More than seventy years after its initial release, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is justly remembered as a stone-cold classic. It’s vision of the seamier side of Hollywood has become definitive in many ways, from the way has-been stars are frequently compared to its doomed heroine Norma Desmond to the way people who haven’t seen a frame of it still know the immortal closing line, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” The film’s legacy has only been buttressed by the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical adaptation, whose latest staging has been one of the hottest shows on Broadway this past season.
Sam Staggs tackles the subject of the film in total, from its initial conception, the protracted fight to get it made, all the way through its long afterlife to the present (at least, the present as of the book’s publication in 2002.) Staggs is not a typical non-fiction author, in ways that both entertain and frustrate the curious reader. While Hollywood history may not require the academic rigor of a Napoleon biography or an account of the Wars of the Roses, Staggs’s gossipy, conversational style is a bit much at times. He feels no compunction about tossing his own opinions about people and events, speculating openly about things he has no actual evidence to back up. He also indulges his own peculiar hobbyhorses to an irritating extent.
The most galling example is his obsession with his hot take that Wilder’s films after Sunset Boulevard were not as good as the ones that came before. Staggs places the blame for this on the dissolution of the partnership between Wilder and screenwriter Charles Bracket. No one denies that Wilder and Bracket were an excellent team, but dismissing Wilder’s post-Sunset career means dismissing movies like Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17, Some Like it Hot, and The Apartment.
Though Staggs does thoroughly cover the making of the film, I was shocked by how much of the book I had left to read even after reaching the point where the movie has been released and lost most of its Oscar nominations to All About Eve. In addition to some truly unnecessary chapters like one where Staggs just describes a bunch of other movies that he feels were influenced by Sunset Boulevard, he spends an inordinate amount of time covering the off-stage drama surrounding the musical adaptation. While some of this was indeed interesting information (honestly, the drama surrounding Patti LuPone’s casting and eventual firing is probably worthy of its own bitchy showbiz book) it’s hard to justify it’s prominence in a book purportedly about the film.
All of which is to say, Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard isn’t a book for serious scholars of film history, and it’s broad scope and voluminousness will probably scare off people looking for a quick, breezy account. It’s a bit stuck in-between that way, a curious book about a wonderful film.