New Book Celebrates "Sunset Boulevard's" 75th Anniversary with BehindtheScenes Secrets (Exclusive) Scott HuverAugust 3, 2025 at 10:00 PM Snap/Shutterstock Still of 1950's 'Sunset Boulevard.' Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder, came out on Aug.
- - New Book Celebrates "Sunset Boulevard's" 75th Anniversary with Behind-the-Scenes Secrets (Exclusive)
Scott HuverAugust 3, 2025 at 10:00 PM
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Still of 1950's 'Sunset Boulevard.'
Sunset Boulevard, directed by Billy Wilder, came out on Aug. 10, 1950, starring William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Nancy Olson and Erich von Stroheim
David M. Lubin's new book, Ready for My Close-Up: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream, shares insight into the creation of the movie and hits shelves two days after the 75th anniversary
A new 4K restoration of Sunset Boulevard will also be re-released in over 1,000 theaters nationwide by Fathom Entertainment starting Aug. 3
Nearly 75 years ago, in 1950, Hollywood produced its first bona fide masterpiece depicting the darker side of striving for fame and success in Tinseltown, writer-director Billy Wilder's classic Sunset Boulevard.
To mark the bitter-yet-beloved movie's anniversary, author and film scholar David M. Lubin's new book, Ready for My Close-Up: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream, releasing Aug. 12 from Grand Central Publishing, chronicles the history and secrets behind the film's sometimes fraught and turbulent journey to the screen, details of which he shares exclusively with PEOPLE.
Sunset Boulevard depicts the toxic, co-dependent relationship between washed-up, increasingly desperate young screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, and the delusional aging actress Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, once one of Hollywood's most admired stars now stagnating years after the spotlight turned away from her, and how their tortured attempts to achieve success or reclaim past glories leads them down a bleak path.
Lubin reveals that behind the scenes, that nagging uneasiness that can permeate Hollywood was front and center in the lives of Sunset Boulevard's creative team. "Every one of the major players had a lot at stake – they were [at] turning points in their careers," the author points out.
Director Wilder, an Austrian expatriate, had found tremendous success in Hollywood, first as a screenwriter and then as a director known for his acerbic wit and pervasive cynicism, with major hit films in the 1940s including the definitive film noir Double Indemnity and the alcoholism drama The Lost Weekend.
Grand Central Publishing
'Ready for My Closeup: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood'
But by 1950, he'd helmed a string of flops in a row and was eager to craft something both artistically satisfying and audience-pleasing. "Wilder wanted to have a comeback movie, and in Sunset Boulevard, 'comeback' is a big theme," Lubin says.
Wilder was taking an ambitious risk, especially by setting his story in the more shadowy corner of show business. The only Hollywood-on-Hollywood films that tended to score with audiences were built on starry-eyed dreamers achieving their dreams of stardom on the screen, and Sunset Boulevard was the antithesis of that. "It was another thing to say Hollywood as a system destroys the people who are in it, even ones like Norma Desmond who've been successful at a time and then never recaptured that glory and was obsessive about getting back," Lubin says.
For the role of Desmond, Wilder turned to Swanson, who in real life had also once existed among Hollywood's loftiest ranks at the height of her career during the Silent Era of the 1920s and '30s, but had gradually — but not regretfully — followed other directions when her stardom waned.
"She had retired from Hollywood in the early '30s when her movies started to flop and got involved in the clothing design business," Lubin says. "And she had a scientific business that bought patents from German Jewish inventors and then used that transaction to get them out of Germany to France or to the United States [during the rise of Nazi fascism]. So she had another life going on, and she wasn't really yearning to get back to the movies. In fact, I think she said, 'I'm done with the movies.' "
Still, she dabbled on the fringes of showbiz. "Gloria Swanson was working on afternoon TV for, I think it was $20,000 a year," Lubin says, "and in her heyday in the silent years, she was making $20,000 a week." When Wilder's offer came, Swanson quickly recognized "this was a chance for her to get her foot back into Hollywood," the author recounts. "I think she realized, 'This can make a huge change in my life.' And she loved acting, so she wanted to do the film."
Courtesy Fathom Entertainment
'Sunset Boulevard' 75th Anniversary screening
Despite being tantalized by the opportunity, Swanson almost walked away after she arrived in Los Angeles from New York and was asked by Wilder to screen test. "She said, 'I'm way too experienced and important to do a screen test,'" Lubin says, noting that one of her close friends convinced her this could be the role of her lifetime, and she finally consented to the screen test.
"And she was amazing!" Lubin adds. Wilder and his screenwriting and producing partner, Charles Brackett, he says, "had no idea the intensity that this woman could emit. And so they started rewriting lines and rewriting the script to make her [more] important. They really bumped up the role of Norma as it had not been in the original script."
Meanwhile, Wilder was on the hunt for the perfect Joe Gillis, though six different actors ultimately turned down the role. "They had been planning to have the hottest young talent in Hollywood, Montgomery Clift, play the role of Joe Gillis," Lubin says. "But two or three weeks before shooting was to begin, Montgomery dropped out." Wilder was furious and found himself scrambling to find his leading man, eventually landing on Holden.
Holden had initially taken Hollywood by storm with his breakout role in 1939's Golden Boy, but his career had fizzled shortly after with a string of mediocre, second-banana roles. "He was 31 years old when this movie came around, half a dozen bigger Hollywood names had turned it down because nobody wanted to play a gigolo," Lubin explains. Holden, too, nearly balked at the character's moral slipperiness. "He took it because he needed a good role, but he was scared that whatever fans he had would leave him if he played in gigolo, so he was taking a big risk."
Almost as difficult to cast was the film's central location itself, Desmond's expansive, once-lavish mansion now in slowly rotting decay, tucked away in a posh Beverly Hills or Bel-Air neighborhood. "But they couldn't find a house that would be suitable for the dilapidated mansion that is almost a costar in the film — the mansion is so important," Lubin says.
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Still from 'Sunset Boulevard' in 1950, showing William Holden, Nancy Olson, Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim.
After an exhaustive search, Wilder finally found an ideal spot in the more easterly L.A. neighborhood of Hancock Park. "They found a home that J. Paul Getty had given to one of his ex-wives as an alimony settlement, and she never lived in the house — she occasionally used it for parties, but she was glad to rent it out for Paramount," Lubin says. "Trouble is, a swimming pool is key to the movie – it's absolutely imperative. And this mansion did not have a swimming pool. So Mrs. ex-Getty and Paramount signed a deal that Paramount would put in a pool, but they wouldn't put in filters or anything to make it useful, and at the end of the movie, they'd fill it all back in."
Even as the movie began to fall into place, "there were tensions and fights and conflicts all the way through," Lubin reveals. Just before beginning the project, Wilder had announced it would be his last with longtime partner Brackett, which sent the latter into a panicky tailspin and sparked frequent clashes between them. But even within Wilder's passionate vision for Sunset Boulevard, Brackett brought his own talents to bear.
"There was this great scene with Cecil B. DeMille where Gloria or Norma comes to Paramount studio under the mistaken belief that he has summoned her," Lubin explains. "Wilder wanted to make it really comic and satirical, but Brackett said, 'Our movie is too comic and satirical. We need to get some gravitas, put some emotional weight into it, so we have to make it that she's vulnerable and hurt.' And that was a huge argument they had." Though Wilder wielded more power on the film, eventually, "Wilder realized, yeah, Charlie was right: it gives the movie more power if you show these vulnerable moments."
Ironically, one of the most potentially explosive relationships on set found a peaceful resolution. Actor and director Erich von Stroheim, who was cast as Desmond's worshipful valet, driver and former silent film director, had a rocky history with Swanson.
"Twenty years earlier, he had directed her in Queen Kelly, a film co-produced by Swanson and her lover, Joseph Kennedy, and Stroheim was such a perfectionist that he kept shooting and reshooting and reshooting," Lubin says. When the film ran out of budget as a result, Swanson had to fire von Stroheim.
"Stroheim always felt like that had ruined his career as a director," Lubin recounts. "I hadn't understood how deep the tensions were between Stroheim and Swanson, but I was also surprised to learn in the correspondence in the archives that they became quite friendly with each other, sent sort of loving letters to each other, so it was wonderful to hear that."
Even when work on the film was nearly complete, Sunset Boulevard offered one more surprise twist during a preview screening of the film in Evanston, Ill. Wilder had opened the film with a scene set in the county morgue, where Gillis' corpse was laid out under a sheet, and Holden's voiceover narration began setting the scene for the events about to unfold.
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"Wilder loved that scene, but when it played in Evanston, the audience laughed uproariously at this talking dead man — they thought they were seeing a comedy," Lubin says. "Then as the movie unfolded, they kept laughing, thinking this is meant to be funny and they missed the serious dimension of it." In response, Wilder continued to tinker with the opening, developing the grimmer, much more moody and ominous sequence in which Holden's narration plays over Gillis' lifeless corpse floating face down in Desmond's pool. "That was a great improvement," the author says.
The film would open on Aug. 10, 1950, to stellar box office and near-universal acclaim, nominated for 11 Academy Awards – including Best Picture, winning three for Best Art Direction, Best Music and Best Writing – and over the ensuing 75 years has continued to be regarded an all-time classic, included in the National Film Registry and among the top 20 of the AFI's Greatest American Films of All Time.
Yet Sunset Boulevard would deliver both sunshine and shadows for its creative combo. Holden would become one of the most popular and in-demand stars of his era, but his personal life was plagued by alcoholism for the rest of his days. Swanson's performance was considered her greatest triumph, but she found herself so deeply identified as Desmond that she was essentially typecast for the remainder of her career.
Wilder would go on to deliver even more enduringly classic films, including two more with Holden, Stalag 17 and Sabrina; two with Marilyn Monroe, The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot; and the bittersweet romance The Apartment, and Lubin says he was "tremendously proud of Sunset Boulevard. He had really come out with a masterpiece, and it was acknowledged at the time as a masterpiece."
But even he would eventually feel a dimming of the spotlight. By the late 1970s, "Wilder's career started going downhill," Lubin says. "At the end, he was going all over Hollywood trying to sell ideas. Everybody thought he was a nice old man who had done great things, but he was no longer what they thought capable of making a contemporary film, and that really rankled him and made him quite unhappy."
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William Holden as Joe Gillis and Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer in 'Sunset Boulevard', directed by Billy Wilder, 1950.
A new 4K restoration of Sunset Boulevard will be re-released in over 1,000 theaters nationwide by Fathom Entertainment on Aug. 3 and 4, and is available in a 4K UHD home video release, ensuring the film will be discovered by generations to come. The double-edged aspect of the Hollywood machinery that informs both the off-screen lives of its major players remains a potent ingredient in the film's appeal, Lubin points out.
"As a film professor, I found that 20-year-old students today really get into it," he says. "At the end of the semester, I asked them what their favorite films are, and Sunset Boulevard is always near the top of the list. So that made me curious: why do 20-year-olds identify with this aged — only 50-years-old — but 50-year-old star, and also this out-of-work screenwriter?"
"Many of the students identified with Norma, in that their college years are sort of this golden period, but they're soon to graduate, be cast out into the real world, and they're unhappy about the thought of suddenly being ignored," the author says, noting that Gillis also offers a relatable figure for failed aspirations. "It becomes, potentially, a cold and icy and lonely world. And we hear so much these days about loneliness among the young people. And so there's a real fear of this: that loneliness or irrelevance that Norma represents for them."
It's an element that has resonated for three-quarters of a century, Lubin reports. "When I was doing my research in the Gloria Swanson archive, I came upon a letter from a 25-year-old British woman who said, 'Even though I'm only half your age, I find all the things you're dealing with are things that I have to deal with at my age,'" he recalls. "And that was a fan in 1950 writing that! So I just realized this is an amazingly rich cultural artifact that is so relevant today that it needed to be explored."
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New Book Celebrates "Sunset Boulevard's" 75th Anniversary with BehindtheScenes Secrets (Exclusive) Scott...
