Sunset Blvd. (1950)

This week’s film noir is also a comedy – a dark, sardonic comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. It’s the great Sunset Blvd., (co)written and directed by Hollywood’s sharpest and nastiest wit, Billy Wilder. What follows is an excerpt from my biography of Wilder, On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder.In one of my other books, Laughing Hysterically: American Screen Comedy of the 1950s,I argue that if Sunset Blvd. has to be slotted into a genre, that genre would be comedy rather than film noir. Without being too Three Faces of Eve-ish about it, I don’t agree with myself any more; Sunset Blvd. is too intricate to be readily categorized. If pressed now, I’d say it was a comical-noirish-melodrama, or maybe a dramacomedic-noir. Whatever it is, it’s brilliant – the best Hollywood-on-Hollywood movie ever made. And one more thing: if you like what you’re about to read, or maybe if you really enjoy hating it, then you’ll absolutely need to buy my new book, Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis

--Ed Sikov, December 2007

Editor's note: Ed Sikov's book has some excellent stories about the filming of Sunset Blvd. The section on the casting of the classic film is worth the read alone. I've taken a piece from the book that talks about two of the most memorable scenes in the film: William Holden floating in the pool and Nora's final decent down the staircase. Surprisingly both scenes were shot well after the initial filming was complete.

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. As John Seitz put it, “You know, I’ve noticed anyone who ever worked for Ufa, they hate to shoot in the middle of the day, which I do too. Because everything is so bright. Freddy Zinnemann is the same way. And Billy too - they all were.... The least interesting time of the day is noon.” 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.

Norma’s descent down the staircase - equally funny, though in a more Grand-Guignol manner - was shot six days later. Finally, at 3:00 AM on June 19, Sunset Boulevard wrapped after (William) Holden and (Eric) 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,” (Gloria) 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 leftover 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 shot, added late to the shooting script, was complicated not only by virtue of its strange vantage point but also because there had to be blood flowing from the wound Norma Desmond’s pistol had just inflicted. The script was quite clear on this point: “we see blood flowing from chest wound.” In addition, the shot had to include a group of policeman and a photographer staring down at the body from above - specifically, from the side of the pool. The photographer would even be snapping pictures, so flash bulbs had to be popping behind Gillis’s floating corpse. Discussions of how to effect this intricate shot began around the actual swimming pool at the location. John Seitz and his crew all thought it would be nearly impossible to balance the light correctly in and around the pool itself, and there was equal concern that the surface of the water would act as a mirror and obscure the people above it.

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. According to Meehan, “The scene in the finder showed that the shot was upside down and in reverse, but I knew the optical department could straighten that out in printing.”

There was a water tank on Sound Stage 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. As Meehan explained, they had to “work within the critical angle of the transmission of light from water to air, about 48 degrees. If you pass this angle the surface itself becomes a mirror. The water must, as usual, be filtered for clarity and should if possible be kept at a low temperature of about 40 degrees. At higher temperatures the natural gases that build up in the water cut down the light transmission.” The effect is spectacularly macabre. A dimly recognizable body floats slowly across the screen as the cops look down and flash bulbs 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 (Brackett) 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 part way 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 10000 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. Neither Wilder nor Swanson had hit their stride yet.

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 completed.