Facts > Films > Sunset Boulevard
Sunset Boulevard (1950) Facts
| Director(s) | Billy Wilder |
| Producer(s) | Charles Brackett |
| Featured Cast | William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark |
| Total Facts | 64 |
The name Norma Desmond was chosen from a combination of silent-film star Norma Talmadge and silent movie director William Desmond Taylor, whose still-unsolved murder is one of the great scandals of Hollywood history. (On the morning of Febriary 1, 1922, Taylor was shot and killed in his Hollywood bungalow. His killer was never identified.)
The opening scene showing Gillis's body was facilitated by placing a mirror on the bottom of the swimming pool.
The original nitrate negatives for the film have long disappeared. The only extant film elements were 35mm inter-positives struck in 1952, which had undergone a great deal of decay. This inter-positive was scanned at 2,000 lines of resolution and electronically restored for the 2002 DVD reissue. The restoration was performed at Lowry Digital by Barry Allen and Steve Elkin. A new 4K high-definition scan was done in 2008 for the film's release on Blu-ray disc.
The photos of the young Norma Desmond that decorate the house are all genuine publicity photos from Gloria Swanson's heyday.
The role of Norma Desmond was initially offered to Mae West (who rejected the part), Mary Pickford (who demanded too much project control), and Pola Negri (who, like Mae West, turned it down) before being accepted by Gloria Swanson.
The writers feared that Hollywood would react unfavorably to such a damning portrait of the film industry, and so the film was code named 'A Can of Beans' while in production.
There's a little dig in the scene when Cecil B. DeMille finds out that Paramount has been calling Norma Desmond because it wants to rent her car for "the Crosby picture." The truth of the matter was that Bing Crosby was one of the very few actors to whom Billy Wilder had borne a grudge, mainly because Crosby had done the unthinkable during filming of The Emperor Waltz, and ad-libbed dialog, something he and Bob Hope had done for years as standard operating procedure in their breezy "Road" pictures. Charles Brackett and Wilder were just as adamant that nothing in their scripts should be changed, and nothing new added.
Upon seeing the film at a star-studded preview screening at Paramount, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer screamed at director Billy Wilder that he should be tarred, feathered and horse-whipped for bringing his profession into such disrepute. Wilder's response was a terse, "Fuck you" (Mayer would find himself ousted from his position within the year by the new regime at MGM, headed by Dore Schary).
When filming began, William Holden was 30 and Gloria Swanson was 49; each celebrated a birthday during production.
When Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond watch one of Norma's old silent movies, they are watching a scene from Queen Kelly, starring a young Gloria Swanson. Erich von Stroheim, who directed Swanson in Queen Kelly plays Max the butler, who serves as the projectionist in the scene. Later in the film, Max tells Joe Gillis that he was the silent movie director who discovered Norma Desmond, and put her in films. According to Billy Wilder, it was von Stroheim's idea to use a clip from Queen Kelly in Sunset Blvd., as a way of "art imitating life."
When Joe Gillis says, "They'll love it in Pomona," most people assume (correctly) that Pomona is intended to be representative of just about any average American town. But it also alludes to the fact that Pomona was one of three towns in California's Inland Empire region (Riverside and San Bernardino were the others) that were frequently used during Hollywood's Golden Age for testing preview audiences' reactions to unreleased films. These towns were favored because they were on the way to Palm Springs, where, after collecting the audience reaction cards, studio personnel would then go to relax and determine what changes should be made to to the previewed films.
When Max is telling Joe about directing Madam's first pictures, there is a bad dub of the word "sixteen". After the Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle trial and the subsequent establishment of the Hays Office to enforce the new Production Code, the producers were concerned that the original age of 14 would be considered child porn and had the line changed in post.
Norma Talmadge was the 'inspiration' for Norma Desmond, the grotesque, predatory silent movie queen in Billy Wilder's film Sunset Boulevard (1950).
One of the most popular sketches on The Carol Burnett Show was called "Nora Desmond" -- which was Burnett's send-up of Gloria Swanson's character Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.