Todd Melby 0:00 Hey there! I'm Todd Melby, host of the Drunk Projectionist podcast. Before we get started, I have a favor to ask: if you could please forward this episode or any episode that you really like to a friend that'll help get the word out about the podcast. Let's go. Speaker 1 0:15 There was a wonderful era in the world of entertainment before television, before talkies-a magic world. I'd love to have you enjoy it with me as it comes again to life in my memory. Speaker 2 0:29 Silence, please. The great stars, the excitement, the thrills, the laughter, and the heartbreak of Hollywood's golden era. Todd Melby 0:56 Today on the podcast, it's Sunset Boulevard, that fantastic 1950 movie that most moviegoers really really like, including me. I love it. It's such a great film. Can't wait to talk to you about it today with my guest David M. Lubin. He wrote a book called Ready for My Closeup: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream. David and I talk about all kinds of terrific stuff from the movie, including of course Clarice Swanson. But you know she wasn't the first person that Billy Wilder considered for the role. The first person was Mae West. He really thought Mae West would be great. So there's a couple of great Mae West anecdotes. There's some other people that he considered for the role, and of course we also dive into other actors from the movie, the screenwriters Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and let's see. Oh, there's this great deleted scene from the movie. Did you know that there was a scene that was really funny that they put out the beginning of the movie? They tested it, but it didn't work. So you'll hear about that too. Stay with us. David M. Lubin is next. We talk about Sunset Boulevard here on the Drunk Projectionist. David Lubin 2:11 Wilder was an Austrian Jew born in 1906, and he lived in Vienna during World War One, and his father managed a hotel, and so they were lower middle class. And Wilder didn't want to go to school. He hated school, but he loved reading and writing. And he became a journalist right after he he got out of high school, and he moved to Berlin and he started writing screenplays. But he could barely he couldn't earn a living as a screenwriter, so he had to supplement his income as both as a reporter, but as a dancer for hire at the big hotels in Berlin, and the word for a man who danced for hire at those hotels was either called a taxi driver, like the woman would be renting the the dance partner, like taking a ride for a taxi, or a word that was newly coined back then was a gigolo. Wilder sort of implied that he did more than dance with women for hire. He finally sold a screenplay and he became active as a screenwriter and made a lot of money. But then Hitler came to power, and as I said, he was Jewish, and he read the writing on the wall, and so he got out of Berlin in 1933, ended up in Hollywood, but could barely speak a word of English, so he couldn't find work, and he'd go around from studio to studio looking for work, like Joe Gillis does in the movie. Todd Melby 3:39 I remember when Wilder was struggling as a screenwriter and could barely speak English and really, really needed money. He was at a party with a swimming pool, which I think is a fun story to tell because of the eventual swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard. David Lubin 3:52 Yeah, the producer Eric Palmer offered Wilder $50 if he would jump full, fully clothed into the swimming pool and swim to the other end, and Wilder was actually a very athletic person, and he rose to the challenge, and he needed the money, but he was also a showoff and wanted the notoriety. So he took off-I think he took off his shoes, he took off his hat, dived into the water, and swam to the other end, and got his $50. And Palmer then offered him a job as a screenwriter. Todd Melby 4:20 You do what you got to do. David Lubin 4:21 Yeah, and so there's there's a lot of Sunset Boulevard that is autobiographical to Wilder, and so Wilder one of the ways he learned English was by listening to baseball games on the radio and soap operas on the radio, and he was dated a lot of women and would learn just from conversation. You know, the best way to learn to speak a foreign language is to have a love affair with somebody who speaks that language. So we had a lot of love affairs. Meanwhile, Charles Brackett was an aristocrat from upstate New York. Went to Harvard Law School. Was a theater reviewer for the New. New Yorker, and he moved to Hollywood, and was struggling to make a success of himself in Hollywood, even though he had been so successful back in New York. So you have Wilder and Brackett; they didn't know each other, but they both worked for Paramount. And one day, a man came in to the room and introduced themselves. Introduce them, and he says, "You're going to form a team, you two. And he just ordered them to start working together. And their first assignment was to write a film for Ernest Lubitsch, a film that turned out not to be very good, but it made Wilder and Brackett into a screenwriting team, and then they won Academy Awards for the last weekend. They were nominated for Nanochka, and they were the most highly paid and celebrated team of screenwriters in Hollywood. Todd Melby 5:53 And yet, they didn't really like each other. David Lubin 5:56 They had a real Frenemies relationship; they were dependent upon each other. Brackett was very polished in his English, and he had a good story sense. Wilder had the imagination. Wilder would shoot out dozens of ideas. Brackett would shoot them down. They'd get into fights over this, and sometimes they throw things at each other, and at times they would refuse to talk to each other. But through that crucible, they wrote some of the most brilliant screenplays, the classic era of Hollywood. Todd Melby 6:32 Paint a picture for us of what it was like in the office when the two of them were working together. Who was writing? Who was pacing? How were they dressed? David Lubin 6:40 Well, Wilder was really restless, and he had-he could not sit still. He was sort of ADD, you might say. He was constantly moving up and down, and he had a walking stick that he would use. And if he had an idea, he'd kind of wave it in the air, and he wore a fedora inside. And I always figured this was because he was balding, and he wanted to cover up his balding hairline, Bracket meanwhile would lay out on a sofa, take his shoes off, and make notes. And they would talk ideas and just throw them out. And as I say, Wilder generated many more ideas than Brackett, but Brackett was the reality test and say, "No, this isn't going to work for this reason and that reason, but they really would hash things out. The building, the Paramount structure that they worked in, the Writers' Building, was called the Babylon because there were so many people babbling and from different backgrounds. Before the Sunset Boulevard was going to be produced, Wilder announced this was going to be their last screenplay together, Brackett was devastated because he thought he's never going to find another companion who is as brilliant as Wilder. But Wilder, at this point, was feeling so much of success, he wanted to go out on his own and not share his credits with Brackett. Todd Melby 7:55 And why do you think Charles Brackett doesn't get much recognition today? And everybody says, "Oh, that's a Billy Wilder movie. That's a Billy Wilder movie. David Lubin 8:03 Bracket on his own just wasn't a genius. I mean, he he considered Wilder a genius as much as he at times despised him or was felt so hurt by Wilder. He recognized that Wilder had just this amazing imagination and this caressing wit that Brackett couldn't match, but there were scenes. For example, I'm mentioning the beauty regime that my students respond to. There was a montage sequence when she thinks Cecil B. DeMille is going to be starring her in her Salome film. So she goes through, as as Joe Gillis says, an army of beauticians arrive at the house on Sunset Boulevard and put her through all this stuff as a montage, and Brackett just absolutely objected to that and said that's vulgar and crass, and we shouldn't disillusion our viewers to see that our beautiful stars are sort of man their looks are manufactured. So he was he was a man of propriety and taste, and didn't like that idea. But Wilder, who had the upper hand, because he was the director as well as the screenwriter, he insisted that they keep it. And I think it's one of the most powerful moments in the film. Todd Melby 9:17 In your book, you also said that there were times when Charles Brackett was worried about the tone of a particular scene, and that his view of a particular scene, or at least the tone of a particular scene, sometimes won out. And I think it might have been with the the DeMille scene. David Lubin 9:30 Wilder wanted to be a very satirical scene and make DeMille look bad, and Gloria look you know Swanson or Desmond look just overweening and in her narcissism, but Brackett looked at it and says, "At this point in the movie, we need a note of humanity, of softness. We just can't make this into a brittle comedy. And so Wilder was very adamant, and he lined up some of the executives at Paramount who agreed with him. But finally, Brackett's wisdom prevailed. And Wilder went along with making Demille into a more humane character, and so it has that one scene in the film of sort of softness and generosity of spirit. Speaker 3 10:13 Norma Desmond. Speaker 2 10:14 She must be a million years old. Speaker 3 10:16 I hate to think where that puts me. I could be our father. Speaker 2 10:20 Very sorry, mr. Demille. Speaker 3 10:21 Must be about that awful script of hers. What can I tell her? What can I say? Speaker 2 10:28 I can tell her you're all tied up in the projection room. I can give her the brush. Speaker 3 10:32 30 million fans have given her the brush. Isn't that enough? Speaker 2 10:36 I didn't mean to. No, Speaker 3 10:37 of course you didn't. You didn't know Norma Desmond as a lovely little girl of 17, with more courage and wit and heart that never came together in one youngster, I Speaker 2 10:48 understand she was a terror to work with. Speaker 3 10:50 Only toward the end, you know, a dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit. Todd Melby 11:00 Let's dig into the the beginning of Sunset Boulevard. Wilder and Brackett they have a a notion for a movie. I believe they called it the swimming pool script. David Lubin 11:10 Yeah, they got the idea that some old Hollywood star would live in a mansion and have a swimming pool, but they didn't know what that star would do, whether it be a man or a woman, whether it be a director or a screenwriter or an actor, but around the time they start thinking about the movie, D.W. Griffith, one of the founders of Hollywood, and as disreputable as he was for *Birth of a Nation* and his racist filmmaking, was still one of the great pioneers in Hollywood history. But by the 1940s, he was a forgotten man living in a sort of flea-bitten hotel. And once Wilder was having, he and his wife were having dinner with Samuel Goldwyn and his wife. And this man staggered into the Brown Derby restaurant, drunk, and comes up to their table and says, "You bastards! You're you're sitting here. I should be sitting where you are. I should be calling the shots. You know, the bouncers pulled the guy out and threw him out in the street. And Wilder says, "Who was that guy? And Goldman said, "That was D.W. Griffith. And that was shortly, you know, a couple months before they started working on the the swimming pool story. And I think they were inspired by the idea of a great silent era star in this case Griffith, the director, being down and out in the late 1940s. So I think that may have been the the real inspiration for the movie. Todd Melby 12:30 Absolutely, and then when they finally get ready for casting, there's all these fantastic casting stories that are in your book. Let's start with Gloria Swanson and and the the people that were considered before her for the role of Norma Desmond, including Mae West. David Lubin 12:48 There's a case where Brackett Wilder violently disagreed. Wilder was friends with Mae West, the sort of sex symbol of the '30s. They would have lunch together, and she was very bald, very bawdy, and Wilder appreciated that he was a bawdy person too. Todd Melby 13:06 Yes. David Lubin 13:07 So he wanted her to play the washed-up star. Brackett objected and said, "If you get Mae West in this movie, it's gonna ruin the movie. No one will take it seriously. She's she doesn't have any depth to her, but Wilder insisted, and he went to interview Mae West, and he told her the story. And Mae West was indignant that Wilder would approach her to play a washed-up older woman who has to like pay a man to have sex with her. She said men would give their eye teeth to be able to have sex with me, and nobody would would believe otherwise. So Wilder left and went back to Bracken. He says, "You're right. She would have made a farce of this film. Todd Melby 13:52 Well, wait a minute. There's a there's a couple Mae West more things. There's just the the Mae West things just strike me as very very funny, and and I enjoyed them. So thank you for putting them in the book. Do you remember the exact quote she said? As far as being in bed with a man, and I'm I'm kind of looking for it right now. Oh, here we go, here we go. So Mae West said, "To the contrary, she boasted, if she had a lover half her age, he would barely be able to crawl out of bed after all she put him through. Her mantra was that she would never play a woman over 26. That's what you wrote. David Lubin 14:30 Yeah, and and her biographer said it was the biggest mistake she ever made in her life. That she had a chance to star in this fantastic movie, brilliant movie, and maybe would have gone down in history as Gloria Swanson has for playing that role. Todd Melby 14:46 Absolutely, the other two actresses that were considered for the role of Norma Desmond, at least the ones that you mentioned in your book, one of them was Mary Pickford. David Lubin 14:54 Pickford had been considered America's sweetheart in the late teens and the 20s, and. She was sort of the most famous silent female star, and they went out. Brackenwilder went out to her mansion called Pickfair that she built with when she was married to Douglas Fairbanks. So Pickford Fairbanks Pickfair, and they went in and they asked her to play Norma, and they told her about, and she just said, "There's not enough of Norma in the script. It has to be about me, or has to be entirely about Norma, and and the Joe Gillis character has to be more minor. So she turned it down, and again, they were glad that she turned it down because they realized in talking with her that she wouldn't have had the gravity and depth that they needed, so they asked her who else might play the role, and she claims that she suggested Gloria Swanson, but other accounts say that George Cooper, the director who was friends with Wilder, that he had suggested Gloria Swanson, and Swanson had been the highest-paid female star of the silent era, and then she had retired into a kind of modest business profile in New York in the 1930 s and 40 s. I mean, she did interesting things, and she played in some theater. She had a dress line of, you know, she was a fashionista. She she created a company that bought patents from Jewish scientists in Germany as a way of helping them to get out of Germany. And in 1948, she was the talk show host of one of the first TV programs in America on WPIX in New York. And then suddenly, out of the blue, she gets this invitation from the producer Charles Brackett to come out to Hollywood to audition for the role of Norma Desmond, they asked her to do a screen test, and she was indignant, and she said, "I've made 60 films. You know how I act. You don't need to see a screen. It was beneath her to do a screen test, so she said that to Cougar, and he said, "Well, who's directing the film? And she said, "Billy Wilder. And he said, "If you refuse that audition, I personally will shoot you. Todd Melby 17:11 Right. He knew. David Lubin 17:13 He he knew this was a really epic film that was possibly in the making. Todd Melby 17:20 And what did Wilder and Brackett like about the screen test? David Lubin 17:23 First of all, they put her up at a hotel, the Beverly Hills Beverly Hills Hotel, and gave her the script, the scene she was supposed to play. I mean, she didn't have the whole script; just had those pages, and she wasn't sure what they were looking for. So she talked to Brackett and got an idea, and then they had the screen test a couple days later, and she blew them out of the water. Both Brack and Wilder thought she has this amazing intensity, this almost fury in the way she delivered the lines, and it's the lines where Joe Gillis says, "You're Norma Desmond. You used to be big. Speaker 2 17:59 You're Norma Desmond. Used to be in silent pictures. Used to be big. Speaker 1 18:04 I am big. It's the pictures that got small. David Lubin 18:10 And just the way she said that, which is now a classic. They thought, holy shit, we really have something here. So they offered her the job. She accepted it, and they started rewriting the script to make more of a part for her, whereas Pickford had felt there wasn't enough Normandezman in the film. Originally there wasn't, but thanks to Swanson, they kept changing the film, kept putting more emphasis on her. Originally they thought she was going to be just this dotty old old woman who was kind of forgetful and self-delusional, but they realize they can make a tragic figure out of her, and so the movie starts off with her just very imperious, but as it goes along, her mind deteriorates. So, in any great drama, you want to see a character move, start one place, and move to a different place, and she starts off from being a little bit loony to being a lunatic. That was not in the original screenplay. Todd Melby 19:08 Yeah, and in the movie, you also see her really wanting something. I mean, she wants Joe. She wants fame again. She wants to do something more than just be in her house with the dead monkey. David Lubin 19:21 Yeah, and that's that's part of for me the greatness of the film is you take a person who could be so negative, but you understand the pathos of them. You understand that she has universal desires to be wanted, to be young, to to stave off mortality, you know. Like great literature, she's a character that shows the tragic condition of life. It's not just Hollywood narcissism. It's really a human need to be wanted and relevant. Speaker 4 19:56 Young man, tell me something. How long has. Movie script these days. I mean, how many pages? Speaker 2 20:03 Depends on what it is-a Donald Duck or a Joan of Arc. Speaker 4 20:05 This is to be a very important picture. I've written it myself. Took me years. Speaker 2 20:11 Looks like enough for six important pictures. Speaker 4 20:13 It's a story of Salome. I think I'll have Demille direct Speaker 2 20:16 it. Demil. Uh. Speaker 4 20:19 We made a lot of pictures together. Speaker 2 20:21 And you'll play Salome. Speaker 5 20:24 Who else? Speaker 2 20:26 Only asking. I didn't know you were planning a comeback. Speaker 4 20:29 I hate that word. It's return-a return to the millions of people who've never forgiven me for deserting the screen. Todd Melby 20:36 Now might be a good time to talk about Erich von Stroheim and his silent film directing career, and what those movies were like. You know, I hadn't heard of them before I read your book, so maybe tell us a little bit more about that. David Lubin 20:47 Well, Monstroheim was an Austrian Jew, like like Wilder, older than Wilder, and he moved to America and he tried making a living as a horse wrangler at a ranch in Northern California, and meanwhile writing short stories and novels that weren't being published, he was a very proud person. He invented an identity for himself. Instead of saying that he was a Jewish tailor, son of a Jewish tailor in Vienna, he said he was Count von Strowheim of the von Stroheims, and that he had fought the cavalry, and he made up all this stuff that wasn't true. And then he read a newspaper clip that they were looking for horsemen to be in Birth of a Nation. So he goes down and becomes one of the KKK riders at the end of the movie, and he got to know Griffith, and he watched how Griffith directed the film, and so he wanted to be a filmmaker too, and he wrote a novel. I mean, a screenplay, and he got Hollywood to produce it, and he to star in it, and his career took off. It was during World War One. People loved to have very negative depictions of the the Huns, the Germans, and he was great at playing these evil Huns in in these World War One propaganda films, and the studio dubbed him the man you love to hate because he was such a good villain. Speaker 2 22:15 Erich von Stroheim, to American audiences during the First World War, the most sinister of movie villains. David Lubin 22:29 But then he was able to direct films, and his films had very good attendance because he was so notorious, and they were so shocking. They're very sexually very advanced films. The trouble was, he wanted his films to be eight or 10 hours long, and the studios would, you know, freak out at that because the sort of sexual fetishism of his films and the adultery and suicide made him very a dangerous character, and he made his greatest film called Greed, about the sort of depravity of human nature, people were stunned by it. So every studio that worked with him kind of never wanted to hire him again because even though his films made money, he was too belligerent and too difficult, and he went too far over budget. Gloria Swanson at that time had her own production company because she was immensely wealthy and she had a lover named Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of JFK, who was in Hollywood producing films. They got together and formed a production company. Kennedy wanted to make a prestige film. He so far only made these low-budget westerns, so he said, "Let's get the best director available to direct a film for us. So they hired von Stroheim, and Irving Thalberg said to Kennedy, "I advise you against this because you're not going to be able to control Stroheim and his cost overruns. But Kennedy had a lot of mass with the universe, hubris, and he said, "Don't worry, I can control Stroheim. So they started production of the film, and Kennedy couldn't control Stroheim, who was such a perfectionist and would shoot scenes over and over and over again. So the film way over budget, and finally Kennedy and Swanson said, "We've got to quit. So in mid production, they stopped the film, and basically Stroheim never got work in Hollywood again as a director because he had just crossed that line. So it was with great irony that Wilder hires Erich von Stroheim to play Max von Meyerling, given the history of Swanson and Stroheim, and so basically Stroheim believed that his career was cut short by Swanson, and here he is to play her butler. Todd Melby 24:51 Right, and in your book you write that there were three things that Stroheim suggested to Wilde. That he do in the movie that he changed slightly, and Wilder said yes to two of David Lubin 25:05 them. The first of them was that the fan letters that Desmond receives every day turns out to have been written by Max. The second one I think was that he was her director and former husband. But the third one was that the Max was supposed to be so devoted to Swanson, and and you know as I said, Stroheim had a real fetish for lingerie, and he wanted a scene in which Max is hand washing her lingerie and wringing it out and you know hanging it up, and that was the one that Wilder said that's a you know step too far, Todd Melby 25:42 right? I hear your note, I refuse David Lubin 25:48 it. Yeah, I came away from writing this book in love with von Stroheim. He was he was such a true to himself character. He had such confidence himself when when he found out that that Swanson was offered $50,000 for the role of Desmond, he had his agent insist that he also get 50,000. Paramount said no, we won't go beyond 35,000. So he was going to hold out, but he realized if he stuck with it, Piermont was going to cast somebody else, so he finally writes to his agent and says, "Okay, even geniuses need to eat. I'll accept the 35,000. But he kept thinking there should be more scenes of him in the film, and he complained that half the time he's in the movie, the camera just shows him his butt, and he he had a chair, you know, for himself as a lead, you know, co-lead that said Eric von Stroheim, and he would always move his chair, which was toward the back, as close to Wilder's chair as possible, almost as if he thought Wilder should disappear and he should take over directing the film. Todd Melby 26:59 He probably thought that for sure. David Lubin 27:01 Years later, Swanson and Shoheim came to respect and actually be very affectionate toward each other. And when Swanson wanted to turn Sunset Boulevard into a musical, she wrote Shoheim and said, "And of course, you would need to play Max. Well, he couldn't sing, and he said, "I will only play the role if you have that orchestra. Totally drowned me out every time I opened my mouth, and so he didn't. He basically didn't do it. She wasn't able to produce it because Paramount wouldn't give her the rights to the property, and von Strawheim died shortly thereafter. Todd Melby 27:35 He made the movie better. I think the casting choices, and obviously the direction, and the writing and the cinematography and the costumes-it all obviously came together in a terrific way. A couple of folks that we haven't talked about: Edith Head. When I first started watching lots and lots of movies, I kept seeing costumes by Edith Head. Costumes by Edith Head. So it was great for me to learn more about Edith Head in your book. David Lubin 27:58 Edith Head was French teacher at a high school in Los Angeles, and one of DeMille's daughters went to that school, and so she met DeMille through that connection, and he told her some jobs available as a costume design or the costume department, and so she was in Paramount's Costume department and was extremely talented, and they recognized that she was talented. But costume departments were always headed up by men, as really every other department in the film industry was. But when the head of the design costume design department turned out to be an alcoholic and couldn't keep up with the job. Head was appointed to step in for him, and she became Hollywood's first female costume designer, head head of department. So she didn't design all the costumes herself, but she was the coordinator of it and the director of it, but she also did her own designs, and she hadn't known Swanson at the time. But when Swanson and Head worked together on Sunset Boulevard, as I said, Swanson was a fashionista, and both her and Head were just loved the idea of creating a wardrobe from a woman who's a modern woman in 1949, but really lives back in the 20s. So they tried to come up with costumes that would be suitable for her, and I think they did a brilliant job of making her look like a woman of the 40s, but also with with echoes of the 20s. And Edith had that year was nominated for two, nominated twice for best costume designer, once for Sunset Boulevard and the other for All About Eve, and she won the Oscar for All About Eve. But she always said she should have won it for Sunset Boulevard, that that was the. More challenging and creative role, Transcribed by https://otter.ai