Some Like It Wilder

by Gene D. Phillips

  Hans Dreier, head of Paramount’s art department, took a special interest in the set designs for Sunset Boulevard, as he had for Double Indemnity. Dreier appointed John Meehan production designer on Sunset Boulevard, but he supervised Meehan’s work very closely. The Getty house was used for exteriors; interiors were filmed on sets built in the studio. Tom Wood, unit publicist on the film, describes in his book on Wilder the elaborate sets Meehan designed in consultation with Dreier for Norma’s florid palazzo. There were “stained glass windows in the front hall, palm trees . . . in the conservatory,” heavy velvet drapes, and a pipe organ in the living room. The gondola-shaped bed in Norma’s boudoir once belonged to Gaby de Lys, the legendary exotic dancer.39 To top it off, Wilder borrowed from Swanson a gallery of vintage photographs of herself to serve as pictures of Norma; they transform Norma’s living room into “a museum.”40

  Beginning on March 26, 1949, prior to the start of principal photography, Wilder commandeered the camera crew to shoot various locations around Hollywood and Beverly Hills. His purpose was to establish the authentic atmosphere of the film colony for the movie. He photographed the Alto Nido Apartments at 1851 North Ivar Avenue, near Hollywood and Vine, where Joe Gillis lives in a seedy bachelor flat. (The apartment building is still there.) The set that Meehan designed for the interior of Joe’s digs was created in the studio. Wilder also took some exterior shots of Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard, which was a hangout for young hopefuls—both writers and actors. Joe and his friends congregate at Schwab’s.

  Principal photography commenced officially on April 18, 1949. During shooting, writes Swanson, “Erich von Stroheim kept suggesting things and asking if scenes might be reshot—very much in his grand old manner of perfectionism, regardless of schedule or cost.”41 Still, Wilder found some of Stroheim’s suggestions helpful. Wilder told me, “It was he who suggested that Norma be receiving fan letters that are ultimately disclosed as having been written by Max. Stroheim had a fine celluloid mind; he knew what worked.” As Stroheim told Wilder, Max writes the letters “because Max still loves her and pities her.” Wilder commented, “Erich had another idea, to dramatize that Max was still crazy about Norma.” Stroheim wanted Max to “be shown washing some of her undies, and caressing them lasciviously.” This was precisely the kind of sexual fetish that Stroheim had gotten away with in his silent films like Foolish Wives, in the days before the censorship code. Wilder convinced Stroheim that such a titillating scene would get them arrested.

  Stroheim had one difficulty in playing Max that Wilder had not anticipated. Swanson writes, “Erich as Max, Norma’s butler and chauffeur, drives her and Joe to Paramount in her old Isotta-Fraschini, with its leopard upholstery. Erich didn’t know how to drive.”42 So the camera stayed close to him as he faked turning the steering wheel, while the ancient auto was towed by ropes attached to a truck. And yet Stroheim still managed to crash into the Paramount gate on Marathon Street!

  There was a technically difficult shot in the opening scene in which Joe’s corpse, floating facedown on the surface of the swimming pool, is viewed from below. Wilder instructed Seitz and Meehan, “The shot I want is from a fish’s viewpoint.” Meehan placed a six-by-eight-foot mirror at the bottom of the pool. Seitz then positioned his camera on the edge of the pool, pointed it down at the mirror, and filmed Holden’s body as it was reflected in the mirror. This proved to be a simple way of getting the shot, Meehan explained, without “the use of expensive underwater camera equipment.”43

  When Norma and Joe tango together on New Year’s Eve on the tile floor of the deserted ballroom of her once-elegant mansion, Norma observes, “Valentino said there’s nothing like tile for a tango.” Swanson had actually tangoed with Rudolph Valentino in the one picture they made together, Sam Wood’s Beyond the Rocks (1922). Seitz had shot The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921, in which Valentino danced a terrific tango with Alice Terry. Seitz utilized the same technique to photograph the tango in both films. He had the camera mounted on a platform on wheels. “Men behind the camera moved the camera platform” so that Seitz could photograph Swanson and Holden “making a complete 360-degree turn around the room.”44

  When Joe later that night threatens to leave Norma, she attempts suicide by slashing her wrists. For the subsequent scene, in which Norma lies on her bed with her wrists bandaged, Seitz asked Wilder what kind of camera setup he wanted. Wilder replied impishly, “Johnny, it’s the usual slashed wrist shot.”45

  Swanson writes that no picture “challenged or engrossed” her more than Sunset Boulevard. For example, Wilder asked her to do an imitation of Charlie Chaplin, whom Swanson had known since 1915, when both were starting out in silent pictures. She had done a Chaplin imitation in Alan Dwan’s Manhandled in 1924. Rehearsing a party scene with Dwan, Swanson snatched a derby from a crew member and clapped it on her head. “Then I grabbed a cane from somebody and started wobbling around in an impersonation of Chaplin.”46 She virtually repeated in Sunset Boulevard the Chaplin routine she had done in Manhandled. This time Swanson borrowed Wilder’s malacca cane for her imitation.

  Principal photography wrapped on June 18, 1949. The final scene to be shot was also the final scene in the picture; it took two days to shoot. It was Norma’s mad scene, when she descends the grand staircase of her mansion in a trance, fantasizing that she is at last making her comeback film. Her eyes are glazed as she walks toward the camera lens, and the shot gradually goes out of focus and fades to black. “I hated to have the picture end,” Swanson writes. “When Mr. Wilder called ‘Print it!’ I burst into tears,” while the cast and crew burst into applause.47

  Although the filming itself went smoothly, Wilder had some bitter quarrels with Brackett during postproduction. Brackett had originally perceived the film’s premise as that of a silent screen star’s attempt at a comeback, which would fundamentally be a comedy with some serious undertones. As the production progressed, Brackett became increasingly uneasy about the grotesque touches Wilder was adding to the mix. As producer of the picture, Brackett had a right to complain, but Wilder did not often heed his objections. One bone of contention was a montage of Norma preparing for her return to the screen by subjecting herself “to a merciless series of facial treatments, in order to have her image as the ageless star.”48 An army of beauticians employ massages, sweat boxes, mudpacks, and rubber masks, “as Norma tries to recapture the face of her celluloid image.”49

  When Brackett viewed the rushes of this footage with Wilder and William Schorr, Wilder’s production assistant, he was apoplectic. He reminded Wilder that the script merely called for “a short montage of various beauty treatments applied to Norma.”50 Brackett insisted that Wilder had turned the montage into something grotesque and vulgar, and he demanded that Wilder excise the montage from the film. Wilder responded that he wanted to portray the torment an older actress would endure to make a comeback. Wilder and Brackett finally exchanged blows, and Schorr had to intervene to stop the fistfight. Schorr was then asked to resolve the conflict. Sunset Boulevard was the first film he had worked on at Paramount, and Wilder was his immediate boss. Not surprisingly, he sided with Wilder. Brackett stormed out of the screening room, shouting obscenities at both men. It was at this time that Wilder confided to Schorr that very likely “this was the last film he would ever make with Charles Brackett.”51

  Doane Harrison became supervising editor of Wilder’s movies starting with Sunset Boulevard. Arthur Schmidt was assigned to edit the film, in collaboration with Harrison. Usually Harrison was on deck to consult with Wilder about cutting the film. He brought a combination of intuition and experience to his discussions with Wilder. “It’s likely that Harrison’s eye . . . did much to ensure that no scene goes on too long and that no scene is truncated,” writes Sam Staggs. “Harrison’s contribution to Sunset Boulevard surely helped to make the picture a seamless, balanced, measured work of art.”52

  During his career Harrison was nominated for three Academy Awards,
for Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard. Inexplicably, he never won. For the record, John Seitz was nominated for the same three pictures, plus Double Indemnity, and the inscrutable members of the academy never voted him a single Oscar either.

  Composer Franz Waxman, who scored Sunset Boulevard, was, like Wilder, an émigré from Berlin who came to Hollywood during the Nazi period. By the time he composed the background music for Sunset Boulevard, he had written scores for some outstanding Hollywood films, including Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940). He began working on his music for Sunset Boulevard immediately after principal photography was completed in June 1949; he labored all summer and finished in August. “The main theme is one of a tango character,” Waxman explained; “it stems from a scene in which Gloria Swanson makes reference to the early days of Hollywood and dancing the tango with Rudolph Valentino. This is the atmosphere in which she still lives in 1950. The tango theme recurs throughout the film, changing keys and instrumentation as called for, right up to the film’s climactic scene, when Norma has gone completely mad.” At this time the tango theme is repeated “in twisted and tortured harmonies”; it has become “as disjointed as her mind is at this moment.”53 John Caps, who named Waxman’s score for Sunset Boulevard among the best ever composed for a film, states, “The dark, pulsing introductory passages place the audience in the sonic world” of a thriller—all tense strings and strident brass. “Waxman spins his material into an essay on dead dreams and self-delusion.” By the end, Waxman himself added, the main theme “has become a powerful tango into madness,” to accompany Norma’s ghastly descent of the staircase.54

  Since Norma is playing Salome as she sweeps down the stairs, Wilder employed Richard Strauss’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” from his opera Salome during rehearsals. Wilder said, “Then we got better than Strauss: Waxman!”55 Waxman wrote his own Salome music for the last scene, which he titled “The Comeback” in his score. Wilder commented, “Waxman and Rozsa, two Europeans, provided my best scores. They knew my work intuitively.”56

  The original draft of the screenplay, dated December 21, 1948, begins with a prologue that was to appear after the opening credits but did not make it into the finished film. This sequence, which takes place in the Los Angeles County Morgue, was written by Wilder alone, since Brackett would have nothing to do with it. As he had done with Norma’s beauty treatment montage, Brackett pronounced the prologue disgusting and morbid. The camera pans from the pavement to the rear of a black hearse; painted on the back of the hearse is the word Coroner. The vehicle pulls up to the receiving entrance of the Los Angeles County Morgue, a low, narrow building. Two attendants wheel the corpse on a cot from the hearse into a large, windowless room. Along the walls are twenty sheet-covered corpses lying on metal slabs in two orderly rows. One of the morgue attendants removes the shoes and socks of the latest arrival. A tag is attached to the left big toe that reads, “Joe Gillis, homicide, 5/19/49.” After the attendants leave, Joe sits up on his slab and begins to recount to the other cadavers how he came to be there.

  In January 1950, Wilder had a sneak preview of the picture at the Coronet Theatre in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago, near Northwestern University. Wilder chose a town far from Hollywood because he did not want a lot of Hollywood insiders at the preview of this picture about the industry. “At the moment they tied the name tag to Holden’s big toe,” Wilder recalled, “the people roared with laughter.” When some of the audience began to walk out, Wilder followed; he sat disconsolately in the lobby, on the steps leading downstairs to the restrooms. As a well-dressed woman passed him on the stairs, he inquired how she liked the picture. She barked, “Have you ever seen such a pile of crap in your life?” Wilder replied, “Never!”57

  Seeking to do some damage control, Wilder figured that, just as in the case of the sneak preview of The Lost Weekend, the audience did not know whether the movie they were going to see was a comedy or a drama. They did not know what mood to be in for Sunset Boulevard, and they found the morgue scene ludicrous. Wilder decided to lop off the prologue.

  Many film historians assume that Wilder devised a whole new opening sequence, on which he expended additional time and money filming. But that is not the case. John Seitz testified that the footage of Joe’s corpse floating in Norma’s pool while the police try to fish him out had already been shot for use toward the end of the film. “We already had both”—the morgue sequence and the scene at the pool.58 Wilder himself stated, “No new footage was shot.” He simply added a voice-over narration by Joe, telling posthumously of the events leading up to his demise.59

  Paramount hosted a full-dress preview screening at the studio in April 1950, to which three hundred members of the Hollywood industry were invited. Wilder was concerned about how the film community would accept the picture. He reassured himself that the new opening sequence was going to get the movie off to a good start. At the first strains of Waxman’s score, with its strident brass and surging strings, the picture got rolling.

  After the opening credits, in which the film’s title is seen stenciled in wedge-shaped letters on a curb, the police are shown swarming around a swimming pool. The pool is on the grounds of an immense baroque estate on Sunset Boulevard; it is just after dawn. A corpse is floating facedown in the pool. The dead man is Joe Gillis, who begins to tell the filmgoer his story in voice-over on the sound track. Joe narrates the film “from beyond the grave,” writes Avrom Fleishman, “from the detached perspective of the dead.”60

  As Joe’s story unfolds in flashback, we see him as a debt-ridden, failed screenwriter. One day Joe’s car has a blowout on Sunset Boulevard, and he turns into the curving private driveway of a garish, shuttered villa that belongs to Norma Desmond, a faded star of the silent screen. When Norma learns that Joe is a screenwriter, she promptly engages him to revise her elephantine screenplay for Salome, a biblical epic in which she desperately hopes to make her comeback. The film scenario that she sketches for Joe is clearly derived from Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1894), “the version that invented the Dance of the Seven Veils.”61 Joe is to be her amanuensis or, more precisely, her “ghostwriter”—laboring over a script for Norma, who is but a ghost of her former self. “Poor devil,” Joe muses, “still waving to a parade that has passed her by.”

  Norma plays bridge once a week with some old friends whom Joe wryly christens “the Waxworks, dim figures from the silent days.” Wilder strove to give the film documentary-like realism by having three stars of silent pictures join Norma’s bridge game: H. B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton. Warner had played Christ in De Mille’s 1927 biblical spectacle The King of Kings; Nilsson was imported to Hollywood from Sweden in 1911—a dozen years before Garbo—to appear in silent pictures like Raoul Walsh’s Regeneration (1915); and Keaton was the silent clown who made the comic masterpiece The General (1927). “The cameo appearances of these silent film stars added a more genuine flavor to the film,” as an evocation of the old Hollywood, Wilder said. Swanson writes that “Keaton muttered in his unmatchable deadpan, ‘Waxworks is right,’ ” as the four assembled for the scene, “and we all howled with laughter. . . . Keaton looked ravaged, as indeed he had been, by alcohol.”62

  The bridge game was filmed on May 3, 1949. The actors all performed like professionals, requiring only two or three takes for each shot. By 5:15 Wilder had finished shooting the bridge game. The reunion of the four stars of silent movies for a single day, Keaton observed, was “like old home week.”63

  Cecil B. De Mille also enjoyed playing himself in Sunset Boulevard. Wilder said, “He was very disciplined and gave a subtler performance, I thought, than any actor ever gave in a film that he directed.” In the sequence in which Norma visits De Mille while he is shooting Samson and Delilah, De Mille puts her in the director’s chair so she can watch a rehearsal. “While she is sitting there,” David Freeman observes, “a boom microphone passes behind her, disturbing her hat and casting a shadow over her face. . . . Nor
ma scowls at the microphone, the very thing that ended her era.”64 Norma mentions to De Mille that the studio has been calling her urgently, but it is not, as she thinks, about making her Salome movie; it is merely to arrange to borrow her venerable Isotta-Fraschini for a Crosby picture. Jeffrey Meyers notes that “De Mille manages to suppress this fact, to forestall her humiliation.”65

  On New Year’s Eve, Joe has a quarrel with Norma, who is drunk; he walks out on her. But Max soon phones him to inform him that Norma has attempted suicide. Joe returns to the house and finds Norma lying in bed, and they are reconciled. “At the stroke of midnight, as the strains of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ waft into the room, she reaches up and pulls him toward her with nails that look like talons,” comments Morris Dickstein.66

  The film’s title refers to the passing of the old Hollywood: It recalls the tragic lives of has-been film stars like Norma Desmond, whose careers in silent pictures were eclipsed by the advent of sound. The sun set on their careers when they failed to make the transition to sound films. The decaying swimming pool on Norma’s estate, in which John Gilbert swam ten thousand midnights ago, is a relic of the grandeur of Norma’s long-lost heyday as a superstar in Hollywood. It is cracked and empty at the film’s start, but after Joe enters her life, Norma restores the pool and fills it. “Still, I didn’t conceive the pool so much as a metaphor for Norma’s personal decay, but as an authentic depiction of the way a woman like Norma, living in the past, would allow her property to slide into ruin,” Wilder explained. “Even today there are old Hollywood estates with empty swimming pools, with rats running around in them, and cracked tennis courts with sagging nets. That is part of our community; people are up, and then they are down. I also used the neglected pool for a dramatic purpose, because later when Joe enters Norma’s life, it would be natural that she would have the pool cleaned and filled as an indication of her renewed interest in life.”