by Ed Sikov
Montgomery Clift, meanwhile, had had time to think. Abruptly, he decided he didn’t want to do the picture after all. He called Herman Citron and told him what the problem was. He’d just gotten through with The Heiress and didn’t want to play any more love scenes with yet another older woman. What Clift specifically said was that he didn’t think he could be convincing. So he quit. Citron tried to talk him out of it, but Monty was adamant. Wilder was enraged. “Bullshit!” Billy yelled. “If he’s any kind of an actor, he could be convincing making love to any woman.”
Sunset Boulevard was getting ready to roll, and Clift’s sudden departure caused a crisis. Under great pressure, Wilder and Brackett were forced to debate the merits of various available Paramount stars, someone who could step into a difficult, high-profile part very quickly. The most promising was William Holden, who had been kicking around the studio for years. Holden was a solid professional who took the roles they gave him but had never quite connected with audiences. He was tall, handsome, muscular—a classic all-American guy with a bright smile and the slightest suggestion of trouble underneath. There was a problem, however. Holden had been great in Golden Boy, but that film was already ten years old. Sunset Boulevard wouldn’t make much sense if one has-been simply hooked up with another. On the other hand, the fact that he’d never really delivered on his Golden Boy promise actually worked to his advantage for Sunset Boulevard. Even though he’d been in pictures for over a decade, audiences still didn’t know William Holden.
Wilder invited him for drinks. They talked about the film for a while, and Billy began to see some of the depth and intelligence that hadn’t come across to him before. He decided that Holden’s lack of stardom wasn’t Holden’s fault at all—it was the lackluster films he’d starred in, and the men who made them. Wilder gave Holden the portion of the screenplay that had been written, and Holden took it back home to read. He phoned back quickly and enthusiastically, beginning what would be a long friendship with Billy—one of Wilder’s most intimate—with a typically gung ho and efficient message: “I like it, I’ll do it, let’s go.” But at home, with his wife, Holden was a lot shakier. “Jesus, I’m scared,” he told her. “I’m not sure I can deliver.”
Brackett and Wilder were happy with Holden, and so was the front office. Replacing Clift saved Paramount $39,000.
By the middle of February, Brackett, Wilder, and Marshman had made various changes to the still-incomplete script. Dan Gillis’s name became Dick Gillis. Kaufman’s name became Millman. Norma Desmond’s mansion, once described as being an enormous hovel with tattered wall hangings and a lot of litter, was no longer quite so dilapidated. Her car, once a Rolls, turned into a Hispano-Suiza, if only for the sound of the name. (“Parlez-vous français? Do you speak English? Hispano-Suiza?”) And Norma herself was no longer engaged in the endless writing and rewriting of her own pompous, semiliterate memoirs. Early on, Gillis had said, in voice-over, “I was feeling a little sick at my stomach. It wasn’t just that sweet champagne. It was that Sunday supplement trash of hers. The memoirs of an egomaniac, not even spelled correctly.” But now Norma would be writing an endless screenplay—a mess of a Salome epic that would serve, for lack of a better word, as her comeback.
The original idea for Sunset Boulevard has been credited variously to Brackett and to Wilder. Brackett, according to one popular account, had wanted to make a comedy about a silent-screen star for a number of years, but neither Brackett nor Wilder knew what to do with the idea until they met Marshman, who offered the idea of having the star get involved with a young man. Wilder then came up with the idea of killing him: “Suppose the old dame shoots the boy.” Brackett is said to have favored a lighter-humored comedy, while Wilder pushed for the film’s bleaker, more sardonic tone. On the other hand, Wilder’s friend Armand Deutsch claims that the whole idea had been Billy’s all along: “Billy once showed [George] Axelrod a scrap of paper which he had saved on which he had scribbled the words, ‘Silent picture star commits murder. When they arrest her she sees the newsreel cameras and thinks she is back in the movies.’ This note had been made almost ten years before Sunset Boulevard.” Whatever its genesis, though, the three screenwriters produced a script that twists comedy into something quite disturbing but never stops being bitterly funny, as long as one doesn’t take their jokes personally.
If Paramount’s accounting figures bear any relation to the work performed, the actual composition of the screenplay for Sunset Boulevard was done almost entirely by Marshman and Wilder. By the time they made Sunset Boulevard, Brackett and Wilder had been describing themselves as “executive writers” for years, and the string of collaborators with whom they produced scripts testifies to their working methods after 1945. The authorship of Sunset Boulevard is not in doubt; the film was written by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and D. M. Marshman Jr. Whether or not Charlie and Billy were still sitting, pacing, napping, and squabbling in their office suite while laying down precise dialogue is another matter entirely. Curiously, Paramount paid Brackett handsomely for producing Sunset Boulevard—about $130,000—but only for producing it; Wilder and Marshman earned all the money for writing the film. Marshman was officially assigned to the project on August 9, 1948. By February 1949, he’d worked on the screenplay for 182 days and received $11,600. Billy, meanwhile, was paid for 306 days of screenwriting and earned $211,416; this was in addition to his directing fee of about $90,000.
In March and early April, the writer-producer, the writer-director, and their for-hire script writer jointly worked out more of the details of their “peculiar” Hollywood project. Since this was a film about an industry they knew and loved, they wanted to suffuse it with familiar people and places. In this spirit Brackett and Wilder hired the nudgy Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky to appear in a sequence set at Schwab’s Drugstore in the heart of downtown Hollywood. Enticing Skolsky to play himself wasn’t difficult; as Brackett told him, “It won’t be Schwab’s without Skolsky. And the whole picture won’t be typically Hollywood without you and the Schwabadero.” This is the scene: Skolsky is seated at a stool at the counter. He asks Gillis, who has failed to land any scriptwriting work and is now completely broke, whether he has anything juicy for Skolsky’s column. Gillis responds, “Sure. Just sold an original for a hundred grand—to the King Brothers. The Life of the Warner Brothers. Starring the Ritz Brothers. Playing opposite the Andrews Sisters. But don’t get me wrong—I love Hollywood.”
Sunset Boulevard’s script also contained lots of references to real people, each of whom had to agree to the use of their names. Some didn’t. Darryl Zanuck’s refusal might have precluded references to himself and Twentieth Century–Fox. Tyrone Power declined as well, as did Olivia de Havilland and Samuel Goldwyn, but Brackett and Wilder decided to use Zanuck’s and Power’s names anyway. For the scene in which Norma Desmond returns to the Paramount lot in the deluded belief that she is being hired to make another movie, the writers wanted her to recognize one of the juicers (industry slang for an electrician) and greet him like long-lost friend. “Hog-Eye!” Norma cries. In fact, “Hog-Eye” was real—it was the nickname of a former Paramount electrician named John Hetman, who didn’t mind the reference. Oddly enough, the reclusive Greta Garbo also granted permission, though when she saw the film itself she was sorry she had done so. She felt that Wilder used her name in a past-tense context, and she was offended. “I thought Billy Wilder was a friend of mine,” Garbo told a friend.
Billy and Charlie also tried to get two town criers for the film’s operatic final scenes, not just one: “I wanted two gossip columnists—Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons—each on the phone, one upstairs, one down, neither of them giving up the phone and saying ‘Get off the line, you bitch! I was here first!’ Hedda I got easily, but Louella knew quite well she would lose that duel because Hedda was a former actress and she would wipe the floor with her.”
The starting date grew closer, and the usual tensions and egos of Hollywood filmmaking continued t
o surface. Swanson was miffed at having to do a screen test, but she was reassured that it wasn’t really to test her but rather her makeup. Told by Brackett that she might need to be artificially aged for the role, Swanson countered by asking, “Can’t you put the makeup on Mr. Holden instead, to make him look younger?” They did, though they also added subtle touches of gray to Swanson’s hair and a few extra wrinkles on her fifty-two-year-old face. For his part, Holden’s worries escalated. He told Wilder nervously that he didn’t know who Gillis (now Joe, not Dick) really was—he couldn’t get a fix on the character. “Do you know Bill Holden?” Billy asked. “Of course,” said Holden. “Then you know Joe Gillis.”
Paramount’s location scouts were busily finding excellent examples of the way Hollywood’s citizens variously lived. The Alto-Nido Apartments, at 1851 North Ivar at the top of the hill at Franklin, would work well for the drab barracks of an unemployed screenwriter. For Norma Desmond’s mansion, they had to look farther afield than the 10,000 block of Sunset Boulevard, on which the fictitious house is situated in the script. They found it, about six miles away, at the northwest corner of Wilshire and Irving Boulevards. The immense heap of a house, built in 1924 for the then-astronomical figure of $250,000, currently belonged to J. Paul Getty’s ex-wife, who hadn’t lived there for several years. More ghostly than derelict, the building itself fit the filmmakers’ description superbly, as did the vaguely seedy-looking yard and garage:
I had landed myself in the driveway of some big mansion that looked rundown and deserted. At the end of the drive was a lovely sight indeed—a great big empty garage, just standing there going to waste…. It was a great big white elephant of a place. The kind crazy movie people built in the crazy twenties. 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 in her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on the world because she’d been given the go-by.
There was no pool, so Paramount built one. (The ex-Mrs. Getty was said to be thrilled to get a free swimming pool, but the pool the studio built had next to no plumbing and was never used for swimming once filming was completed.) Paramount also sweetened the mansion’s interior by adding stained glass windows to the front hall, heavy draperies and a pipe organ in the living room, and palm trees in the conservatory.
The script was undergoing modifications as well. For the morgue scene they gave a drowned boy’s corpse a grim little joke: “I drowned. Right off the pier at Ocean Park. I bet Pinky Evans I could stay under water longer than two minutes, and I did, too.” Gillis was now skirting obscenity in a line to Kaufman, the producer: “You trying to be funny? Because I’m all out of laughs. I’m up that creek and I need a job.” Max was given a limp. Gillis comments on it in his room over the garage: “I figured he was a little crazy. Maybe it was that stroke—he’d had a stroke a while back—part of his brain was limping too. Come to think of it, the whole place was like that—half paralyzed—withering away in slow motion.” Finally, the producer Kaufman became Sheldrake, and he was given a new clincher at the end of his speech about his many debts and financial obligations: “Now if Dewey had been elected,” Sheldrake begins, whereupon Gillis leaves the office in disgust.
The PCA was unusually restrained in its response to the script drafts Paramount submitted. The “up that creek” line had to be cut—that was one of Breen’s few specific demands. A larger issue remained, but it was one over which the PCA had little direct control, namely the “sex affair” between Gillis and Norma. “It seems to us at this point that there is no indication of a voice for morality by which the sex affair would be condemned, nor does there appear to be compensating moral values for the sin.” The protagonist’s grim end made no difference to the PCA: “We are quite aware that the story is told in flashback and the leading man is shown to be dead when the story opens.”
Costuming Gloria Swanson for the role of Norma Desmond presented designer Edith Head with a tricky set of problems. Here was a woman who was a throwback to a bygone era, but she was a very rich, very stylish throwback who could buy whatever she wanted in the best stores in Beverly Hills. Moreover, Norma had to remain blissfully unaware that she was a throwback. Thus her clothes had to be both in style and out-of-date, all at once. Head’s ingenious solution was to combine Jazz Age materials with so-called New Look styling. (Dior brought out the New Look in 1947, and it dominated women’s fashions through much of the 1950s: an hourglass form and tightly cinched waists that created a kind of rigid femininity that postwar culture found attractive.) She employed current fashion trends but added the odd element here and there—for instance, a 1949 hat trimmed in peacock feathers. For the film’s final scene, though, Head abandoned the New Look entirely in favor of a barely defined waistline; when Norma is ready for her last close-up she looks just that much more out of time. Ironically, Head was already familiar with Gloria Swanson from her earliest days at Paramount. As a young costumer’s assistant she used to wash Swanson’s hosiery.
On March 26, 1949, shooting began at dawn with preproduction shots of the L.A. County morgue and its exterior courtyard; they were filmed at the Hall of Justice itself. Preproduction shooting continued through April 16, with shots of the Sunset Strip, the Alto-Nido exteriors, and various other locations around Hollywood and Beverly Hills. The script was still incomplete when the production of Sunset Boulevard officially opened on April 18. Wilder began that morning by shooting scenes of Gillis in the apartment, which had been constructed on the lot. Von Stroheim was called to Soundstage 9 in the afternoon to film the scene in which Max welcomes Gillis into the Desmond mansion, and Swanson appeared the following day to film various shots of Norma in her bedroom.
“Johnny,” Billy told cinematographer John Seitz, “keep it out of focus—I want to win the foreign picture award.” For the scene in which Swanson lies in bed with her wrists slashed, Seitz asked Billy how he wanted to film it. “Johnny, it’s the usual slashed-wrist shot.” For the monkey scene, Seitz was told, “Johnny, it’s the usual dead chimpanzee setup.” For the New Year’s Eve tango sequence, Seitz employed a dance dolly—a platform on wheels hooked onto the camera, which itself was mounted on a movable platform, thereby enabling Seitz to take a shot of Swanson and Holden making a smooth, vertiginous sweep of the room. It wasn’t an innovation; Seitz first used the technique to shoot Rudolph Valentino and Alice Terry tangoing in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921).
On April 21, the company was called to the mansion location at Wilshire and Irving for exterior shooting, but the quality of light deteriorated and Billy had to call off shooting early. Holden, Billy, and the crew spent the next day rushing from location to location: from Stone Canyon Road to the Bel-Air golf course, from North Vine Street (for Rudy’s shoeshine parlor: “Rudy never asked any questions about your finances—he’d just look at your heels and know the score”) to Paramount’s ornate entrance gate—not the imposing main gate on Melrose, but the smaller, more beautiful one set back from the corner of Melrose and Bronson.
It is through the Bronson gate that Gillis walks on his way to see Sheldrake, the “smart producer.” The scene is one to which Billy related, if not because of his recent past, then certainly because of his earliest days at Ufa and at Columbia, Fox, and Paramount itself. “All right, Gillis, you’ve got five minutes, what’s your story about?” Sheldrake snaps. Wilder’s camera tracks back from Sheldrake distractedly lighting a cigar to Gillis hunched forward in his chair, his hands waving around in a gesture that seems more Billy than Holden:
GILLIS: It’s about a baseball player, a rookie shortstop that’s batting .347. Poor kid was once mixed up in a holdup but he’s tryin’a go straight, except that there are a bunch’a gamblers that won’t let him!
SHELDRAKE: (bored) So they tell the poor kid he’s got to throw the World Series or else, huh?
GILLIS: More or less, except for the end. I’ve got a gimmick that’s real good.
SHELDRAKE: Yo
u got a title?
GILLIS: Bases Loaded. There’s a forty-page outline…. They’re pretty hot about it over at Twentieth, except I think Zanuck’s all wet. Can you see Ty Power as a shortstop? You got the best man for it right here on this lot—Alan Ladd! Be a good change of pace for Ladd. And another thing—it’s pretty simple to shoot. Lots’a outdoor stuff. You could make the whole thing for under a million.
Sheldrake burps loudly from the bicarbonate he has been belting back while Gillis goes on and on about Ladd and the outdoor stuff. Gillis pretends not to notice.
At this, Betty Schaefer enters and rips Bases Loaded to shreds. She describes it with throwaway cruelty: “It’s from hunger.” Sheldrake then comes up with a possibility:
SHELDRAKE: Of course, we’re always looking for a Betty Hutton. Do you see it as a Betty Hutton?
GILLIS: Frankly, no.
SHELDRAKE: Now wait a minute—if we made it a girls’ softball team, put in a few numbers…. Might make a cute musical. “It Happened in the Bull-Pen—the story of a woman.”
GILLIS: Are you trying to be funny? Because I’m all out of laughs. I’m over a barrel. I need a job!
Gillis heads desperately to the pay phone at Schwab’s. First he puts the bite on his friend Artie Green, but Green can only offer $20. “Then I talked to a couple of yes men at Metro. To me they said no. Finally I located that agent of mine. The big faker. Was he out digging up a job for poor Joe Gillis? Huh-uh. He was hard at work in Bel-Air, making with the golf sticks.” This is where the Bel-Air golf course location came in. On the green, Gillis’s agent does him a big favor:
