For the boys and ghouls among us, an alive-and-kicking
organization called Cinespia presents classic Hollywood movies projected
against a mausoleum wall on the grounds of the Hollywood Forever memorial park.
It’s a weekly event staged during L.A.’s spring and summer nights. The series
started up in 2002: now on Saturday evenings some 3500 patrons crowd onto the
hallowed Douglas Fairbanks lawn—blankets, picnic hampers, candles, and bottles
of wine in tow—to enjoy the best of Hollywood oldies.
Labor Day weekend’s offering was so absolutely well suited
to its locale that Cinespia sent out a special email notice: “The legendary
film about the dark side of fame comes to Cinespia. A down-on-his-luck
screenwriter stumbles upon a mysterious mansion on Sunset Blvd and enters a
dark fairytale that could only be told in Hollywood. SUNSET BOULEVARD is
brilliant, compelling and downright terrifying. [Fading star Norma Desmond] is
played to perfection by Gloria Swanson in one of the most chilling performances
in cinema.”
Is it fair to call Sunset
Boulevard, as Cinespia suggests, “the greatest cemetery screening of them
all”? This can be argued (The Night of
the Living Dead, for one, is a pretty apt movie to show in a graveyard).
But no one can deny that this location, right in the heart of old Hollywood, is
hugely resonant when it comes to this particular movie. Here’s the Cinespia
email again-- “You’ve never seen SUNSET BOULEVARD like this: next to the
legendary Paramount Studios lot, where Norma Desmond plans her final comeback,
by the resting place of director Cecil B. DeMille, who [inspires] her haunting
close up, and the tombs of Valentino, Fairbanks and the stars of Norma’s
milieu.”
I wasn’t able to attend the Cinespia screening, but the hue
and cry made me revisit the film on my own. It’s always surprising to recall
that Billy Wilder, best known for such witty romps as The Apartment and Some Like
It Hot, was the co-writer and director of Sunset Boulevard. It’s a tragic tale of desperation, delusion, and
death, but it’s also at times mordantly funny, especially in its view of the
life of a Hollywood screenwriter. Here’s William Holden’s Joe Gillis describing
his failed career as a crafter of screenplays: "The last one I wrote was
about Okies in the Dust Bowl. You'd never know, because when it reached the
screen, the whole thing played on a torpedo boat." And when a fresh-faced studio reader (Nancy
Olson’s Betty) says to Joe, “I’'d always heard that you had some talent, "
he shoots back, “That was last year.
This year I'm trying to make a living."
Joe’s sardonic words are a prime encapsulation of what
Hollywood writers go through. By my own day, though, one aspect of the story
had changed forever. Joe and his colleagues work (when they work at all) for
the big studios. Yes, they’re at the
beck and call of honchos like De Mille (who plays a featured role in the film),
but such men have the ability to make things happen. Betty, a lowly reader who
wants to move up in the screenwriting ranks, has a steady job and a pretty
cushy office on the Paramount lot. And when an old star like Norma Desmond
happens onto a set, it’s like a family reunion. Today’s Hollywood is a great
deal more decentralized. The bigshot decision-makers come and go so quickly
that few remember their names. When a
legend is ready for her close-up, it’s hard to think of anybody who’d have the
courtesy to put her in the spotlight one last time.
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