On Sunset Boulevard

by Ed Sikov

  AGENT: So you need three hundred dollars. Of course I could give you three hundred dollars. Only I’m not going to!

  GILLIS: (apprehensively) No?

  AGENT: Gillis, get this through your head. I’m not just your agent. It’s not the ten percent! I’m your friend!

  GILLIS: You are?

  AGENT: Don’t you know the finest things in the world are written on an empty stomach? Once a talent like yours gets in that Mocambo-Romanoff rut, you’re through!

  Gillis responds to this helpful suggestion by glaring at him and snarling “I need three hundred dollars.” He does so with much the same vocal tone and facial expression Don Birnam has when he holds up the liquor store for a bottle.

  Location shooting continued for the next two weeks, all of which were taken up with filming sequences at the Desmond mansion, including, on May 3, the scene in which Norma invites a few old friends to her house to play a rubber or two of bridge. Gillis nicknames them “the waxworks,” and they look and act accordingly. In one of the film’s crueler touches, the waxworks are played by three old, washed-up movie stars: H. B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson, and the greatest silent comedian of all, Buster Keaton. According to Billy, Keaton was actually an excellent bridge player, no small compliment coming from Billy. He was also a severe alcoholic whose once-handsome face had turned puffy and sagging. Brackett and Wilder had approached another former star, William Haines, but Haines turned them down; he was content with his second career as one of Hollywood’s most successful interior designers. “It’s clean,” he told Brackett and Wilder—“no mascara on the face.”

  The three silent screen stars who did agree to caricature themselves in Sunset Boulevard worked for precisely one day. Nilsson was called at 7:00 A.M., the others at 9:00 A.M. They performed diligently like the professionals they had once been, needing only two or three takes per setup. By 5:15 P.M. Wilder was done with them and they were has-beens again.

  For his part, von Stroheim was happy to be back on a top-notch production after his forays into B-picture purgatory, and he came up with several of his own ideas about the relationship between Max von Mayerling and the woman he serves. It was von Stroheim’s idea to have Max write all of Norma’s fan letters. According to Wilder, von Stroheim also suggested a scene in which Max washed Norma’s underwear, but Wilder nixed that one. One von Stroheim element Wilder did add was a piece of the ruined Queen Kelly itself. For $1,000 Paramount purchased 122 feet of its footage for Norma Desmond to project in her own living room as evidence of her greatness. She is luminous indeed, her face, in close-up, surrounded by bright candles that still fail to draw attention away from her. When Wilder reveals that Max von Mayerling is himself a ruined film director reduced to servitude, the joke that is Norma Desmond becomes all the more bitter. Wilder acknowledged that the idea to use the Queen Kelly footage was von Stroheim’s.

  The shooting of Sunset Boulevard continued smoothly through May. The important chase sequence—in which Gillis escapes from the repo men, blows a tire, and ends up by pure chance at Norma Desmond’s house—was delayed by some bad weather and complicated traffic problems, but the production stayed more or less on schedule. Sidney Skolsky appeared at Schwab’s according to plan on May 16. An even more recognizable Hollywood figure, hired for the sake of his name and reputation, showed up on May 23, when the scenes of Norma’s return to the Paramount lot went before the cameras. Paramount’s most famous director, Cecil B. DeMille, was going to play himself. “He was shooting Samson and Delilah,” Billy remembered. “We used his sets when Norma visits. We had him for one day. Ten thousand dollars.” The gossip around town was that DeMille had trouble doing his scene and required seven takes before he got it right. DeMille also demanded and received the right to change one of his lines. Originally, he was to have said to Norma, “I haven’t seen you since Lindbergh landed in Paris and we danced on the nightclub table.” DeMille refused to say it. “I never go to nightclubs,” he declared. “And if I did, I wouldn’t dance on a table, even if Lindbergh flew to Paris twice. And if I did dance, it would be with Mrs. DeMille.” If Wilder had a problem with C.B., he didn’t broadcast it; he told the press, “Mr. DeMille was too courteous to make suggestions, and I was too afraid.”

  Originally, Wilder wanted DeMille to ask Delilah (Hedy Lamarr) to get out of her chair so that he could give it to Norma Desmond. Lamarr, with whom Billy either had or hadn’t had an affair (depending on whether one trusts Louella Parsons), agreed to do it—“for twenty-five thousand dollars,” according to Billy. “I said that it would be enough for Norma to sit in a chair with Hedy Lamarr’s name on it. That was ten thousand dollars. So I put her in DeMille’s chair.” It cost nothing to do so, since DeMille had already been well paid for his efforts. After filming DeMille’s scenes, Wilder is said to have patted C.B. on the back and said, “Very good, my boy. Leave your name with my secretary. I may have a small part for you in my next picture.”

  As it turned out, Wilder hadn’t finished dealing with DeMille about his appearance in Sunset Boulevard—and would not until the studio anted up a new black Cadillac limousine and a billing order revised in DeMille’s favor. DeMille demanded and received not only higher listing in the credits, but also a crediting order in which his illustrious name did not appear immediately (and, to DeMille, insultingly) next to Franklyn Farnum’s; Farnum played the monkey mortician.

  In Sunset Boulevard, Joe Gillis learns to make a good living by endlessly rewriting Norma’s ghastly Salome. He’s a kept man who survives by smoothly humoring his patron, first by writing a part for her in a movie that will never be made, and then by making love to her. In each case he has to hold his nose a little to be able to go through with it.

  But Gillis doesn’t give up his own writing career. He meets Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), an attractive story editor, and launches a new script with her. They work together in the evenings and at night, once their day jobs have been put to bed. Billy worked a personal reference into the scene: “The night shot where Holden and Nancy Olson walk on the lot, she tells how she grew up there, at Paramount. How she wanted to be in movies. That’s my wife’s background we used. Audrey’s mother worked in wardrobe. Aud grew up like that.” (Audrey, meanwhile, was getting used to being married to Billy. One night during the production of Sunset Boulevard Billy woke up and told her, “Darling, it’s late, and I have a hard day at the studio tomorrow. Would you be so kind as to take a cab home?” “You idiot,” Audrey informed him—“we’re married already.”)

  In an effort to get his actors to live their roles as fully as possible, Wilder actually scheduled the filming of Gillis’s scenes with Betty in the late evening and well into the night. Holden, Olson, Billy, and the crew worked from 7:30 P.M. to 12:10 A.M., and after a break for supper, they continued filming the readers’ office scenes until 4:30 in the morning. For the shot of Gillis and Betty kissing on the balcony of the Writers Building, Billy knew that Olson was feeling some discomfort at performing the scene in such a semipublic place, so he arranged only a brief rehearsal for them, after which they performed the kiss very well on the first take. “Cut! Print!” Billy yelled. But just to be on the safe side, he asked them to do it a second time. This time he didn’t call cut. After an extended period of time, the crew began snickering. Finally, someone else yelled “Cut!” It was Mrs. Holden, who had appeared in the meantime and didn’t find the joke very funny.

  By the end of the first week of June, the need for retakes as well as generally slow progress brought the production five days behind schedule, a manageable delay. One problem was the weather; Los Angeles was plagued by unusually foggy days, so whenever a little sun came out they would drop what they were doing and film outdoor scenes. They weren’t looking for the characteristically brilliant sun of Los Angeles, however—not for Sunset Boulevard. The film may have been set under the cruel sun of Hollywood, but both Wilder and Seitz preferred more gray than Southern California’s sky tended to provide.

  The grimly amusi
ng morgue interiors were shot on June 10. The lead cadavers and all the extras were laid out on their metal slabs and covered with sheets from head to ankle; their feet stuck out. Filming went smoothly until a strange rumbling disturbed a take. Amid snickering from the crew, Wilder’s assistant rushed down the rows of covered corpses until he found the one who was snoring.

  Norma’s descent down the staircase—equally funny, though in a more Grand-Guignol manner—was shot six days later. Finally, at 3:00 A.M. on June 19, Sunset Boulevard wrapped after Holden and von Stroheim completed their work at the Desmond mansion location.

  Nobody believed the film was actually finished. The need for retakes, special-effects photography, pickups, and the filming of added scenes meant that the production would simply reopen the following week. Some of these scenes involved Max serving as Norma’s chauffeur. The car had become an Isotta Fraschini, not a Hispano-Suiza. Von Stroheim was helpless. “Erich didn’t know how to drive,” Swanson later reported, “which humiliated him, but he acted the scene, and the action of driving, so completely that he was exhausted after each take, even though the car was being towed by ropes the whole while.” Wilder was blunter, and probably more inventive as well: “He still crashed it into the Bronson gate.” According to Swanson, she and von Stroheim suffered no tensions left over from their disastrous past. They were no longer close, of course, but they’d reconciled long before being cast in Sunset Boulevard.

  Wilder had also come up with an idea for a spectacularly unnerving low-angle shot of Joe Gillis’s dead body floating in the swimming pool, taken from underwater. The shot proved to be so central to Wilder’s vision of the film, and so difficult to achieve, that several whole days in late June were spent solving the problem of how to do it. The script was quite clear: “we see blood flowing from chest wound,” and in addition, the shot had to include a group of policemen and a photographer staring down at the body from the side of the pool. The photographer would be snapping pictures, so flashbulbs had to be popping behind Gillis’s floating corpse.

  Billy was insistent. “Baby,” he said to John Meehan, the film’s associate art director, “the shot I want is a fish’s viewpoint.” This rang a bell with Meehan. While waiting at the barbershop earlier that week, he had read a magazine article on the subject of the way fishermen look to the fish they are trying to catch. He returned to the barber’s the following morning and frantically searched for the article, but he couldn’t find it. He proceeded to the studio in defeat, but the germ of an idea had been planted. He got an aquarium, a mirror, and a few plastic dolls from the props department and performed some trial setups. At a certain angle, the objects in the water were as clear as the objects above the water.

  There was a water tank on Soundstage 9. Holden was summoned, along with the men playing the police. With Holden in the pool and the other actors surrounding him looking down, the shot was actually taken from above the water, the camera pointing down toward a mirror on the floor of the tank. Behind the policemen was a large piece of sky-colored muslin. Holden was quite chilly by the time the shot was successfully filmed; the water couldn’t be warmed for his comfort. The effect is spectacularly macabre. A dimly recognizable body floats slowly across the screen as the cops look down and flashbulbs fire. The audience is unnerved not only by the ghastliness of the corpse but also by the position we are asked to assume. At least Joe Gillis floats. We, on the other hand, have sunk to the bottom. There is no inconsistency between Wilder’s refusal to film a shot looking down from a catwalk and his demand for “a fish’s viewpoint.” Wilder chooses his shots to express emotions—his own as well as his characters’. Looking down on his characters from an isolated perch isn’t his style. Sinking to the bottom and staring up at them in disbelief is.

  One more crucial scene needed to be reshot. On June 23, the cast and crew gathered at the stairway of the Desmond mansion, where Norma would prepare for the close-up of a lifetime. Wilder filmed the scene as he planned it; Norma came down the stairs not toward an actual close-up but toward a final fade-out. The production reopened one more time on the 25th for shots of rain and fog at the mansion location, after which Sunset Boulevard’s production closed again. The film’s budget of $1,572,000 was still essentially on target.

  Billy and Charlie weren’t satisfied with some of the rushes. The tone was off; something was missing. More retakes were necessary. The scene in Norma’s bedroom, in which Gillis assures the suicidal star that he loves her, was reshot on July 7. On July 9, Holden and Swanson reworked their first scene together—the one in which Norma leads Gillis toward a small dead body draped with a satin coverlet and set upon a kind of altar. Norma announces: “I put him on the massage table in front of the fire. He always liked fires—and poking at them with a stick.… I want the coffin to be white, and I want it specially lined with satin—white, or a deep pink …!” (at this moment Norma draws the coverlet back partway and a tiny, very hairy dead arm falls down.) “… maybe red! Bright flaming red—let’s make it gay!” Wilder then tracks forward to the monkey’s face.

  Sunset Boulevard wrapped once more. August, September, and October were taken up by editing. By October 10, Sidney Skolsky was on the cutting room floor. Looking at the footage again and again, especially with a preview audience or two, Wilder concluded that other scenes weren’t quite right either, and the production was forced to reopen yet again on October 20 for location shooting—in particular, the beginning of the film and the chase sequence. The corner of Sunset and Rexford, Billy’s own block of North Beverly Drive, and a driveway on the actual 10,000 block of Sunset Boulevard—all were shot that day just after dawn with two identical sets of cops and reporters—one set proceeding on Rexford, the other turning into the driveway on Sunset.

  More retakes of Gillis’s body in the pool followed, along with interiors of the Desmond mansion and a revised scene with DeMille. “We required one more close-up,” Wilder reports. “I asked him to come back and do it. He understood. It was the shot outside the stage where he says good-bye. He came back. For another ten thousand dollars.” (Wilder is slightly mistaken on this point. Instead of $10,000, DeMille got his $6,600 Cadillac limo and an extra bonus of $3,000.) Sunset Boulevard wrapped once more.

  Reviewing footage in November and December, Billy and Charlie decided that a certain scene still wasn’t right. The tone was still off; the mood was wrong; it just didn’t play well enough. They had to redo it. So on January 5, 1950, more than six months after it was supposed to have closed for good, the production of Sunset Boulevard reopened again. It would be the last time. The scene was Norma’s. Gillis was dead, Norma having shot him in the back. (She explains her action by noting, “No one ever leaves a star. That’s what makes one a star. The stars are ageless, aren’t they?”) The homicide squad has arrived at her mansion, along with Hedda Hopper. The butler, Max, Norma’s former director, must convince her to come down the stairs, and he does so by telling the madwoman that she is filming her new movie’s climactic scene. She descends the staircase.

  Holden was long gone from the production; so were von Stroheim and Hedda Hopper. This would indeed be Norma Desmond’s final scene, and she wouldn’t have to share it with any of her costars. To start the day, Wilder ordered a total of nine different takes of the dialogue between the two homicide detectives, with slight changes from take to take. He then called for ten different takes of Norma’s descent down the staircase, all accompanied by music, just as filmmakers used to do in the days of silent pictures. The music: the “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Salome, Richard Strauss’s opera. (“Strauss for the rehearsal,” Wilder said; “Then we got better than Strauss. Waxman!”)

  They tried various effects with Swanson. Take two, for instance, featured a wild, demented look on her face as she descended, after which she raised her arms at the foot of the steps. For take four she was asked to effect a relaxed, pleasant look and to raise her arms at the end. A pleasant look without the raised arms was the point of take six. The first
six takes were in medium long shot, after which Wilder moved the camera farther away for the following four. The pleasant look and the wild look were each filmed again with alternating arm postures. Finally, on the last take of the day, Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond descended the stairway from a long distance with a deranged look in her eyes and her arms raised in a bizarre, inimitable gesture—a mad, contorted dance, her hands waving invisible veils. She walked toward the camera, her image went briefly out of focus, Wilder yelled “Cut!” and the filming of Sunset Boulevard was truly completed.

  With all of this reshooting, Sunset Boulevard was now about $180,000 over budget. But Paramount was not terribly concerned. The Emperor Waltz had been the exception, not the rule; Billy and Charlie had a good, solid financial track record. Their stars, too, were happy. Holden sent Wilder a special walking stick from Japan with a collapsible fishing rod tucked inside. Swanson gave no gift; she got one, though—a plaque with this inscription: “To proclaim that Gloria Swanson is the greatest star of them all and the idol of cast, staff, and crew of Sunset Boulevard.”

  In consultation with the front office, Brackett and Wilder had decided to preview the film somewhere other than Los Angeles. It was a matter of self-protection. “We didn’t want Hollywood people to see the picture because it was about Hollywood,” Wilder explained. So they took it to Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. The lights went down and the film began. The camera rolled down Sunset Boulevard and into the morgue, the corpses started talking, and the audience erupted into peals of laughter. Wilder was shocked: “I just sat there for a few minutes, and then I left the theater. There were some steps leading down to the toilet. I sat there on the third step—that was one of the black moments of my life. And a lady came down the steps who had also left the theater. As she passed me, she said, ‘Have you ever seen shit like this in your life?’ And I said, ‘Never.’”