Beam Me Up, Scotty!: People often misquote this movie's famous line as "I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille" when it's actually, "Alright, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up".
Colbert Bump: At a rally in 2020, Donald Trump denounced the recent Best Picture win of Parasite, suggesting that a film from South Korea shouldn't be given Hollywood's highest honor, adding "Can we get Gone with the Wind back, please? Sunset Boulevard? So many great movies." While pundits at first focused on invoking the often-described pro-confederacy film Gone with the Wind, the out-of-nowhere mention of Sunset Boulevard, a film most people wouldn't guess would be a favorite of Trump, brought renewed attention to it. It also prompted lots of comparisons between Trump and Norma Desmond on Twitter.
Creator Backlash: Erich von Stroheim complained that he was always identified with "that butler role" rather than anything else he directed or starred in.
Darkhorse Casting: Billy Wilder cast newcomer Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer, as he wanted someone who could project a wholesome and ordinary image to contrast with Gloria Swanson.
Executive Meddling: Probably for the better. The original cut of the film involved Joe Gillis's corpse talking to other corpses in the morgue, which made test audiences laugh uproariously. All that survives of this early opening consists of script pages and some silent footage of morticians transporting and storing the corpse.
Irony as She Is Cast: Despite the fact that Erich von Stroheim plays a butler/chauffeur, he could not drive in real life. During the scenes in which he drove, the car was towed by another car. In the scene in which he drives Norma Desmond to Paramount Pictures at the studio gates the car was pulled by men with an out of camera rope.
While Norma Desmond is just about the most famous example of a washed-up has-been who can't get over the fact that she's in her fifties and has no real career prospects, Gloria Swanson had in real life quite happily moved into other forms of acting (including on the stage and over the radio), as well as become a visual artist and a fashion designer who specialized in dressing older women in ways that flattered rather than tried to conceal their age. Also, unlike Norma's alleged comeback turning out to only be the studio wanting to use her car in a film, Swanson could have had a comeback after this film- but she refused to take the roles on principle, seeing them as only wanting her to play Norma Desmond over and over again. She went back to her other careers instead, now with a boosted profile.
Method Acting: According to Gloria Swanson's daughter, Michelle Amon, her mother stayed in character throughout the entire shoot, even speaking like Norma Desmond when she arrived home in the evening after filming. On the last day of shooting, Swanson drove back to the house she, her mother and daughter shared during production, announcing "there were only three of us in it now", meaning that Norma Desmond had taken her leave.
Mid-Development Genre Shift: The film was originally going to be a comedy, and some of those lines made it into the final version as the usual film noir wisecracking.
Money, Dear Boy: Cecil B. DeMille agreed to do his cameo for a $10,000 fee and a brand-new Cadillac. When Billy Wilder went back to him later to secure a close-up, DeMille charged him another $10,000.
Prop Recycling: Norma's bed was used in the 1925 film of The Phantom of the Opera and before that belonged to stage star Gaby Deslys.
Reality Subtext: The Movie. How much so? The film was extremely shocking for Hollywood insiders, sending shockwaves through the industry. Audiences were more or less unaware of it, though, and just thought of it as a snarky Film Noir.
Norma is played by Gloria Swanson, who was a silent film star, and worked with Cecil B. DeMille. Max is played by Erich von Stroheim, who was a silent film director.
Norma talks about dancing with Rudolph Valentino, Swanson not only danced with Valentino, they were good friends and starred in Beyond the Rocks in 1922.
The Chaplin and Keystone Bathing Beauties scene were because one of Swanson's first movies was the 1915 Chaplin film His New Job and she was a Keystone player during the time of the Beauties.
The movie that Norma and Joe watch together was comprised of footage from Troubled ProductionQueen Kelly (1929) - directed by none other than Erich von Stroheim.
When Norma remarks how Paramount owes it's existence to her, it was probably taken from the fact that when Swanson was asked to come to Paramount for a Screen Test, she remarked why she would need to screentest for Paramount as she made more than 20 movies for the studio.
And Cecil B DeMille referred to Swanson as "young fella" when both were getting started in Hollywood.
The Waxworks, of course, were real former Hollywood stars then considered has-beens, including Buster Keaton.
The subtext of the film, and especially its critique of how Hollywood handles former stars, was so subversive that, at a special invite-only premiere, Louis B. Mayer, one of the heads of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, angrily berated Billy Wilder in front of the entire crowd: "You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!"
Referenced by...: The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Swimming Fools" starts with a shot of Squidward lying face-down in a pool while narrating that he always wanted a pool, and in the end, he got one. This mirrors the opening dialogue of the film when a corpse is discovered in a backyard pool.
Silent film era star Gloria Swanson plays all-but-forgotten silent film era star Norma Desmond (and silent film actor and director Erich von Stroheim plays Desmond's butler Max, also her former silent film director).
Those Two Actors: After the success of the film, this was attempted with William Holden and Nancy Olson; they appeared in three further films together, but none of them was really successful.
Typecasting: Gloria Swanson said that the reason she didn't make many films after this one is that most of the parts she was offered were just rehashes of Norma, and some people still confused Swanson with Desmond. (Fortunately for her, and probably contributing to her frustration with being viewed as the real-life version of her character, she had other avenues to return to, unlike Norma- see Irony as She Is Cast above.)
Wilder initially wanted to do a film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Hollywood-based satire The Loved One but couldn't get the rights, so he conceived an original story in a similar setting. The Loved One was eventually adapted to film in 1965.
Several other old-time actresses were considered for the role of Norma Desmond, including Greta Garbo, Pola Negri, Mary Pickford, and even Mae West, who was turned down after one meeting with the producers, who said they realized that she was still both too dignified and too pretty to believably sell a has-been character like Norma.
The film would originally begin with Joe being taken to the morgue, where he would tell the story of the film to his fellow corpses. The scene was filmed, but test audiences laughed throughout the scene, and Billy Wilder decided to cut the sequence from the final version. Unfortunately, the only material left was the script and some brief, silent frames of the ambulance taking the corpse to the morgue.
Stephen Sondheim began work on a musical version, before the release of Andrew Lloyd Webber's play. He abandoned the project due to Billy Wilder saying that he'd prefer a Sunset Boulevard opera to a musical.
Working Title: The writers feared that Hollywood would react unfavorably to such a damning portrait of the film industry, and so the film was code named A Can of Beans while in production.
The musical also provides examples of:
Acclaimed Flop: The Broadway and Los Angeles productions enjoyed generous ticket sales, the latter even collecting advance ticket sales in excess of four million dollars. All this, however, was dragged down by high operating costs thanks to a monster of a set and high profile lawsuits by leading ladies who had been dismissed before even setting foot on stage. The LA production closed after only 369 performances, while the Broadway run closed after 977, running a loss estimated to be about twenty million dollars. The Canadian production, starring Diahann Carroll, also closed early, relocating from Toronto to Vancouver for the last few months of its run.
Approval of God: Billy Wilder, directer of the film, was in attendance for opening night in both London and New York, and said the best thing they did was leave the script alone.
Prop Recycling: Glenn Close saved all the costumes from her first time and used them for her second time run in 2016/7.
Rarely Performed Song: “Salome” is probably the least-known song from the score. It’s the only number not to be heavily reprised throughout the rest of the show, and is usually omitted from highlight cast recordings.
Starring a Star as a Star: Professional productions of the musical tend to cast big-name stars as Norma. Just from English-language shows, there's Patti LuPone, Betty Buckley, Glenn Close (twice), and Petula Clark.
Troubled Production: Oh boy. The musical was significantly reworked after its West End premiere, evolving into the show as we know it now by the time it opened in Los Angeles. That production was marred when it closed after only 369 performances. This came as a surprise to Faye Dunaway, who was scheduled to replace star Glenn Close after the latter departed for Broadway. She promptly sued, settling out of court for an undisclosed amount. West End "Norma" Patti LuPone sued and settled as well, having been contractually promised the role on Broadway, only to be replaced by Close due to stronger American press reviews. The West End opening night was marred by multiple failures of the hydraulics of the massive set, attributed to interference by a nearby TV broadcast van. Even after the faults were worked out, the set proved ridiculously expensive to operate, the Broadway production costing three quarters of a million dollars a week to operate.
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