Sunset Blvd.
1950 USA Color 110 Minutes
Sunset Boulevard was adapted into a musical in 1993, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
The movie was the last major Hollywood feature to be filmed on a nitrate negative.
The role of Joe Gillis was initially offered to Montgomery Clift.
The role of Norma Desmond was initially offered to Mae West and Mary Pickford.
The story, written by Charles Brackett and Bily Wilder, initially was called A Can of Beans
The movie has been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
Sunset Boulevard is a street in the western part of Los Angeles County and stretches approximately twenty-two miles in length. It has gained notoriety as a Red light district.
This week 56 years ago Sabrina premiered (September 9, 1954)
June 22, 1906
Samuel Wilder
March 27, 2002
Billy Wilder was born in Sucha, Poland. From 1929 he worked as a screenwriter for silent films in Berlin until the Nazis came to power and the Jewish Wilder left for America.
Wilder knew little or no English when he arrived in Hollywood but was helped by film star Peter Lorre, with whom he once shared an apartment.
A turning point in his career came in 1938 when he began a long and succesful collaboration with screenwriter Charles Brackett which was expanded into a producer-director one in 1942. The duo turned such classics as Double Indemnity (1944), Five Graves to Cairo (1943) , The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), after which the partnership dissolved.
During the 1950s Wilder continued a string of hit films including Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some like it hot (1959). Through the 1960s and 1970s, Wilder worked on several more films, although none was as successful as his previous ones.
Though his last film was made in 1981, Billy Wilder was still turning up to work at his Hollywood office well into his 80s.