wilder had some trepidation about Breen’s evaluation. After all, as James Agee notes, “A sexual affair between a rich woman of fifty and a kept man half her age is not exactly a usual version of boy meets girl.”13
Wilder did not receive a detailed response from Breen until May 24, 1949. Breen replied that, because the script lacked the last sequence, he could not render a final verdict on the acceptability of the entire story. He did complain, however, about the sexual relationship of Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond: “There is no indication of a voice for morality, by which the sex affair would be condemned, nor do there appear to be compensating moral values for the sin.”14
George Cukor, Wilder’s friend and colleague, explained, “According to the provisions of the code at that time, the main character could not have an extramarital affair without suffering some kind of dreadful punishment, like breaking a leg or falling down a well.” Consequently, Cukor concluded, Breen warned Wilder in his letter about Sunset Boulevard that, in the ending that Wilder contrived for the film, some clear-cut punishment must be meted out to Norma as the main character for her moral transgression.15 Even though the film’s ending was not finalized, Wilder and Brackett were planning a tragic conclusion for the picture, one that should satisfy Breen.
As the characters took shape in the screenplay, Wilder and Brackett naturally began to discuss who should be cast in the picture. Wilder wanted an old-time star to play Norma Desmond. “God forgive me, I wanted Mae West,” Wilder confessed.16 When Wilder interviewed her, it was apparent that West, who was nearing sixty, thought that she was as sexy as she had ever been. She was insulted when Wilder asked her to play a has-been, even though she had not made a picture since 1943—The Heat’s On, a tasteless musical that had flopped. West would not consider playing an older woman who is eventually dumped by her younger lover. On the contrary, West assured Wilder, she would have seen to it that Joe was too exhausted from their sexual bouts in her boudoir to get out of bed!17
Next on the list as a candidate to play Norma was Mary Pickford, known as America’s Sweetheart in her heyday in silent pictures. Pickford demanded, for openers, that the part of Norma Desmond be built up; it must be abundantly clear that Pickford was the star of the picture. Scott Eyman notes, “Wilder could foresee that Pickford, who was now a movie executive, desired more control over the picture than he was prepared to grant her.”18
Finally, Wilder sounded out Cukor, who had been directing pictures for nearly two decades. Cukor suggested Gloria Swanson, who had been one of the brightest stars of the silent period. Indeed, at the height of her career, Cukor pointed out, “She was carried in a sedan chair from her dressing room to the set.”19 But her career had faltered after the coming of sound. By the time Wilder cowrote Music in the Air, a stale musical, for her in 1934, her Hollywood career was for all practical purposes defunct. Wilder remembered, when he was considering her for Sunset Boulevard, that Swanson was thought to be “sort of an old bag from silent picture times.”20 She was only fifty-two.
Cukor assured Wilder that Swanson could play a movie goddess hoping for a comeback convincingly, since at that point she was a Hollywood has-been.21 But Swanson had not withdrawn into seclusion. By the time Wilder wanted her for his movie, she had moved to New York and become the host of a local TV talk show. Brackett, in his function as producer, officially phoned Swanson in New York and told her that Billy Wilder was much interested in her playing the lead in his next film. When he added that the studio wanted her to do a screen test, Swanson was indignant. “I made two dozen pictures for Paramount,” she replied; they might well serve as her “screen test.” After all, her successful silent pictures had helped to build Paramount. “Without me, there would be no Paramount Pictures,” she told him—a line Norma Desmond would repeat in the film. She concluded acrimoniously, “You want a screen test . . . to see if I am still alive?”22 Brackett tactfully responded that she should think of the test as a mere formality. Swanson accepted Brackett’s invitation to come out to Hollywood and discuss the project.
Another actor on Wilder’s wish list for Sunset Boulevard was Erich von Stroheim. After the war Stroheim had moved back to France, where he continued to be considered one of the all-time great directors, a titan of the silent era. Wilder contacted Stroheim at his home outside Paris and told him he wanted him to play Max von Mayerling in Sunset Boulevard. Like Stroheim, Max had been a director of silent films; in fact, Max directed Norma Desmond in a silent picture, just as Stroheim directed Gloria Swanson in one. But, like Stroheim’s, Max’s directorial career did not survive the coming of sound. Max has wound up as Norma’s dignified butler and last admirer.
At first, Stroheim wanted no part of the role. Max von Mayerling was no Field Marshal Rommel but a Hollywood has-been, a character similar enough to Stroheim himself to be disturbing. Stroheim reflected ruefully that, if he took the part, he would be returning to Hollywood to appear in a movie that was exploiting his own downfall as a film director. Moreover, he was offended by the mention of his return to Hollywood in the gossip column of “that old bitch” Louella Parsons, who said that he was a relic of Hollywood’s past.23
What’s more, Stroheim learned, Cecil B. De Mille was very likely going to do a cameo in the picture, playing himself. The idea of appearing in a movie with De Mille was galling to Stroheim. As Arthur Lennig, author of the definitive biography of Stroheim, writes, “Here was De Mille, a lesser talent, still making films, still a success, still a foremost director; and here was Stroheim playing a butler.” Withal, Stroheim accepted the role because, as usual, he was short on funds, since he always lived beyond his means. But ever after, Stroheim referred to the role of Max von Mayerling as “that goddamned butler.”24 John Seitz, the director of photography on the film, attested to the fact that Stroheim thought the role of Max demeaning to him. “He would walk around the set muttering, ‘Why are they doing this to me?’ ”25
Montgomery Clift was set to play Joe Gillis, Norma’s young lover. Clift’s first movie was Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948), in which he played an American GI in war-ravaged Berlin. Wilder learned that Zinnemann had nothing but praise for Clift and engaged him. But two weeks before Wilder began shooting Sunset Boulevard, Clift’s agent phoned him to say that Clift had bailed out. Clift’s alleged motive was that he did not believe that he could be convincing making love to a woman twice his age. “Bullshit!” Wilder hollered at the agent. If he were a serious actor, he could be convincing “making love to ANY woman!!”26
Brackett knew the facts behind Clift’s reneging on his commitment to play Joe Gillis, and he set Wilder straight. Clift had been carrying on an affair with Libby Holman, a faded star of the New York stage in the Roaring Twenties, since 1942. Brackett, who had known Holman since his days at the New Yorker in the 1920s, was aware that she was fifteen years older than Clift. In 1932 Holman had been accused of shooting her wealthy young husband Zachary Reynolds, although his death was eventually declared a suicide. Holman, who was by now a hopeless alcoholic, had convinced herself that the plot of Sunset Boulevard, which Clift had relayed to her, was a thinly disguised version of her relationship with Reynolds. She threatened to kill herself if Clift made Sunset Boulevard. So Wilder gave up on Clift.27
Wilder combed the list of Paramount contract players and settled on William Holden, who had given a solid performance as a prizefighter in Golden Boy (1939) but since then had been more or less wasted as a second lead in some frivolous comedies. Holden was afraid he simply was not talented enough to play a serious role like Joe Gillis. But Wilder brushed aside his misgivings: “That’s easy. You know Bill Holden? Then you know Joe Gillis.” Wilder was aware that Holden’s career had begun to slide. Furthermore, he was becoming a problem drinker and was getting a little frayed around the edges.28 Holden himself had agreed that the story of Joe Gillis was his story. Joe is supported by an aging actress, he pointed out, and he had himself once been “a whore” like Joe. “When I was a young actor starting out in Hollywood, I used to service actresses who were older than me,” he confessed.29
Holden desperately wanted to give his career a boost, and Wilder convinced him that this was the part that would do it for him. Holden finally agreed to play Joe a scant three days before shooting began.30 As things turned out, Holden was better in the part than Clift would have been. Holden retained a vestige of the features of the all-American boy that he had been when he made Golden Boy. So in Sunset Boulevard he was the all-American boy being corrupted—a subtle dimension to the part that Clift could not have matched.
If Cukor had to encourage Swanson to play Norma, Swanson, in turn, had to coax Cecil B. De Mille to take a cameo role in the film. Swanson had heard by the grapevine that De Mille had agreed to do a scene but was having difficulty learning his lines, “and he was very nervous about appearing in front of the camera.” Swanson accordingly sent him a telegram, declaring, “Mr. De Mille, if you’re just yourself, you’ll be wonderful.”31 Swanson signed the telegram “Young Fellow,” which was De Mille’s pet name for her. Swanson had become a major star in the films she had made for De Mille between 1919 and 1921, including The Affairs of Anatol (1921), a saucy comedy about the battle of the sexes, in which she costarred with Wallace Reid. The nickname was a reference to the spirit and energy she brought to the parts she played. When he saw how Swanson had signed the telegram, “he lit up.”32 De Mille would call Norma “young fellow” in the film.
De Mille drove a hard bargain with Wilder for appearing in Sunset Boulevard. He got ten thousand dollars for one day’s work, a sequence in which Norma visits De Mille on the set of Samson and Delilah. Then Wilder asked him to come back and do one more close-up. “It was shot outside the soundstage, where he says goodbye to Norma. He came back”—and he got the studio to buy him a new limousine as compensation for the extra work.33 “We used his sets when Norma visits him,” which were still standing, Wilder remembered.34
In the screenplay Wilder and Brackett mention that Norma has Max screen “one of Norma’s old silent pictures” for Joe.35 Wilder wanted to use a clip from one of Swanson’s silents in this scene but was at a loss as to which of her pictures to choose. Stroheim suggested that Wilder take an excerpt from his Queen Kelly, an unfinished silent movie from 1928. Wilder told me, “It was an interesting tie-in, that the clip of Gloria Swanson as a younger film star was actually from the one picture in which she was directed by Stroheim, who was playing Norma’s former director in Sunset Boulevard. This added a more genuine flavor to the film.” Queen Kelly was produced by Gloria Swanson and financed by Joseph Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy), a Boston financier who was also Swanson’s lover. Swanson played Patricia Kelly, a young girl whose affair with a handsome prince ends abruptly when he is forced to marry the neurotic queen who rules the land. “Stroheim was painstaking and slow during filming because of his relentless perfectionism,” Swanson said. They had numerous clashes on the set. After one shouting match with Stroheim, who simply would not be hurried, she stalked off the set. She phoned Kennedy and stated flatly, “Our director is a madman!” Kennedy soon called Stroheim. He said that it was time to shut down the picture because it was clear that talking pictures were here to stay; there was little hope of releasing a silent film successfully.36 In Sunset Boulevard, it is while looking at a close-up of herself in this silent film that Norma utters the celebrated remark, “No dialogue—we didn’t need dialogue. We had faces then.”
Swanson, as producer of the picture, gave Wilder permission to use an excerpt from Queen Kelly in Sunset Boulevard. “Of course I didn’t mind,” she writes in her autobiography. She and Stroheim “had long since reconciled our differences over Queen Kelly.”37 When I asked Wilder why he substituted his own intertitle for the one in the scene he was using from Queen Kelly, he replied, “I couldn’t use the intertitle from Queen Kelly because Queen Kelly was a movie starring Gloria Swanson, while the clip being projected in Sunset Boulevard was supposedly from a film starring Norma Desmond.”
While location scouting around Hollywood, Wilder found the house that would serve as Norma Desmond’s mansion at 3810 Wilshire Boulevard, although the address is given as 10086 Sunset Boulevard in the film. The real house “was owned by billionaire John Paul Getty,” Seitz remembered. Paramount rented it for the duration of the shoot.38 Getty had given the house to his ex-wife as part of their divorce settlement, but she did not reside there. The baroque edifice was built in 1924 to resemble a French-Italian Renaissance castle. The swimming pool was added to the grounds for the film, and the former Mrs. Getty kept it as partial payment for the use of the house when shooting was completed.
Joe characterizes Norma’s “mausoleum” in his voice-over narration of the film as “the kind of place that crazy movie people built in the crazy ’20s.” Wilder had Joe describe the old mansion this way: “A neglected house gets an unhappy look—this one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in Great Expectations, that Miss Havisham, with her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on the world because she had been given the go-by.”
Hans Dreier, head of Paramount’s art department, took a special interest in the set designs for Sunset Boulevard, as he had for Double Indemnity. Dreier appointed John Meehan production designer on Sunset Boulevard, but he supervised Meehan’s work very closely. The Getty house was used for exteriors; interiors were filmed on sets built in the studio. Tom Wood, unit publicist on the film, describes in his book on Wilder the elaborate sets Meehan designed in consultation with Dreier for Norma’s florid palazzo. There were “stained glass windows in the front hall, palm trees . . . in the conservatory,” heavy velvet drapes, and a pipe organ in the living room. The gondola-shaped bed in Norma’s boudoir once belonged to Gaby de Lys, the legendary exotic dancer.39 To top it off, Wilder borrowed from Swanson a gallery of vintage photographs of herself to serve as pictures of Norma; they transform Norma’s living room into “a museum.”40
Beginning on March 26, 1949, prior to the start of principal photography, Wilder commandeered the camera crew to shoot various locations around Hollywood and Beverly Hills. His purpose was to establish the authentic atmosphere of the film colony for the movie. He photographed the Alto Nido Apartments at 1851 North Ivar Avenue, near Hollywood and Vine, where Joe Gillis lives in a seedy bachelor flat. (The apartment building is still there.) The set that Meehan designed for the interior of Joe’s digs was created in the studio. Wilder also took some exterior shots of Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard, which was a hangout for young hopefuls—both writers and actors. Joe and his friends congregate at Schwab’s.
Principal photography commenced officially on April 18, 1949. During shooting, writes Swanson, “Erich von Stroheim kept suggesting things and asking if scenes might be reshot—very much in his grand old manner of perfectionism, regardless of schedule or cost.”41 Still, Wilder found some of Stroheim’s suggestions helpful. Wilder told me, “It was he who suggested that Norma be receiving fan letters that are ultimately disclosed as having been written by Max. Stroheim had a fine celluloid mind; he knew what worked.” As Stroheim told Wilder, Max writes the letters “because Max still loves her and pities her.” Wilder commented, “Erich had another idea, to dramatize that Max was still crazy about Norma.” Stroheim wanted Max to “be shown washing some of her undies, and caressing them lasciviously.” This was precisely the kind of sexual fetish that Stroheim had gotten away with in his silent films like Foolish Wives, in the days before the censorship code. Wilder convinced Stroheim that such a titillating scene would get them arrested.
Stroheim had one difficulty in playing Max that Wilder had not anticipated. Swanson writes, “Erich as Max, Norma’s butler and chauffeur, drives her and Joe to Paramount in her old Isotta-Fraschini, with its leopard upholstery. Erich didn’t know how to drive.”42 So the camera stayed close to him as he faked turning the steering wheel, while the ancient auto was towed by ropes attached to a truck. And yet Stroheim still managed to crash into the Paramount gate on Marathon Street!
There was a technically difficult shot in the opening scene in which Joe’s corpse, floating facedown on the surface of the swimming pool, is viewed from below. Wilder instructed Seitz and Meehan, “The shot I want is from a fish’s viewpoint.” Meehan placed a six-by-eight-foot mirror at the bottom of the pool. Seitz then positioned his camera on the edge of the pool, pointed it down at the mirror, and filmed Holden’s body as it was reflected in the mirror. This proved to be a simple way of getting the shot, Meehan explained, without “the use of expensive underwater camera equipment.”43
When Norma and Joe tango together on New Year’s Eve on the tile floor of the deserted ballroom of her once-elegant mansion, Norma observes, “Valentino said there’s nothing like tile for a tango.” Swanson had actually tangoed with Rudolph Valentino in the one picture they made together, Sam Wood’s Beyond the Rocks (1922). Seitz had shot The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921, in which Valentino danced a terrific tango with Alice Terry. Seitz utilized the same technique to photograph the tango in both films. He had the camera mounted on a platform on wheels. “Men behind the camera moved the camera platform” so that Seitz could photograph Swanson and Holden “making a complete 360-degree turn around the room.”44
When Joe later that night threatens to leave Norma, she attempts suicide by slashing her wrists. For the subsequent scene, in which Norma lies on her bed with her wrists bandaged, Seitz asked Wilder what kind of camera setup he wanted. Wilder replied impishly, “Johnny, it’s the usual slashed wrist shot.”45
Swanson writes that no picture “challenged or engrossed” her more than Sunset Boulevard. For example, Wilder asked her to do an imitation of Charlie Chaplin, whom Swanson had known since 1915, when both were starting out in silent pictures. She had done a Chaplin imitation in Alan Dwan’s Manhandled in 1924. Rehearsing a party scene with Dwan, Swanson snatched a derby from a crew member and clapped it on her head. “Then I grabbed a cane from somebody and started wobbling around in an impersonation of Chaplin.”46 She virtually repeated in Sunset Boulevard the Chaplin routine she had done in Manhandled. This time Swanson borrowed Wilder’s malacca cane for her imitation.
Principal photography wrapped on June 18, 1949. The final scene to be shot was also the final scene in the picture; it took two days to shoot. It was Norma’s mad scene, when she descends the grand staircase of her mansion in a trance, fantasizing that she is at last making her comeback film. Her eyes are glazed as she walks toward the camera lens, and the shot gradually goes out of focus and fades to black. “I hated to have the picture end,” Swanson writes. “When Mr. Wilder called ‘Print it!’ I burst into tears,” while the cast and crew burst into applause.47
Although the filming itself went smoothly, Wilder had some bitter quarrels with Brackett during postproduction. Brackett had originally perceived the film’s premise as that of a silent screen star’s attempt at a comeback, which would fundamentally be a comedy with some serious undertones. As the production progressed, Brackett became increasingly uneasy about the grotesque touches Wilder was adding to the mix. As producer of the picture, Brackett had a right to complain, but Wilder did not often heed his objections. One bone of contention was a montage of Norma preparing for her return to the screen by subjecting herself “to a merciless series of facial treatments, in order to have her image as the ageless star.”48 An army of beauticians employ massages, sweat boxes, mudpacks, and rubber masks, “as Norma tries to recapture the face of her celluloid image.”49
When Brackett viewed the rushes of this footage with Wilder and William Schorr, Wilder’s production assistant, he was apoplectic. He reminded Wilder that the script merely called for “a short montage of various beauty treatments applied to Norma.”50 Brackett insisted that Wilder had turned the montage into something grotesque and vulgar, and he demanded that Wilder excise the montage from the film. Wilder responded that he wanted to portray the torment an older actress would endure to make a comeback. Wilder and Brackett finally exchanged blows, and Schorr had to intervene to stop the fistfight. Schorr was then asked to resolve the conflict. Sunset Boulevard was the first film he had worked on at Paramount, and Wilder was his immediate boss. Not surprisingly, he sided with Wilder. Brackett stormed out of the screening room, shouting obscenities at both men. It was at this time that Wilder confided to Schorr that very likely “this was the last film he would ever make with Charles Brackett.”51
Doane Harrison became supervising editor of Wilder’s movies starting with Sunset Boulevard. Arthur Schmidt was assigned to edit the film, in collaboration with Harrison. Usually Harrison was on deck to consult with Wilder about cutting the film. He brought a combination of intuition and experience to his discussions with Wilder. “It’s likely that Harrison’s eye . . . did much to ensure that no scene goes on too long and that no scene is truncated,” writes Sam Staggs. “Harrison’s contribution to Sunset Boulevard surely helped to make the picture a seamless, balanced, measured work of art.”52
During his career Harrison was nominated for three Academy Awards, for Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard. Inexplicably, he never won. For the record, John Seitz was nominated for the same three pictures, plus Double Indemnity, and the inscrutable members of the academy never voted him a single Oscar either.
Composer Franz Waxman, who scored Sunset Boulevard, was, like Wilder, an émigré from Berlin who came to Hollywood during the Nazi period. By the time he composed the background music for Sunset Boulevard, he had written scores for some outstanding Hollywood films, including Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). He began working on his music for Sunset Boulevard immediately after principal photography was completed in June 1949; he labored all summer and finished in August. “The main theme is one of a tango character,” Waxman explained; “it stems from a scene in which Gloria Swanson makes reference to the early days of Hollywood and dancing the tango with Rudolph Valentino. This is the atmosphere in which she still lives in 1950. The tango theme recurs throughout the film, changing keys and instrumentation as called for, right up to the film’s climactic scene, when Norma has gone completely mad.” At this time the tango theme is repeated “in twisted and tortured harmonies”; it has become “as disjointed as her mind is at this moment.”53 John Caps, who named Waxman’s score for Sunset Boulevard among the best ever composed for a film, states, “The dark, pulsing introductory passages place the audience in the sonic world” of a thriller—all tense strings and strident brass. “Waxman spins his material into an essay on dead dreams and self-delusion.” By the end, Waxman himself added, the main theme “has become a powerful tango into madness,” to accompany Norma’s ghastly descent of the staircase.54
Since Norma is playing Salome as she sweeps down the stairs, Wilder employed Richard Strauss’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” from his opera Salome during rehearsals. Wilder said, “Then we got better than Strauss: Waxman!”55 Waxman wrote his own Salome music for the last scene, which he titled “The Comeback” in his score. Wilder commented, “Waxman and Rozsa, two Europeans, provided my best scores. They knew my work intuitively.”56
The original draft of the screenplay, dated December 21, 1948, begins with a prologue that was to appear after the opening credits but did not make it into the finished film. This sequence, which takes place in the Los Angeles County Morgue, was written by Wilder alone, since Brackett would have nothing to do with it. As he had done with Norma’s beauty treatment montage, Brackett pronounced the prologue disgusting and morbid. The camera pans from the pavement to the rear of a black hearse; painted on the back of the hearse is the word Coroner. The vehicle pulls up to the receiving entrance of the Los Angeles County Morgue, a low, narrow building. Two attendants wheel the corpse on a cot from the hearse into a large, windowless room. Along the walls are twenty sheet-covered corpses lying on metal slabs in two orderly rows. One of the morgue attendants removes the shoes and socks of the latest arrival. A tag is attached to the left big toe that reads, “Joe Gillis, homicide, 5/19/49.” After the attendants leave, Joe sits up on his slab and begins to recount to the other cadavers how he came to be there.
In January 1950, Wilder had a sneak preview of the picture at the Coronet Theatre in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago, near Northwestern University. Wilder chose a town far from Hollywood because he did not want a lot of Hollywood insiders at the preview of this picture about the industry. “At the moment they tied the name tag to Holden’s big toe,” Wilder recalled, “the people roared with laughter.” When some of the audience began to walk out, Wilder followed; he sat disconsolately in the lobby, on the steps leading downstairs to the restrooms. As a well-dressed woman passed him on the stairs, he inquired how she liked the picture. She barked, “Have you ever seen such a pile of crap in your life?” Wilder replied, “Never!”57
Seeking to do some damage control, Wilder figured that, just as in the case of the sneak preview of The Lost Weekend, the audience did not know whether the movie they were going to see was a comedy or a drama. They did not know what mood to be in for Sunset Boulevard, and they found the morgue scene ludicrous. Wilder decided to lop off the prologue.
Many film historians assume that Wilder devised a whole new opening sequence, on which he expended additional time and money filming. But that is not the case. John Seitz testified that the footage of Joe’s corpse floating in Norma’s pool while the police try to fish him out had already been shot for use toward the end of the film. “We already had both”—the morgue sequence and the scene at the pool.58 Wilder himself stated, “No new footage was shot.” He simply added a voice-over narration by Joe, telling posthumously of the events leading up to his demise.59
Paramount hosted a full-dress preview screening at the studio in April 1950, to which three hundred members of the Hollywood industry were invited. Wilder was concerned about how the film community would accept the picture. He reassured himself that the new opening sequence was going to get the movie off to a good start. At the first strains of Waxman’s score, with its strident brass and surging strings, the picture got rolling.
After the opening credits, in which the film’s title is seen stenciled in wedge-shaped letters on a curb, the police are shown swarming around a swimming pool. The pool is on the grounds of an immense baroque estate on Sunset Boulevard; it is just after dawn. A corpse is floating facedown in the pool. The dead man is Joe Gillis, who begins to tell the filmgoer his story in voice-over on the sound track. Joe narrates the film “from beyond the grave,” writes Avrom Fleishman, “from the detached perspective of the dead.”60
As Joe’s story unfolds in flashback, we see him as a debt-ridden, failed screenwriter. One day Joe’s car has a blowout on Sunset Boulevard, and he turns into the curving private driveway of a garish, shuttered villa that belongs to Norma Desmond, a faded star of the silent screen. When Norma learns that Joe is a screenwriter, she promptly engages him to revise her elephantine screenplay for Salome, a biblical epic in which she desperately hopes to make her comeback. The film scenario that she sketches for Joe is clearly derived from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1894), “the version that invented the Dance of the Seven Veils.”61 Joe is to be her amanuensis or, more precisely, her “ghostwriter”—laboring over a script for Norma, who is but a ghost of her former self. “Poor devil,” Joe muses, “still waving to a parade that has passed her by.”
Norma plays bridge once a week with some old friends whom Joe wryly christens “the Waxworks, dim figures from the silent days.” Wilder strove to give the film documentary-like realism by having three stars of silent pictures join Norma’s bridge game: H. B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton. Warner had played Christ in De Mille’s 1927 biblical spectacle The King of Kings; Nilsson was imported to Hollywood from Sweden in 1911—a dozen years before Garbo—to appear in silent pictures like Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration (1915); and Keaton was the silent clown who made the comic masterpiece The General (1927). “The cameo appearances of these silent film stars added a more genuine flavor to the film,” as an evocation of the old Hollywood, Wilder said. Swanson writes that “Keaton muttered in his unmatchable deadpan, ‘Waxworks is right,’ ” as the four assembled for the scene, “and we all howled with laughter. . . . Keaton looked ravaged, as indeed he had been, by alcohol.”62
The bridge game was filmed on May 3, 1949. The actors all performed like professionals, requiring only two or three takes for each shot. By 5:15 Wilder had finished shooting the bridge game. The reunion of the four stars of silent movies for a single day, Keaton observed, was “like old home week.”63
Cecil B. De Mille also enjoyed playing himself in Sunset Boulevard. Wilder said, “He was very disciplined and gave a subtler performance, I thought, than any actor ever gave in a film that he directed.” In the sequence in which Norma visits De Mille while he is shooting Samson and Delilah, De Mille puts her in the director’s chair so she can watch a rehearsal. “While she is sitting there,” David Freeman observes, “a boom microphone passes behind her, disturbing her hat and casting a shadow over her face. . . . Norma scowls at the microphone, the very thing that ended her era.”64 Norma mentions to De Mille that the studio has been calling her urgently, but it is not, as she thinks, about making her Salome movie; it is merely to arrange to borrow her venerable Isotta-Fraschini for a Crosby picture. Jeffrey Meyers notes that “De Mille manages to suppress this fact, to forestall her humiliation.”65
On New Year’s Eve, Joe has a quarrel with Norma, who is drunk; he walks out on her. But Max soon phones him to inform him that Norma has attempted suicide. Joe returns to the house and finds Norma lying in bed, and they are reconciled. “At the stroke of midnight, as the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ waft into the room, she reaches up and pulls him toward her with nails that look like talons,” comments Morris Dickstein.66
The film’s title refers to the passing of the old Hollywood: It recalls the tragic lives of has-been film stars like Norma Desmond, whose careers in silent pictures were eclipsed by the advent of sound. The sun set on their careers when they failed to make the transition to sound films. The decaying swimming pool on Norma’s estate, in which John Gilbert swam ten thousand midnights ago, is a relic of the grandeur of Norma’s long-lost heyday as a superstar in Hollywood. It is cracked and empty at the film’s start, but after Joe enters her life, Norma restores the pool and fills it. “Still, I didn’t conceive the pool so much as a metaphor for Norma’s personal decay, but as an authentic depiction of the way a woman like Norma, living in the past, would allow her property to slide into ruin,” Wilder explained. “Even today there are old Hollywood estates with empty swimming pools, with rats running around in them, and cracked tennis courts with sagging nets. That is part of our community; people are up, and then they are down. I also used the neglected pool for a dramatic purpose, because later when Joe enters Norma’s life, it would be natural that she would have the pool cleaned and filled as an indication of her renewed interest in life.”
Norma’s romance with Joe is doomed to be short-lived, however; as time goes on, Joe finds it intolerable to be supported by a wealthy, aging woman. He realizes that he is an opportunist who has sold himself to the highest bidder. He thus reflects Wilder’s favorite theme: Joe can no longer bring himself to do anything for money. Joe strikes up a relationship with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), another aspiring screenwriter. She calls one sequence in “Dark Windows,” a scenario of Joe’s, “moving and true.” She is confident that it could be made into a screenplay about “teachers and their threadbare lives.” Joe catches her enthusiasm, and he works on it surreptitiously with her several nights a week. But Norma inevitably discovers that Joe is seeing Betty and becomes insanely jealous.
One fateful night, Joe finally summons the courage to tell Norma that he is terminating their sordid liaison once and for all. “Norma, you’re a woman of fifty,” Joe tells her. “There is nothing tragic about being fifty, unless you try to be twenty-five!” When she threatens to kill herself if he leaves, he replies, “You’d be killing yourself to an empty house. The audience left twenty years ago.” Norma, who has been emotionally disturbed for some time, finally crosses the brink into insanity. As Joe leaves her spectral mansion and walks across the patio, the deranged woman empties a revolver into his retreating figure; he pitches forward into the swimming pool. She shoots Joe dead, comments Steffen Haubner, “to prevent him from abandoning her, as everyone else did long ago.”67 As Joe is fished out of the floodlit pool by the police, he comments laconically on the sound track to the filmgoer, “Well, this is where you came in.”
Shortly afterward, a crew of newsreel cameramen enter the mansion to photograph the fallen star as she is taken away by the police. But Norma mistakes the newsreel cameramen for the camera crew on a movie set and accordingly believes that she is at long last making her comeback film. Max, who has supported her fantasies about a new career all along, makes believe, for her sake, that he is Cecil B. De Mille directing her in Salome. A look of anguish crosses Max’s face when he directs the cameras toward Norma as she sweeps down the grand staircase of her exotic mansion for her final close-up. “So they were turning after all, those cameras,” Joe says over the sound track. “Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had finally enfolded her.” The stunning finale of Sunset Boulevard makes for one of the greatest moments in all cinema.
American films at the time tended to have more positive endings than this film does, because the studios feared that the public would reject downbeat endings. “Sunset Boulevard did not have a happy ending,” said Wilder, “because it was inevitable that Norma would go mad. No other ending would have worked for the film, and the studio at no point questioned this.”
Most of the audience at Paramount’s advance screening of Sunset Boulevard for the Hollywood community on that April night in 1950 stood up and cheered at the film’s conclusion. Gloria Swanson writes, “Barbara Stanwyck fell on her knees and kissed the hem of my skirt.” Swanson looked around for Mary Pickford, but an old-time producer told her, “She can’t show herself, Gloria. She’s overcome; we all are.”68 Not Mae Murray, another diva of the silent screen, whom Stroheim had directed in The Merry Widow (1925). She thought the movie was overdone; “None of us floozies was that nuts!” she exclaimed.69
Louis B. Mayer, the pompous chief executive of MGM, threw a tantrum in the lobby. “We should horsewhip this Wilder; . . . he should be sent back to Germany,” Mayer ranted.70 Then, spying Wilder, he shook his pudgy fist at him, denouncing him as a disgrace to the industry. “You have dirtied the nest. You should be kicked out of this country, tarred and feathered, you goddamned foreigner son-of-a-bitch.” In the heat of the moment, Mayer apparently lost sight of the fact that he too was an immigrant, having been born in Minsk, Russia. Tom Wood, the film’s publicist, diplomatically reported afterward that Wilder merely stuck his tongue out at Mayer. But, by Wilder’s own testimony, he responded to Mayer in kind. “Yes, I directed this picture,” Wilder said. “Mr. Mayer, why don’t you go fuck yourself!” When a friend later told him that his offensive remark might have cost him some Oscar votes, Wilder replied, “You are so right. Remind me to cut out my tongue in the morning.”71
Wilder insisted that Sunset Boulevard “was not anti-Hollywood,” as Mayer contended. Joe Gillis was a hack and Betty Schaefer tried “to put Joe back on the right track,” Wilder explained. “I don’t say anything derogatory about pictures” in this film.72 One might even say that Sunset Boulevard proves that Hollywood was fundamentally all right, if it could turn out a picture like Sunset Boulevard, so unlike the bland, well-scrubbed “heart-warmers” being churned out by Mayer at MGM in those days.
Very few critics panned Sunset Boulevard when it premiered at Radio City Music Hall on August 10, 1950. Admittedly, one reviewer dismissed it as “a pretentious slice of Roquefort,” but he was the exception that proved the rule.73 James Agee, who was committed to writing capsule film reviews for the Nation, contributed a five-page essay on the picture to the November 1950 issue of Sight and Sound. “It is one of those rare movies,” he rhapsodized, “that can be talked about, almost shot for shot and line for line, for hours on end. . . . I am willing to bet that it will be looked at and respected long after most of the movies too easily called great have been forgotten.”74 (For example, Compton Bennett’s King Solomon’s Mines, thought to be a major epic in 1950 and nominated, along with Sunset Boulevard, for best picture, is no longer remembered.)
Sunset Boulevard is blessed with a superb screenplay and inspired direction, topped off by Gloria Swanson’s superlative performance as Norma and Erich von Stroheim’s indelible portrayal of Max. Moreover, the movie is sterling for Wilder’s consummate craftsmanship in producing well-defined, plausible characters. Swanson, as the obsolete screen star, has the threat of madness throughout—the cockeyed glint in her eyes implies the unruly and unmanageable passions that lie beneath her surface glamour. This keeps us watching as she leads us down the treacherous path to tragedy.
When the Academy Awards rolled around, Sunset Boulevard nabbed eleven nominations, including best picture; Holden and Swanson for best actor and best actress; Stroheim for best supporting actor; Wilder for best director; Wilder, Brackett, and Marshman for best original screenplay; Waxman for best score; and Meehan and Dreier for best production design. On Oscar night, March 29, 1951, the only winners for Sunset Boulevard were Wilder, Brackett, and Marshman for best original screenplay; Waxman for best score; and Meehan and Dreier for best production design.
At the Oscar party that Paramount held at the Mocambo nightclub after the ceremony, Wilder commiserated with Holden: “It was a miscarriage of justice, Bill.”75 Since Paramount had come away from the Academy Awards almost empty handed, Wilder endeavored to cheer up the gathering at the Mocambo with his sardonic humor. He told the journalists present that Barbara Stanwyck had just related to him an anecdote about an aging actress like Norma Desmond whose toy boy was spending her money extravagantly. According to Wilder, Stanwyck had inquired of the dowager, “Tell me, darling, is the screwing you’re getting worth the screwing you’re getting?”76
Stroheim did not make the trip from Paris for the Oscar ceremonies; he was offended that he had been nominated for best supporting actor instead of best actor. So he had an additional reason to hate the role of the subservient butler to the end of his days.
Over the years, Sunset Boulevard has continued to be singled out as a masterpiece. When the American Film Institute (AFI) honored the best one hundred films made during the first century of American cinema with a special on CBS-TV on July 3, 2003, Sunset Boulevard was near the top of the list. The release of the picture on DVD in 2008 was the occasion for renewed acclaim. The transfer to DVD is a triumph of digital technology—it is amazingly sharp, clear, and free of perceptible blemishes, and it boasts detailed commentaries.
Wilder never forgot the very moment he decided to call it quits with Brackett once and for all. One day he was having a discussion with Brackett while they were sitting in Wilder’s car, parked in the studio lot. “He kind of flew off the handle,” said Wilder. The discussion turned into a violent quarrel, and they both got out of the car angry, “and that is how it ended.”77 The next morning Wilder said to Brackett with studied casualness, “You know, Charlie, after this, I don’t think we should work together any more. I think it is better for both of us if we just split up.”78
Nearly twenty years later, one rainy Sunday afternoon at Brackett’s Bel Air home, when he was dying from a stroke, Brackett talked with Garson Kanin about his breakup with Wilder. “I never knew what happened, never understood it,” Brackett lamented. “We were doing so well; I always thought we brought out the best in each other. . . . It was shattering; it was such an unexpected blow that I thought I’d never recover from it. And, in fact, I don’t think I ever have.” Brackett concluded, “We had our disagreements, of course; but they were always professional, never personal.”79
The point that Brackett had lost sight of was that their disagreements never ended. They had been quarreling incessantly, amid flying telephone books and ashtrays, for years. “It’s like with married people,” Wilder explained candidly; they have to argue in such a way that they don’t destroy anything basic about the relationship. “You have to be able to come back for more. Like lovers, it’s better not to go to sleep angry.”80 The collaboration of Wilder and Brackett had often been described as a marriage, but by now it was a bad marriage, according to Wilder. “We had been squabbling about every little thing.”81 Moreover, Wilder had broached to Brackett the subject of Ace in the Hole, a dark satire about yellow journalism, and Brackett wanted no part of what he termed a lurid scenario. And so the professional marriage of Wilder and Brackett finally ended in divorce, after twelve years and thirteen pictures.
After their separation, Wilder stayed at Paramount, but Brackett moved to Twentieth Century–Fox, where he continued cowriting and producing movies. In 1953 Brackett produced and coauthored the script for Titanic for director Jean Negulesco (remade by James Cameron in 1997). Brackett, Ninotchka cowriter Walter Reisch, and A Foreign Affair cowriter Richard Breen won an Academy Award for their screenplay for Titanic.
Wilder would stay at Paramount for another three pictures before moving on to other studios. After he broke off with Brackett, he took over from his former partner the responsibility of producing the films he directed, to safeguard his artistic autonomy. From now on, as cowriter, director, and producer of his films, Wilder would bear the brunt of whatever praise or blame accrued to his films.