Sunset Boulevard (1950) on Netflix
Joe Gillis, a screenwriter fleeing the men who want his car, hides in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard. Its owner, Norma Desmond, a silent film star, has written a comeback script.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Norma Desmond lives in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard, a silent film star whose time on screen is over. She has written a screenplay about Salome and means to play the lead in it herself. Joe Gillis, a screenwriter with repo men after his car and no buyer for his work, turns into her driveway. When she learns what he does, she asks his opinion of the script. He finds it poor but tells her otherwise, and she hires him as a script doctor and moves him into the house. Joe's acquaintance Betty Schaefer, a script reader who once harshly critiqued one of his stories, comes back into his life through his friend Artie Green.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Billy Wilder insisted that Joe Gillis's corpse be seen from the bottom of the pool. After experiments with a camera lowered underwater disappointed him, the shot was achieved by placing a mirror on the pool floor and filming William Holden's reflection from above, with the police officers around the pool forming a backdrop.
- Montgomery Clift was signed to play Joe Gillis at $5,000 a week for 12 weeks but withdrew just before filming began, saying the role of a young man involved with an older woman was too close to his part in The Heiress. An infuriated Wilder said that if Clift were any kind of actor, he could be convincing making love to any woman.
- Billy Wilder recalled that he first wanted Mae West and Marlon Brando for the leads of Sunset Boulevard. West rejected the offer outright, offended that she should be asked to play a Hollywood has-been while she was still portraying herself as a sex symbol in her senior years.
- To hide the story from Paramount Pictures and dodge Hays Code censorship, Wilder and Brackett submitted the script a few pages at a time, letting executives believe Wilder was adapting a nonexistent story called A Can of Beans. Only the first third of the script was written when filming began in May 1949.
- Norma Desmond's mansion exteriors were filmed at a Wilshire Boulevard house built in the 1920s by millionaire William O. Jenkins, who lived in it only a year before leaving it abandoned for over a decade, earning it the nickname "Phantom House". It later appeared in Rebel Without a Cause and was demolished in 1957.
- At a Paramount screening for studio heads and guests, Louis B. Mayer shouted at Billy Wilder, "You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!" Wilder retorted with a vulgarity, allegedly after Mayer suggested that the Jewish Wilder be sent back to Germany, where his family had perished in the Holocaust.
- Critics expected the Best Actress Oscar to go to Gloria Swanson or Bette Davis, and were surprised when newcomer Judy Holliday won for Born Yesterday. Davis believed that she and Swanson had effectively canceled each other out by playing comparable characters, allowing Holliday to win.
- Franz Waxman based Norma Desmond's theme on tango music, inspired by her having danced the tango with Rudolph Valentino, and set it against Joe Gillis's bebop theme. He also used distorted arrangements of 1920s and 1930s film-music styles to suggest her state of mind.
