"Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
October 6, 2003. EntertainmentMagazine.net
In 1950, writer/director Billy Wilder, along with co writer Charles Brackett, initially considered their film, Sunset Boulevard, a dark comedy, a rendition of the Hollywood dream gone horribly wrong.
How appropriate that this film about the movie world would ultimately reflect the real world and all its sweetness and bitterness. Life, after all, is nothing if not dark and comedic.
Sunset Boulevard showcased the (in this case dramatic) life of a writer. Poor Joe Gillis (a.k.a. William Holden) had talent and ambition but couldn't get arrested in the town he temporarily called home. When Joe drove his about-to-be repossessed car into that dark garage on Sunset Boulevard, the man he was irrevocably changed.
The copywriter from Dayton, Ohio turned struggling Hollywood screenwriter became the kept man, the remorseful, enlightened man, and, through it all, the doomed man. With one simple turn of the wheel, his life changed forever. Only in the movies, some might say. But what are movies, but a dramatic extension of life. Through the collaboration of creative minds, a character's journey begins. Like life, a character stumbles and falls, learning along the sometimes broken way.
Joe learned life's hardest lesson from Norma Desmond (a creepy Gloria Swanson): Be careful what you wish for, you might get it. The film begins with a voice-over narrative provided by the recently deceased Joe, attempting to explain how he became recently deceased.
"You see, the body of a young man was found floating in the pool of her [Norma's] mansion-with two shots in his back and one in his stomach. Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with a couple of 'B' pictures to his credit. The poor dope! He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool-only the price turned out to be a little high."
Joe dreamed of making it big in Hollywood. He dreamed of seeing his name in big neon lights. Instead, his name appeared on the front page, a victim of that celluloid world he once so desperately wanted to join.
Those unreachable dreams of his clashed with his newfound values and ultimately cost him his life. Before leaving Hollywood, (under a sheet on a stretcher) Joe had an epiphany, realized too little too late.
While watching Sunset Boulevard, I always feel the need to defend Joe and his misguided actions. Can't everyone see he's merely a product of his screwed-up environment?
That self-absorbed world of his dictates that he take his opportunities wherever he can find them. Of course, the poster girl for that screwed up environment turns out to be the person he tries to dupe.
Every word out of Norma's mouth echoes that of a woman who's lost touch with reality. Maybe that's what makes remembering her lines so easy for me. "Writing words, words, more words! Well, you've made a rope of words and strangled this business. Ha, ha. But there's a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongue." Okay, it makes sense that silent screen star Norma Desmond would dislike writers, but ironically, the woman had a way with words.
Too bad she was too far-gone, into a world that no longer existed. Joe was too much of the present world. He knew how the game was played. Norma, on the other hand, hadn't been playing with a full deck in years. An unfair fight, it would seem, yet in the end, Joe was no match for Norma.
An unstable Hollywood has-been riding on the coattails of an unsuccessful screenwriter was a match made in Hollywood Hell. Yet, this is a ride I can watch over and over again. I still find myself transfixed by this world in which morality and moviemaking just don't mix.
I still wish, for Joe's sake, that Norma had gotten herself some major therapy. Many felt sorry for poor, pathetic Norma, but in the end, the one who's left standing is not the one who gets my sympathy vote.
While many saw Joe as a sell-out, I saw him as a broken man who met, in many ways, a kindred soul when he met Norma. Here was a broken old china doll if ever there was one, beaten down by the same Hollywood system that had once sent her soaring among the stars.
Being true to their characters as well as to the decaying world in which they both lived, neither tattered soul attempted to mend the other. Instead, they unwittingly tore each other further apart.
In a perfect world (which was in no way depicted in this movie), Joe would have pursued a relationship with Paramount script reader/aspiring writer Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olsen).
They would have finished that script they were working on together, sold it to the highest bidder, and walked off into the sunset (well beyond that boulevard). Sadly, writing the story this way would have been the ultimate sell-out.
Everything in the movie led up to Joe's demise (even without the whole body-face-down-in-the-pool scene, we would have known Joe was doomed). He was surrounded by too much darkness. Betty represented the light (which was probably why her part in the film, although significant, was small).
When Sunset Boulevard opened that summer in 1950, many in Hollywood considered it a slap in the face. Ironically, it met with as much hostility as Joe did while trying to find work in Hollywood. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer spoke for the Hollywood elite when he suggested Wilder "be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood." Mayer accused Wilder of biting the hand that fed him (much like Norma accused Joe of doing).
The Hollywood insiders did not want to see the dark, truthful world represented in the film. They didn't know how well the story would hold up, or how appropriate it would be decade after scandalous decade. Holden's character learned too late that nothing in this life is free, least of all his soul. Taking back his integrity meant giving up his life.
The murdered man spoke to his audience, both literally and figuratively, and his brilliantly written words reverberate more than half a century later.
Sunset Boulevard reflected life in ways that extended beyond the gated walls of Hollywood. It told the story of a has-been movie star and a never-was screenwriter (of which there are still plenty of these days).
The movie carried a heavy message about the times in which they lived. In the year 2003, that message rings just as clear. When we compromise our values, it costs us. our dearly.
Movies that speak for generations to come speak of the best that Hollywood has to offer. The world may continuously change when we're not looking, changing the scope of movies along the way, but some things in this world remain the same. This is a story about success and failure, and what is life, if not a series of triumphs and losses? This, in the end, is a story about the price of dreams wrongly pursued.
More than 50 years have passed since Sunset Boulevard first aired. Yet, 50+ years later, the characters on the screen are still speaking for the common people and inspiring dreams.
I watch them in anticipation, reaching toward their dreams, carrying life's burdens, and making mistakes. While not all movie characters carry that weight as eloquently and dramatically as the characters in Sunset Boulevard, they all have the same goal: to connect with the people beyond the screen.
When Joe Gillis first met Norma Desmond in that neglected mansion of hers, he remarked, "You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big." Norma shot back, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." In her own delusional way, she was right. Within each movie resides a small world being played out on the big screen.
Audience members have come to expect a lot more from movies than they did in 1950. Special effects and computer wizardry, however, have not obliterated my need to find myself somewhere on that larger-than-life screen. Like Joe, I search for redemption. Like Joe, I wish for more in life than I have.
And when watching Sunset Boulevard, I still wish Joe Gillis had put on a bulletproof vest before turning his back on Hollywood. I want him to make it in the movies, or at least back to that small copywriter's desk in Dayton, Ohio. Every time I see this film, a part of me hopes for a different ending. The fine line between fact and fiction is broken, and I wish the world could be different.
|