The "fee" for renting the Jean Paul Getty mansion was for Paramount to build the swimming pool, which features so memorably.
The antique car used as Norma Desmond's limousine is an Isotta-Fraschini, and once belonged to 1920s socialite Peggy Hopkins Joyce. It was a gift from her lover, automobile magnate Walter Chrysler.
The character of Joe Gillis was very much in tune with William Holden's standing at the time. When he appeared in the 1939 film Golden Boy, he was hailed as exactly that, but had seen his stock fall, largely through his problems with alcohol and a string of unmemorable films in the 1940's. On the basis of this film and largely out of his continuing association with director Billy Wilder, Holden would reach the zenith of his career from 1950-57.
The directions made by the Paramount guard for Norma and Joe to go meet Cecil B. DeMille on "Stage 18" is accurate: this stage, one of the largest on the Paramount lot, was known for years as "The DeMille Stage," and now is called "The Star Trek Stage", as all the "Trek" movies and some scenes from the TV shows have shot there (the TV series, from Star Trek: The Next Generation onward had their main sets right across the studio street on Stages 8 and 9, which are right below the second-floor office occupied by Betty Schaefer in Sunset Blvd.. Those offices later became the home of the "Star Trek" art department.)
The drugstore where Joe Gillis meets up with his old movie industry friends is Schwab's Pharmacy, then a real pharmacy/soda fountain at the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Crescent Heights Blvd. in West Hollywood. It was widely known as a top Hollywood hangout for many actors, directors, writers and producers. F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered a heart attack while in Schwab's in 1940. (Contrary to legend, Lana Turner was not discovered by a talent agent in Schwab's but, rather, in a drugstore across from Hollywood High School, about three miles to the east.) Schwab's was torn down in 1988 to make way for a movie theater and a shopping center.
The first floor set of Norma Desmond's mansion was also used in the western comedy Fancy Pants starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball, giving fans a chance to see it in full color.
The first name of the Joe Gillis character was Dan in an early draft of the screenplay.
The movie's line "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." was voted as the #6 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007. "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces." was #13. "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." was #91 .
The movie's line "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up" was voted as the #7 movie quote by the American Film Institute. (It is also one of the most frequently misquoted movie lines, usually given as, "I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.") "I am big! It's the pictures that got small." was voted #24, out of 100.
The musical version of the movie opened in London on July 12, 1993 and ran 1529 performances. It opened on Broadway at the Minskoff Theater on November 17, 1994, ran for 977 performances and won the 1995 Tony Awards for Best Musical, Book and Score.
The name Norma Desmond was chosen from a combination of silent-film star Norma Talmadge and silent movie director William Desmond Taylor, whose still-unsolved murder is one of the great scandals of Hollywood history. (On the morning of Febriary 1, 1922, Taylor was shot and killed in his Hollywood bungalow. His killer was never identified.)
The opening scene showing Gillis's body was facilitated by placing a mirror on the bottom of the swimming pool.
The original nitrate negatives for the film have long disappeared. The only extant film elements were 35mm inter-positives struck in 1952, which had undergone a great deal of decay. This inter-positive was scanned at 2,000 lines of resolution and electronically restored for the 2002 DVD reissue. The restoration was performed at Lowry Digital by Barry Allen and Steve Elkin. A new 4K high-definition scan was done in 2008 for the film's release on Blu-ray disc.
The photos of the young Norma Desmond that decorate the house are all genuine publicity photos from Gloria Swanson's heyday.
The role of Norma Desmond was initially offered to Mae West (who rejected the part), Mary Pickford (who demanded too much project control), and Pola Negri (who, like Mae West, turned it down) before being accepted by Gloria Swanson.
The writers feared that Hollywood would react unfavorably to such a damning portrait of the film industry, and so the film was code named 'A Can of Beans' while in production.
There's a little dig in the scene when Cecil B. DeMille finds out that Paramount has been calling Norma Desmond because it wants to rent her car for "the Crosby picture." The truth of the matter was that Bing Crosby was one of the very few actors to whom Billy Wilder had borne a grudge, mainly because Crosby had done the unthinkable during filming of The Emperor Waltz, and ad-libbed dialog, something he and Bob Hope had done for years as standard operating procedure in their breezy "Road" pictures. Charles Brackett and Wilder were just as adamant that nothing in their scripts should be changed, and nothing new added.
Upon seeing the film at a star-studded preview screening at Paramount, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer screamed at director Billy Wilder that he should be tarred, feathered and horse-whipped for bringing his profession into such disrepute. Wilder's response was a terse, "Fuck you" (Mayer would find himself ousted from his position within the year by the new regime at MGM, headed by Dore Schary).
When filming began, William Holden was 30 and Gloria Swanson was 49; each celebrated a birthday during production.
When Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond watch one of Norma's old silent movies, they are watching a scene from Queen Kelly, starring a young Gloria Swanson. Erich von Stroheim, who directed Swanson in Queen Kelly plays Max the butler, who serves as the projectionist in the scene. Later in the film, Max tells Joe Gillis that he was the silent movie director who discovered Norma Desmond, and put her in films. According to Billy Wilder, it was von Stroheim's idea to use a clip from Queen Kelly in Sunset Blvd., as a way of "art imitating life."