Sunset Boulevard (film)
Sunset Boulevard (styled in the main title on-screen as SUNSET BLVD.) is a 1950 American black comedy[1][2] film noir[3] directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Wilder and Charles Brackett. It was named after a major street that runs through Hollywood.
Sunset Boulevard
- Charles Brackett
- Billy Wilder
- D. M. Marshman Jr.
Charles Brackett
Paramount Pictures
- August 10, 1950
110 minutes
United States
English
$1.75 million
$5 million
The film stars William Holden as Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, and Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, a former silent-film star who draws him into her deranged fantasy world, where she dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen. Erich von Stroheim plays Max von Mayerling, her devoted butler, and Nancy Olson, Jack Webb, Lloyd Gough, and Fred Clark appear in supporting roles. Director Cecil B. DeMille and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper play themselves, and the film includes cameo appearances by silent-film stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson.
Praised by many critics when first released, Sunset Boulevard was nominated for 11 Academy Awards (including nominations in all four acting categories) and won three. It is often ranked among the greatest movies ever made. As it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the U.S. Library of Congress in 1989, Sunset Boulevard was included in the first group of films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.[4] In 1998, it was ranked number 12 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 best American films of the 20th century, and in 2007, it was 16th on their 10th Anniversary list.
Plot[edit]
At a mansion on Sunset Boulevard, police officers and photographers discover the body of Joe Gillis floating face down in the swimming pool. In a flashback, Joe relates the events leading to his death.
Six months earlier, Joe is a down-on-his-luck screenwriter trying to interest Paramount Pictures in a story he submitted. Script reader Betty Schaefer harshly critiques it, unaware that Joe is listening. Later, while fleeing from repo men seeking his car, Joe turns into the driveway of a seemingly deserted mansion inhabited by forgotten silent film star Norma Desmond. Learning that Joe is a writer, Norma asks his opinion of a script she has written for a film about Salome. She plans to play the role herself in her return to the screen. Joe finds her script abysmal, but flatters her into hiring him as a script doctor.
Joe moves into Norma's mansion at her insistence, and sees that Norma refuses to believe that her fame has evaporated. Her butler Max secretly writes all of the fan mail that she receives in order to maintain the illusion. At her New Year's Eve party, Joe realizes that she has fallen in love with him. He tries to let her down gently, but Norma slaps him and retreats to her room, distraught. Joe visits his friend Artie Green and again meets Betty, who thinks a scene in one of Joe's scripts has potential. When he phones Max to have him pack his things, Max tells him Norma has cut her wrists with his razor. Joe then returns to Norma, and their relationship becomes intimate.
Norma has Max deliver the edited Salome script to her former director Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount. She starts getting calls from Paramount executive Gordon Cole but refuses to speak to anyone except DeMille. Eventually, she has Max drive her and Joe to Paramount in her 1929 Isotta Fraschini. DeMille welcomes her affectionately and treats her with great respect, but tactfully evades her questions about the script. Max then learns that Cole only called her because he wants to rent her Isotta Fraschini for use in a film.
Preparing for her imagined comeback, Norma undergoes rigorous beauty treatments. Joe secretly works nights in Betty's office, collaborating on an original screenplay. His moonlighting is discovered by Max, who then reveals that he was once a respected film director who discovered Norma, made her a star, and was her first husband. After she divorced him, he abandoned his career to become her servant.
Norma discovers a manuscript with Joe and Betty's names on it and phones Betty, insinuating that Joe is not the man he seems. Overhearing the call, Joe invites Betty to the mansion to see for herself. When she arrives, he pretends that he is satisfied being a gigolo so that she can be with Artie. However, after she tearfully leaves, he packs to return to his old newspaper job in Dayton, Ohio. He bluntly informs Norma that there will be no comeback, that Max writes all of her fan mail, and that she has been forgotten. He disregards Norma's threat to kill herself as she brandishes a gun; as he leaves the house, Norma shoots him three times, and he collapses into the pool.
The flashback ends and the film returns to the present day, with Desmond about to be arrested for murder. The mansion is overrun with police and reporters with newsreel cameras, which she believes are film cameras. Max pretends to "direct" her, and the police play along. As the cameras roll, Norma descends the grand staircase for what she thinks is a close-up for DeMille. She stops and makes an impromptu speech about how happy she is to be making a film again, then walks towards the camera.
Production[edit]
Background[edit]
The street known as Sunset Boulevard has been associated with Hollywood film production since 1911, when the town's first film studio, Nestor, opened there. The film workers lived modestly in the growing neighborhood, but during the 1920s, profits and salaries rose to unprecedented levels. With the advent of the star system, luxurious homes noted for their often incongruous grandeur were built in the area.
As a young man living in Berlin in the 1920s, Billy Wilder was interested in American culture, with much of his interest fueled by the country's films. In the late 1940s, many of the grand Hollywood houses remained, and Wilder, then a Los Angeles resident, found them to be a part of his everyday world. Many former stars from the silent era still lived in them, although most were no longer involved in the film business. Wilder wondered how they spent their time now that "the parade had passed them by" and began imagining the story of a star who had lost her celebrity and box-office appeal.[5]
The character of Norma Desmond mirrors aspects of the twilight years of several real-life faded silent-film stars, such as the reclusive existences of Mary Pickford and Pola Negri and the mental disorders of Mae Murray, Valeska Surratt, Audrey Munson and Clara Bow. Dave Kehr has asserted that Norma Talmadge is "the obvious if unacknowledged source of Norma Desmond, the grotesque, predatory silent movie queen" of the film.[6] The most common analysis of the character's name is that it is a combination of the names of silent film actress Mabel Normand and director William Desmond Taylor, a close friend of Normand's who was murdered in 1922 in a never-solved case sensationalized by the press.[7]
Original release and responses[edit]
Previews and revision[edit]
Wilder and Brackett, nervous about a major screening in Hollywood, held a preview in Evanston, Illinois, in late 1949. The original edit opened with a scene inside a morgue, with the assembled corpses discussing how they came to be there. The story began with the corpse of Joe Gillis recounting his murder to the others. The audience reacted with laughter and seemed unsure whether to view the rest of the film as drama or comedy. After a similar reaction during its second screening in Poughkeepsie, New York, and a third in Great Neck, the morgue opening was replaced by a shorter poolside opening,[30] using footage filmed on January 5, 1950.[31]
In Hollywood, Paramount arranged a private screening for the various studio heads and specially invited guests. After viewing the film, Barbara Stanwyck knelt to kiss the hem of Gloria Swanson's skirt. Swanson later remembered looking for Mary Pickford, only to be told, "She can't show herself, Gloria. She's too overcome. We all are." Louis B. Mayer berated Wilder before the crowd of celebrities, saying, "You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!" Upon hearing of Mayer's slight, Wilder strode up to the mogul and retorted with a vulgarity that one biographer said was allegedly because Mayer, who was Jewish, suggested that Wilder, who was also Jewish, would be better off being sent back to Germany, an extraordinary sentiment so soon after the war and the Holocaust, in which Wilder's family perished.[32][33] In 2020 Olson recounted that friends who had attended the screening told her that Wilder had simply told Mayer "Go fuck yourself."[23]
The few other criticisms were not so venomous. According to one often-told but later discredited anecdote,[34] actress Mae Murray, a contemporary of Swanson, was offended by the film and commented, "None of us floozies was that nuts."[35]
Premiere and box-office receipts[edit]
Sunset Boulevard had its official world premiere at Radio City Music Hall on August 10, 1950.[36] After a seven-week run, Variety magazine reported the film had grossed "around $1,020,000", ($12,917,178 in 2023 dollars [37]) making it one of that theater's most successful pictures. Variety also noted that, while it was "breaking records in major cities, it is doing below average in ... the sticks." To promote the film, Gloria Swanson traveled by train throughout the United States, visiting 33 cities in a few months. The publicity helped attract people to the cinemas, but in many areas away from major cities it was considered less than a hit.[7]
The film earned an estimated $2,350,000 at the U.S. box office in 1950 ($29,760,166 in 2023 dollars [37]).[38]
Critical response[edit]
Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 98% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 112 reviews, with an average rating of 9.5/10. The critical consensus states: "Arguably the greatest movie about Hollywood, Billy Wilder's masterpiece Sunset Boulevard is a tremendously entertaining combination of noir, black comedy, and character study."[39]
Aftermath[edit]
Sunset Boulevard was the last collaboration between Wilder and Brackett. They parted amicably and did not publicly air any grievances for the rest of their lives. In later years, Brackett confided in screenwriter/director Garson Kanin that he had not anticipated the split, or had ever understood exactly what happened or why. He described it as "an unexpected blow" from which he never recovered fully; when asked to respond to Brackett's comments, Wilder remained silent.[62]
The two men briefly reunited in October 1951 to face charges that they had plagiarized Sunset Boulevard. Former Paramount accountant Stephanie Joan Carlson alleged that in 1947 she had submitted to Wilder and Brackett, at their request, manuscripts of stories, both fictional and based on fact, she had written about studio life. She claimed that one in particular, Past Performance, served as the basis for the Sunset script, and sued the screenwriters and Paramount for $100,000 in general damages, $250,000 in punitive damages, $700,000 based on the box office returns, and an additional $350,000 for good measure, for a total of $1,400,000. Carlson's suit was dismissed after two and a half years. In 1954, a similar suit was filed by playwright Edra Buckler, who claimed material she had written had been the screenplay's source. Her suit was dismissed the following year.[63]
Brackett's Hollywood career continued after his split with Wilder. He won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Titanic (1953), and wrote Niagara (1953), the breakthrough film for Marilyn Monroe as a dramatic actress. It was Wilder, however, who realized Monroe's comedic abilities in The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot. Brackett's career waned by the end of the decade, though he did produce the Oscar-nominated film The King and I (1956). He received an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1958.
William Holden began receiving more important parts and his career rose. He won the Best Actor Oscar for Stalag 17 (1953), also directed by Wilder, and by 1956 he was the top box-office attraction in the United States. Holden and Wilder also rejoined forces for Fedora (1978), another film critical of Hollywood.
Before the film was released, Nancy Olson had grown disenchanted with film as a career partly because the themes of Sunset Boulevard resonated with her, and also because she had become engaged to songwriter Alan Jay Lerner and decided to move to New York with him. Nevertheless, Olson's pairing with William Holden was considered a success, and she appeared opposite him in several films during the 1950s, although none of them repeated their earlier success; she returned to Hollywood to make several other films, including The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) and Son of Flubber (1963), in which she was paired with Fred MacMurray.[23]
Similarly, Gloria Swanson was not able to leverage her own success in Sunset Boulevard. Although offered scripts, she felt that they all were poor imitations of Norma Desmond. Imagining a career that would eventually reduce her to playing "a parody of a parody," she virtually retired from films.[5]
Sunset Boulevard was shown again in New York City in 1960, and drew such a positive response that Paramount arranged for a limited re-release in theaters throughout the United States.
Films that discuss Sunset Boulevard in their screenplays or pay homage in scenes or dialogue include Soapdish (1991), The Player (1992), Gods and Monsters (1998), Mulholland Drive (2001),[7] Inland Empire (2006) and Be Cool (2005). The ending of Cecil B. Demented (2000) is a parody of Sunset Boulevard's final scene.
Restoration and home media[edit]
By the late 1990s, most Sunset Boulevard prints were in poor condition, and as the film was shot using cellulose nitrate filmstock, much of the original negative had perished. Paramount Studios, believing the film merited the effort of a complete restoration, mounted an expensive project to have it digitally restored. This restored version was released on DVD in 2002.[64][65] In 2012, the film was digitally restored by Paramount Pictures for Blu-ray Disc debut. Frame-by-frame digital restoration by Prasad Corporation removed dirt, tears, scratches and other defects.[66][67]
Musical adaptations[edit]
Stapley and Hughes[edit]
From around 1952 to 1956, Gloria Swanson herself worked with actor Richard Stapley (aka Richard Wyler) and cabaret singer/pianist Dickson Hughes on an adaptation titled Boulevard! (at first Starring Norma Desmond). Stapley and Hughes first approached Swanson about appearing in a musical revue they had written, About Time (based on Time). Swanson stated that she would return to the stage only in a musical version of her comeback film. Within a week, Stapley and Dickson had written three songs which Swanson approved.[68]
In this version, the romance between Gillis and Schaefer was allowed to blossom, and rather than shoot Gillis at the end, Norma gave the couple her blessing, sending them on their way to live "happily ever after."
Although Paramount gave verbal permission to proceed with the musical, there was no formal legal option. In the late 1950s, Paramount withdrew its consent, leading to the demise of the project.
In 1994, Dickson Hughes incorporated material from Boulevard! into a musical Swanson on Sunset, based on his and Stapley's experiences in writing Boulevard!.
This attempt is chronicled in the 2021 documentary Boulevard! A Hollywood Story.
Other failed attempts[edit]
Stephen Sondheim briefly considered turning Sunset Boulevard into a musical until meeting Billy Wilder at a cocktail party, who told him that the film would be better adapted as an opera rather than a musical.[69] Hal Prince later approached Sondheim to adapt the film as a musical with Angela Lansbury playing Norma Desmond.[70]
John Kander and Fred Ebb were also approached by Hal Prince to write a musical of Sunset Boulevard.[71]