The musical returned to Broadway in 2017, still starring Glenn Close. It won the 1995 Tony Award for Best Musical, in a year in which only one other show was even nominated. The Broadway premiere starred Glenn Close, and The 1996 Australian premiere in Melbourne showcased a relative unknown named Hugh Jackman, who played Joe Gillis opposite Debra Byrne as Norma Desmond, who, at the time, was ironically Australia's own White-Dwarf Starlet. In 1993, it was adapted into a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber. After a failed suicide attempt by Norma on finding out about the Other Woman, things come to a head, leading to a shocking conclusion which is also the film's opening. Max, who has a few secrets of his own, appears increasingly annoyed at the attention Norma lavishes on Joe, and at Joe's dismissive attitude toward it. Meanwhile, in secret, Joe has been working with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), an attractive young female screenwriter, on another script - a script Joe sees as his redemption in more ways than one. and for a Hollywood beauty queen, fifty might as well be one hundred. ![]() She chooses to forget that she's now fifty rather than twenty-five. Convinced her script - which is juvenile, trashy, and hours too long - will restore her to her rightful place as the greatest star of her day, she puts herself through a strict and at times absurd regimen to prepare herself for her return. More and more, he's trapped in his gilded cage: Norma buys him expensive things but never actually pays him, leaving him more and more dependent on her every fickle whim. Once Norma learns that Joe is a screenwriter, she offers him room, board and refuge from his creditors.in exchange for his help in revising the truly hopeless screenplay she's been writing for twenty years to prepare for her return.Īt first, Joe sees her as a sap he can use to bide time and make some easy cash, but it becomes increasingly blurred just who's playing whom. The delusional Norma believes that her adoring fans still desperately want her to return to the screen, more than two decades after the advent of "talkies" rendered her and every other silent-film star on the block obsolete. Some months earlier Joe, blindly fleeing his creditors, winds up in what appears to be an abandoned mansion, only to find that silent movie great Norma Desmond ( Gloria Swanson) still lives there with her Austrian manservant, Max von Mayerling ( Erich von Stroheim). Our narrator, a jaded and struggling screenwriter named Joe Gillis ( William Holden), takes us back and tells us How We Got Here. It is generally regarded as one of the best films of all time.Īs the film opens, an as-yet-unidentified man has been found dead, floating face-down in a pool in the backyard of an enormous Hollywood mansion on Sunset Boulevard. ![]() ![]() While the characters are deeply flawed, in some cases beyond any redemption, the film still manages to present them all as complex, sympathetic, and even endearing. It's the pictures that got small.Ī classic 1950 Film Noir directed by Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard is a satirical yet dark meditation on the film industry and the fleeting nature of fame, and to this day one of Hollywood's most scorching (yet wistful) depictions of itself.
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