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0  dark Windows Sunset Boulevard You don’t know what it means to stand in front of a camera again. This picture will put me right back where I was. —Bette Davis as Margaret Elliot in the film The Star “I was working with Mr. Brackett, and he had the idea of doing a picture with a Hollywood background,” Wilder recalled. “Once we got hold of the character of the silent picture star, whose career is finished with the advent of the talkies, . . . we started rolling.”1 It was the comeback story, he concluded , that appealed to them, so they tackled it. Wilder had a staunch belief in having a resourceful cowriter on every picture. During the story conferences, he said, “there is no muse coming through the window and kissing our brows. We just sit together and discuss, . . . and we fight it out.” Then too the collaborator comes in handy “when you’re arguing with the front office,” he added. “You need somebody there, preferably with a machine gun on his shoulder.”2 The aim of the writers was to make the screenplay as airtight as possible, to forestall having to improvise dialogue on the set. “Sometimes, if a scene does not work during shooting,” Wilder explained, “we withdraw into a corner and rewrite it . . . during lunchtime.” But, he emphasized, this was quite different from shooting off the cuff. They would not just “sit down and slap it together. No, never.”3 Wilder and Brackett press-ganged D. M. Marshman Jr. into joining their team, since they had much admired his insightful movie reviews for Life magazine. The trio began work on the scenario on August 9, 1948. “We closed the doors and asked ourselves, ‘What kind of story shall we do?’” Brackett remembered. It was Marshman who suggested “a relationship between a silent-day queen and a young man. She is living in the past, refusing to believe her days as a star are gone, and is sealed up in one of those Some LIke It WILder 0 rundown, immense mansions on Sunset Boulevard, amid a clutter of mementoes ,” like a gondola-shaped bed.4 “We saw the young man as a screenwriter ,” Brackett continued. “He’s a nice guy, maybe from the Middle West, a man who can’t make the grade in Hollywood.” They did not see the older woman as a horror; “she was someone who had been given the brush by thirty million fans.”5 This last sentence would find its way into the screenplay almost verbatim. Then the writing team got stuck; they were unable to figure out what would happen next. Wilder, from the beginning of his screenwriting career in Hollywood, had kept a notebook in which he scribbled clever ideas for use in screenplays. When he consulted his notebook, he found this fragment : “Silent picture star commits murder. When they arrest her, she sees the newsreel cameras and thinks she is back in the movies.”6 Wilder remarked to his partners, “Suppose the old dame shoots the boy.”7 That suggestion put them back on track. They decided to call the aging movie queen Norma Desmond. Her first name was a reference to Mabel Normand, the silent film comedienne. Her surname referred to William Desmond Taylor, a director of silent films who was murdered on the night of February 2, 1922. Taylor had had love affairs with several actresses, among them Normand, who was implicated in Taylor’s unsolved murder. The scandal ended her career.8 So Norma Desmond’s name was tinged with tragedy. Joe Gillis, the aspiring screenwriter who gets involved with Norma, resembled Wilder himself at the beginning of his career in Hollywood, when he was a struggling scriptwriter. Concerning his affinities with Joe, Wilder explained, “Any writer draws on things he has seen and lived through. . . . I submitted God knows how many scripts and synopses and was turned down,” just like Joe Gillis.9 Wilder opted to have the male lead narrate Sunset Boulevard, as he had done with Double Indemnity. In the present instance, Joe Gillis would narrate the film from beyond the grave, making Sunset Boulevard one of the rare Hollywood films narrated by a dead person. “I have always been a great man for narration,” said Wilder, “and not because it is a lazy man’s crutch.” Narration allows for economical storytelling because “it saves you a lot of exposition,” he continued. “You can say in two lines something that would take twenty minutes...

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