By Peter Tonguette
In his recent interview on Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast, Woody Allen — speaking freely, candidly, and unguardedly — admitted that he was not among those who revere Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” as a great work of art. “‘Sunset Boulevard’ is what my wife would call, and I would agree with her, fun junk,” Allen said. “You know, it’s great fun, but it’s a junky and silly movie.” The Oscar-winning writer-director expressed several unconventional cinematic opinions on the podcast (including that “Lawrence of Arabia,” while impressive as filmmaking, contained “cornball” performances).
Still, surprisingly, his view of “Sunset Boulevard” reflects a strong minority position in certain cinephile circles. Although the film was an Oscar-winner and a box-office hit for Paramount Pictures, and has become a perpetual presence on “best of all-time” lists, some observers have failed to discern deeper meanings in the tale of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a one-time silent movie goddess who, in her senescence, has persuaded herself that the handiwork of barely-getting-by screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) will be her vessel back to the big screen. In the screenplay by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman Jr., Norma is ready for her close-up, but no one else cares to see it. The film’s maliciously comic insight is that star power waxes and wanes but ultimately — finally, permanently — wanes.
Yet in his definitive account of leading directors working in America, “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968,” film critic Andrew Sarris deposited Wilder in his dreaded “Less Than Meets the Eye” category, and he did not spare “Sunset Boulevard” from his critical contempt. “Even his best films — ‘The Major and the Minor,’ ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ ‘Stalag 17,’ and ‘Some Like It Hot’ — are marred by the director’s penchant for gross caricature, especially with peripheral characters,” wrote Sarris, and certainly there is a strong preference for the grotesque in “Sunset”: No adjective better fits Erich von Stroheim’s performance as Norma’s butler, Max, to say nothing of the assorted cameos by the once and formerly famous, including Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille.
On the other hand, perhaps “Sunset Boulevard” is a classic precisely because of what some perceive as its shallowness and outrageousness. Since Wilder and Brackett had focused their satiric energies on Hollywood, whose gloss and glitz have always concealed striving, despair, and self-delusion, isn’t it fitting that their movie would reflect their subject? As is revealed in “Ready for My Close-Up,” David M. Lubin’s first-rate new book about the making of the film, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer indeed zeroed in on the threat “Sunset Boulevard” posed to the image he sought to propagate of the industry. “You should be tarred and feathered and run out of town,” Mayer told Wilder, and this was not merely the words of a jealous man at the helm of another studio. “No one had a greater hand in creating and maintaining the star system,” Lubin writes of Mayer. “MGM’s publicists boasted the studio had ‘more stars than in the heavens.’ “Sunset Boulevard” suggested that many, if not most, Hollywood stars were not so heavenly; that they were incorrigible narcissists who grew increasingly out of touch with reality and had little ability to adapt to life when their stardom waned, as inevitably it would.” The film endures, Lubin suggests, because it uses a unique stew of genres — including comedy, crime film, horror story, and Hollywood exposé — to make this point. “’Sunset Boulevard’ is above all an unsentimental examination of our innate unwillingness to accept the inevitability of decline, decay, and death,” he writes. “Norma’s game is to avoid looking death, or its earthly emissary, old age, in the face.”
What was the source of Wilder’s seemingly immovable cynicism? His story will not be unfamiliar to film history buffs, but Lubin offers fresh insight into the basic details. Born in 1906 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wilder grew up in an atmosphere that worked to permanently sour his view of human beings, especially when it came to romance. Libertinism surrounded him. “In high school, he spent several years looking out the classroom window at the pay-by-the-hour hotel across the street, where men and women entered together, only to leave separately a short time later,” Lubin writes. Although his parents, Max and Eugenia, were perfectly respectable members of society in the hotel business, Billy found reason even to mistrust the apparent propriety of his home life. Lubin reveals: “While still in high school, Wilder inadvertently opened a letter addressed to Max, [who], he discovered on reading it, had fathered an illegitimate son nearly Billy’s age.”
Eventually pulling up stakes for Berlin, Wilder tried to make inroads as a reporter and aspiring screenwriter, but his most profitable vocation was working as what was called a “tea dancer” or “taxi dancer” at a pair of fancy hotels. “Both terms were euphemisms for a dance partner or social (and perhaps sexual) companion available for hire: a gigolo,” Lubin writes. He drew upon this experience in a series of magazine articles that bore the title, “Waiter, A Dancer Please!” — a title that, one imagines, could easily have been repurposed for one of Wilder’s deliciously hard-bitten screenplays.
Lubin plots out Wilder’s progress from the German film industry (where, in time, he had success as one of the scenarists on the influential 1930 production “People on Sunday”) to Hollywood, where, in partnership with the far more straitlaced Brackett, he dreamt up the dialogue for such classic comedies as Ernst Lubitsch’s “Ninotchka” (1939), Mitchell Leisen’s “Midnight” (1939), and Howard Hawks’s “Ball of Fire” (1941). Then, in 1942, Wilder prevailed upon Paramount to let him occupy the director’s chair on the Wilder-Brackett script “The Major and the Minor” (1942), starring Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers. Here, Lubin gives us a first reference to picture editor Doane Harrison, who would remain Wilder’s close cutting-room collaborator and production associate well into the 1960s. On that first directorial effort, Lubin writes, Harrison “taught the almost novice director to ‘cut within the camera’ — that is, to pre-think how shots would stitch together so that a minimum of editing would be necessary, and the resulting film would glide effortlessly from one moment to the next.”
Of course, such editorial smoothness can also be achieved without “cutting within the camera,” but undeniably, such a spare, unfussy approach appealed to Wilder. “You will not find in my pictures any phony camera moves or fancy setups to prove I am a moving-picture director,” Wilder once said. “I like to believe that movement can be achieved eloquently, elegantly, economically, and logically without shooting from a hole in the ground.” Which is not to say that Wilder lacked artistic ambitions and even pretensions: In a fascinating insight, Lubin writes that it was Wilder’s reading of novelist Evelyn Waugh’s Los Angeles-set satire “The Loved One” that provided an early kernel of inspiration for the script that became “Sunset Boulevard.” The ill-attended, rather perfunctory Hollywood funeral for silent film pioneer director D.W. Griffith, by then a shamefully neglected figure, was another motivating factor for Wilder and Brackett. “Billy and I spent the morning in discussion of the Hollywood story,” Brackett wrote in his diary, soon after Griffith’s sendoff. “It’s all centered around a swimming pool owned by an old silent days’ star.”
Lubin expertly traces the assorted histories of the other major players in “Sunset Boulevard,” including Gloria Swanson, whose silent-film superstardom is well evoked. “At the zenith of her career, Swanson was among Hollywood’s greatest celebrities, beloved by legions of fans who were whipped into a constant state of adoration by a popular new medium, the movie magazine, Photoplay being the best known,” writes Lubin, who notes that Photoplay was the magazine that furnished figures on the actress’s alleged spending habits, including $500,000 annually for jewelry, $50,000 for gowns, and $10,000 for lingerie. Yet Swanson could relate not just to Norma Desmond’s ascent but her decline as well, especially after her ill-advised decision to pour her energy (and financial resources) into her own company, Gloria Swanson Productions, and retain the directorial services of the future costar Stroheim, then a director associated with profligacy, for her production of “Queen Kelly” — at the expense of her acting career.
“No other star ever turned down a contract which agreed to pay $26,000 every week, fifty-two weeks every year for five years,” wrote journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns, but that’s just what Swanson did. “La Belle Swanson, at twenty-seven, then the best dressed woman in the world, a public idol, brushed it aside and two years later she was broke — and I mean flat broke.” When Wilder turned up with the ideas for “Sunset Boulevard,” which had been conceived for Mae West and pitched to Mary Pickford, Swanson had been consigned to the small screen as the host of “The Gloria Swanson Hour.” A screen test persuaded Wilder and Brackett of her enduring star presence and intuitive sense of the role. “She has no inhibitions,” Brackett wrote in his diary. “It’s just a question of holding her back.” (They also felt they had to use makeup to add evidence of aging to the still-glamorous Swanson.)
The book attends to everything from the casting of Holden as Joe Gillis (he had been picked as a backup following Montgomery Clift’s withdrawal) to the participation of DeMille in a richly conceived cameo as himself. (Despite the fortune and glory he had achieved as a legendary director, he insisted upon a $10,000 salary and additional funds and perks for a reshoot.) Lubin tracks the very Norma Desmond-like spiral of Stroheim, whose decline was especially dramatic: from an immensely talented, albeit overspending, director in the 1920s to a character actor in the 1930s and beyond. Unable to bargain for a higher salary for “Sunset Boulevard,” he gladly took the job, saying, “Even geniuses have to eat at least twice a week,” though his high self-regard was undimmed. Costar Nancy Olson reported that Stroheim, unable to slough off the habits of his previous profession, “moved his chair as close as possible to the cameras, as if he were more than ready to step in as director on a moment’s notice,” Lubin writes.
Especially fascinating is the discussion of Wilder’s pursuit of real locations for the film, including the exterior of Norma’s house, 641 South Irving Boulevard — a residence acquired by Ann Rork in her divorce proceedings with ex-husband J. Paul Getty. A swimming pool, an all-important element in the story, was not present on the premises, so Paramount built one, albeit “without proper filtering and water circulation.” On-set anecdotes make up the meat and potatoes of “making of” books like these. It’s enthralling to learn that, for Norma’s climactic staircase descent that is capped with her line “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” Wilder approached filming as he might have in the silent days, playing “Dance of the Seven Veils” from the opera “Salome” to get Swanson and the other actors in the right frame of mind.
Lubin does not neglect post-production. He quotes film scholar Sam Staggs to describe the importance of Doane Harrison, who received credit for “Editorial Supervision.” (Arthur Schmidt is the picture editor of record.) “Harrison taught Wilder how to pre-plan each shot as part of a total editing scheme,” Staggs wrote, and Lubin illustrates several examples of how, in “Sunset Boulevard,” Wilder and the editors “connect a shot in one scene with that in another.” For example, one scene ends with Joe Gillis departing through a door at a New Year’s Eve party and the next scene begins with Gillis entering Norma’s bedroom. “It’s a visual match — out one door, in another — that furthers the contrast between Artie’s apartment, which pulsates with energy and life, and Norma’s solitary, cloyingly baroque bedroom.” Throughout, Lubin describes the film with authority and enthusiasm.
The subsequent triumphs and failures of all the principals and prime movers — Wilder, Brackett, Swanson, Holden, and more — are accounted for, but most intriguing of all is the afterlife of “Sunset Boulevard” itself. “’Sunset Boulevard’ remains the best drama ever made about the movies, because it sees through the illusions, even if Norma doesn’t,” film critic Roger Ebert once wrote. “Fun junk”? Maybe. But a little junkiness is to be expected in a movie about showbiz.
