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Ready for Her Close-Up:
Art Imitates Life in the Making of "Sunset Boulevard"

By Greg Hatch, Dramaturg

Gloria Swanson was the epitome of a silent screen idol. Soon after her first appearance on film at the age of seventeen, she was launched into superstardom by director Cecil B. DeMille. In their six film collaborations, from 1919 to 1921, Swanson repeatedly portrays glamorous, sexy, worldly, and feisty women, dressed in elaborate costumes festooned with jewels and peacock feathers, surrounded by servants, taking up husbands and lovers, and even sharing the screen with a real lion. In real life, the young Swanson was equally excessive and ambitious, avowing, “I will be every inch and every moment the star!” She married and divorced four husbands (one being a Marquis) while also taking multiple lovers (one being patriarch Joe Kennedy) by age 35. Fan magazines frequently featured her in both sycophantic and disparaging stories. As a result of her on- and off-screen success, Swanson became one of Hollywood’s earliest millionaires and she spent lavishly on fashion, a mansion, and elaborate dinner parties. Swanson ultimately produced her own movies, which allowed her to play roles ranging from waitress to duchess, and from convent girl to brothel madam, sometimes in the same film.  

Unlike Norma Desmond, the reclusive, former silent screen star she’d eventually portray in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson made a successful transition from silent films to “talkies,” at least initially. Her first sound film in 1929, The Trespasser, earned her a second Oscar nomination for Best Actress. (The first was for Sadie Thompson. She’d go on to earn a third nomination for Sunset Boulevard, but she never won.) Despite that success, Swanson produced a streak of unsuccessful films in the early 1930s and walked away from Hollywood to pursue other interests. She made only one more film, Father Takes a Wife, in 1941, before her triumphant “return” in Sunset Boulevard.

The director of Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder, and his frequent co-writer, Charles Brackett, wrote a film treatment “about an old star who has lost her standing in the interregnum of silent pictures and sound pictures.” Their first choice was Mae West, followed by Pola Negri and Mary Pickford. It was only after director George Cukor suggested Gloria Swanson that the writers realized she was ideal, having been the top box office star of their own studio Paramount, in the 1920s. Initially thinking she was accepting a small role, Swanson divorced her fifth husband in New York and moved back to Hollywood.

Wilder and Brackett continued to write the screenplay throughout the film’s production, and as they worked, character Norma Desmond’s backstory began to resemble that of real-life Gloria Swanson even more. Erich von Stroheim, who plays servant Max and Desmond’s one-time director in the film, had, in fact, directed Swanson in the silent film Queen Kelly, the movie he screens for Desmond and Joe Gillis. In the film Stage Struck, Swanson’s character daydreams about playing Salome, the subject of Desmond’s own screenplay. And, of course, Cecil B. DeMille famously plays himself in Sunset Boulevard.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Christopher Hampton had both seen the film and thought it would make a good musical, though they were not the first. Gloria Swanson, Stephen Sondheim, and Harold Prince had each taken a stab at musical adaptations. Unlike their predecessors, Hampton and Lloyd Webber (along with co-writer Don Black) agreed an adaptation should remain faithful to the movie. After all, Sunset Boulevard was a classic film and many of its lines had entered the public lexicon. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” And most famously, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” Billy Wilder attended the 1993 London premiere of the musical. He expressed appreciation that the book and lyrics retained many of his key plot points and dialogue. He was also impressed by how the musical’s creative team managed to focus the audience’s attention on what needs to be seen and heard, something Wilder had accomplished in his film with long camera shots and, of course, close-ups.

Dramaturg Sources: Sunset Boulevard: From Movie to Musical (George Perry, 1993), On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (Ed Sikov, 1998), and Silent Stars (Jeanine Basinger, 1999).