Great films are born of great collaborations, and Sunset Boulevard represents one of the most extraordinary confluences of cinematic talent in film history. But its production was surprisingly fraught, filled with unexpected twists. Why was William Holden, who had never caught fire as a leading man, hired to play Joe Gillis after the fastest rising star in the business dropped out at the last minute? After Mae West and Mary Pickford turned down the now iconic role of Norma Desmond, how did Billy Wilder convince Gloria Swanson, who had long been absent from Hollywood at this point, to leave her low-paying job as a TV talk show host to join the cast?
Adept ... Though the book has its shortcomings, he rightly sees the movie as a kind of passkey into the history of the first half-century of Hollywood itself, warts and all ... Lubin is alert to the various ways that Sunset Boulevard doesn’t just observe Old Hollywood but serves as its mausoleum.
For anyone fascinated by Hollywood’s beginnings or Billy Wilder’s body of work, this heavily researched yet never dense page-turner is an essential addition to any film fanatic’s bookshelf.
