Sunset Boulevard

Billy Wilder's 1950 film Sunset Boulevard pleased both critics and audiences, and it has since become a touchstone of film noir as well as one of the best-known films about Hollywood made in Hollywood. The story opens on an unforgettable image: William Holden's screenwriter, Joe Gillis, floating face down in the pool of Norma Desmond, an ageing star played by Gloria Swanson. Some of the film's dialogue has also entered cinema history, including Norma's insistence that she is the large one while the pictures have shrunk.

Steven Cohan's study rests on original archival research into how the film was made. It examines how director Billy Wilder, the leads Holden and Swanson, and a supporting group that includes Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer, Cecil B. DeMille and Hedda Hopper, along with costumier Edith Head and composer Franz Waxman, each contributed to the picture's success and to its meanings.

Cohan reads the film in two ways, as a backstudio picture, meaning a movie about Hollywood, and as a film noir. He places it against the backdrop of McCarthyism, blacklisting and the Hollywood Ten. The book also traces how the film was marketed, how audiences and critics received it, and how its afterlife has unfolded.

Throughout, Cohan argues that the film belongs to a specific historical moment, when the movie industry was leaving the studio era behind, yet it still speaks strongly to today's viewers. He ends by speculating on the reasons for its lasting appeal.