#Hollywood Is Always Hungry For The Next Big Thing

Norma Desmond, of course, wasn’t invented out of whole cloth by “Sunset Boulevard” screenwriters Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D.M. Marshman, Jr., but inspired by the real-life experiences of silent film stars who had trouble finding work once sound entered the pictures. Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, and Greta Garbo all became secretive and reclusive in the 1930s, and actresses like Clara Bow and Mae Murray struggled with mental health during their careers, some have said intensified by their mistreatment by the Hollywood system (via The Guardian). Aging was seen as a bad career decision for women in Hollywood, and if you did it, you were essentially shown the door or actively kicked out. Norma Desmond may have been named after Norma Talmadge, best known for “Smilin’ Through” (1922) and “The Lady” (1925). Whatever the specific inspiration, Norma is the stand-in for every Hollywood actress that was victimized by broken promises and brusque expulsion, and became an icon of L.A.’s unjustly forgotten. 

Even the title, “Sunset Boulevard,” has a whiff of a bygone era. While Hollywood Blvd. was better known as the seat of the film industry in 1950, the Los Angeles film industry actually began on Sunset Blvd. in 1911 when the Nestor Film Company moved from New Jersey to an office at the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Gower Street, setting up the city’s first permanent film studio. (There’s a Denny’s on that corner now.)

Wilder, Brackett, and Marshman wanted to make a critique of Hollywood, exposing the cynicism and horror that lies beneath the opulence and fame. As they knew from years of experience, screenwriters who work in Hollywood weren’t glamorous artists, but word-producing meat bots who were locked into tiny writing coffins, ordered to write more, more, MORE. The production machine mutated the craft of writing from a creative endeavor to a content factory.