30 Rock, Studio 60 on Sunset Strip and Sunset Blvd...
I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.
Two of the most anticipated shows of the Fall TV season,
30 Rock and
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, are behind-the-scene shows about the inner workings of television. The mixed reviews accorded both got me thinking about behind-the-scenes movies about movie making, which have a similarly inconsistent track record. And that got me thinking about
Sunset Blvd. (1950), an acid-tipped elegy for casualties of the boulevard of broken dreams. Not to mention a font of lines that have kept generations of drag queens in material, including "I
am big. It's the pictures that got small" and "All right, Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my close up."
Conventional wisdom is that the only people who care about the machinery behind popular entertainment are the people who make it, and there's some truth to that. But movies and TV shows are shared dreams, and for every person who doesn't want the illusion spoiled, there's another aching to see the man behind the curtain.
Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett's
Sunset Blvd. revolves around the much parodied figure of silent-movie superstar Norma Desmond, played by real-life silent star
Gloria Swanson. Forgotten by the industry that once worshipped at her box office returns, Norma lives in a suspended world of shadows and memories, cocooned
In a decaying Italianate mansion (once owned by oil billionaire J. Paul Getty and subsequently demolished to make way for a Getty office building) with her butler (
Erich von Stroheim) - once both her director and her husband - and her dreams of a glorious comeback.
Narrated by a dead man - desperate b-movie screenwriter Joe Gillis (
William Holden), whom we meet floating face-down in a swimming pool - and laced with bitter allusions to Hollywood's ruthless consumption of its young,
Sunset Blvd. is blackly funny and quietly devastating: The business may be shallow and venal, but the power of movies to create worlds vivid, and satisfying than real life is what gets us hooked on them.
Things to consider:
Are today's stars like the stars of the past, or has that larger-than-life quality been eroded by scandal journalism the bad behavior of younger stars? Swanson, for example, was as wild in her day as
Lindsay Lohan. But Swanson's indiscretions weren't not splashed all over the pages of tabloid magazines and newspapers.
Have the movies gotten small?
Goldie Hawn's Elise Elliot declares in
The First Wives Club (1996) that there are three ages of women in Hollywood: "Babe, district attorney and
Driving Miss Daisy." Norma Desmond is partly a victim of the sound era - many popular stars couldn't make the transition to talking pictures - and partly a victim of an industry in which women's roles grow scarcer as they get older.
Sunset Blvd. is shot through with Hollywood in jokes (and not funny ha-ha jokes, either); here are some:
Erich von Stroheim was one of the greatest directors of the silent era; he directed Swanson in the notorious and unfinished
Queen Kelly - the movie Norma shows Joe in her private screening room.
Cecil B. DeMille, who plays himself, was one of the most popular directors and directed Swanson in several films. His scenes were done on the set of
Samson and Delilah (1949), which was shot on the backlot at Paramount, the studio that made Swanson a star.
Hearst newspaper columnist Hedda Hopper, in her heyday the terror of Hollywood (she led the campaign against Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane on behalf of her employer), plays herself.
The friends who gather at Norma's house to play cards, whom Joe Gillis unkindly dubs "the waxworks" are
Anna Q. Nilsson, who made more than 150 films before 1928;
H.B. Warner, whose silent career peaked with the role of Jesus Christ in DeMille's
King of Kings; and comedian
Buster Keaton.
Previous DVD blogs:
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This Week's New DVD Releases
