There are Hollywood classics, and then there are Hollywood Classics. Undoubtedly 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, director/writer Billy Wilder‘s ultimate Hollywood story is in that rarefied air. It is of course the tale of washed up aging silent screen queen Norma Desmond, played to the hilt by another actress known for her silents Gloria Swanson, whose delusional dreams of a comeback end – and begin – with the murder of screenwriter Joe Gillis, who lies face down in her pool at her decaying mansion as the film opens, and Gillis cheekily narrates his own demise. That would be William Holden doing the honors and both he and Swanson were nominated for Oscars, along with Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer, a script reader who falls for Gillis, and the inimitable Erich von Stroheim who plays Max, Desmond’s ex-husband and loyal butler. They were all among the 11 Oscar nominations the film received, winning 3 for Art Direction, Music, and Writing.
This is simply a movie that has never gone out of style, a black comedy and scathing look at a motion picture industry which eats its own, especially those still in denial like Desmond who famously says, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small”. Remember this was made 75 years ago but it still rings true in a very different industry, and a very different Paramount Pictures which serves as the studio that is depicted in the movie, and the studio that released it. Ironically as it celebrates its anniversary this weekend on August 10, marking the exact date it opened, Paramount itself this week just infamously completed its rocky sale to new owners Skydance, a contentious roller coaster of a battle for government approval for the sale of a monolithic enterprise that includes perhaps Hollywood’s most famous legacy major studio in a world Desmond, and indeed Swanson, probably wouldn’t recognize even if those famous gates are still there within a lot with bigger gates now protecting it. If satirist supreme Wilder were still alive and kicking this new Hollywood tale might be catnip for yet another film about the business he skewers here.
William Holden, Gloria Swanson, Nancy Olson, Erich von Stroheim, 1950
Everett
Among the first films selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, and in the top 20 of the AFI’s Greatest American Films Of All Time, it has been meticulously restored with a new theatrical premiere at May’s Cannes Film Festival. The stunning 4k restoration played theatres last weekend and has just been released on 4k Ultra HD with more than two hours of extras included. In June, the latest Broadway production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard won three 2025 Tony Awards including Best Musical Revival, and Best Actress in a Musical for Nicole Scherzinger’s astounding work as Norma Desmond, repeating her triumph in London at the Olivier Awards. The cast album is a hit and available now as well. The 1994 original Broadway version of the show was nominated for 11 Tonys (same number as the film’s Oscar nominations) and won 7 including for star Glenn Close who has tried ever since to get a new film version of the musical mounted that she could star in.
Erich von Stroheim, Gloria Swanson, 1950, ‘ready for my closeup’
Paramount
It is indeed a story that continues to fascinate. I had the pleasure recently to hop on a zoom with 97-year- old Nancy Olson Livingston, the only living member of the 1950 movie’s cast (and crew for that matter), and someone with a remarkably sharp memory of just about everything associated with its making, as she also recalled in a chapter from her wonderfully detailed and delicious 2022 autobiography, “A Front Row Seat”. Here is our conversation.
DEADLINE: Can you believe it has been 75 years since you made Sunset Boulevard and you are still here talking about it?
OLSON LIVINGSTON: It is truly amazing, isn’t it? It is something that I have understood for a long time, because I’ve thought about it, and I’ve read so many versions of why, but I have one, which is that a great work of art reveals the truth, and the truth is recognized, the bare truth, not with tags all around it. Just simply the truth, and that has a power that is extraordinary, and it’s hard to deliver, to write and to act and to make it happen.
But Billy Wilder understood the motion picture business and understood that movie stars were commodities. They were made more beautiful, more lustrous, more sexual. As I’ve said many times, Marilyn Monroe is a perfect example. When she got a little older, they were less interested, and she committed suicide at the age of 36. So, Norma Desmond was one of those extraordinary, talented, gifted movie stars who was thrown away, and every character in Sunset Boulevard…
Bill Holden plays Joe Gillis, who wants to be a great writer, and he hasn’t sold a script. He’s been told that he should go away, ‘we’re not interested’. Loses his house, his car, his dreams, everything, and he sells his soul for survival, and my character, Betty Schaefer, I want to be a writer, and I understand that Joe Gillis has some talent, and he can help me be successful. So, I’m an opportunist. I want him to come and help me get what I want, and in the process, I fall in love with somebody who has sold his soul.
DEADLINE: You and Bill Holden actually became quite the screen team for a while after making Sunset Boulevard. You did three more films together.
OLSON LIVINGSTON: Well, I tell you…and we became friends, and I could just tell you, quickly, one story. Alan Livingston, who is my second husband, my real husband (note: she was first married to Alan Jay Lerner who dedicated one of his many musicals, My Fair Lady, to Nancy), he and I were on our way to London, and we were changing planes at Kennedy Airport, and we were walking down this long hallway, and I hear a voice behind me. Oh, this is years later, and it said, ‘Nancy’, ‘and I turned around, and I said, ‘Bill?’ And we start running toward each other. We meet. We hug. We kiss. He said ‘I haven’t seen you in two years. How are you? Are you remarried? Is he okay? Is he being good to you, Nancy?’ And then he gave me another kiss. Now, in the meantime, a man was walking by, and he taps us on the shoulder, and he said, ‘excuse me, but I have to tell you, this is better than looking at an old movie!’.
DEADLINE: I just saw the magnificent reinvention of the Sunset Boulevard musical when I was in New York in May. I imagine you saw the musical version as well? What did you think?
OLSON LIVINGSTON: Billy Wilder and his wife Audrey and Alan Livingston and I were all invited to the opening in New York and the opening in London, and the score was quite wonderful, but the play itself didn’t have what Billy’s picture had, and Billy made a comment. He said, ‘it is my movie in a permanent longshot…a movie is different from a play or a musical. The proscenium arch, it’s the writing. It’s the expressing that must be made to the audience, where, with the movie, a camera can come up to you and take your own tear down your cheek in a closeup, and you don’t have to say a word’. So, that was a brilliant statement of Billy’s. It’s my movie in a permanent longshot, and therefore, it loses what that movie had.
DEADLINE: A favorite part of the movie for me was the love scene on the balcony that you and Holden had. Do you recall doing that scene. What was it like?
OLSON LIVINGSTON: Well, first of all, I arrive, and we’re shooting it at night outside, and down below the balcony are tables and chairs and everybody having a party (on the lot). Having a dinner party, and they’re friends of Billy’s, and Bill’s wife is there, and Audrey Wilder is there, and I’m thinking, ‘oh my god, we’re playing this very heavy-duty love scene, and they’re all down there watching’. Anyway, that put me off a little, but again, Billy very carefully directed this, and we were close together, and at this point, he would say, ‘Bill, take Nancy in your arms, slowly draw her in, keep drawing her closer in this embrace, and do not separate until I say cut’.
Nancy Olson, William Holden, 1950
So, there we were, and I got to the line where Bill asks me…Joe Gillis asks Betty Schaefer, ‘what happened?’ And I turn to Bill and answer, ‘you did’, and whereupon, he takes me into his arms, draws me in, and starts to kiss me. We rather enjoyed it, actually. It was lovely…he knew how to kiss. It’s an art, by the way, and he started, and it went on and on and on, and finally, I thought, ‘why isn’t (Wilder) saying cut?’ And suddenly, there was a female voice from down below. ‘Cut, damn it. Cut!’. It was Mrs. Holden.