Eugene Walter was a prolific Hollywood screenwriter of the 1920s and 1930s. 1851 Ivar Street was the address of the Alto Nido Apartments, where Walter lived, sometimes worked, and, ultimately died in 1941. As Sunset Blvd. opens, William Holden's character Joe Gillis describes himself as a Hollywood screenwriter "living in an apartment house above Ivar Street." As the camera cranes up into the apartment, we can see it's the Alto Nido. The apartments, and the "Alto Nido" sign out front that is glimpsed briefly in the film, are still there today.
Jay Livingston, Ray Evans: The Paramaount songwriting duo are seen at the piano at Artie Green's New Years party. They are singing a parody of their song, "Buttons and Bows," from the movie The Paleface, for which they won an Oscar in 1949, the year Sunset Blvd. was made. (Ironically, in the parody they are singing, they lament that "Hollywood to us ain't been so good")
Norma Desmond says she paid US$28,000 for the Isotta-Fraschini car. US$28,000 in 1929 (the year of the vehicle) is worth ~US$347,472 in 2009.
According to Gloria Swanson's daughter, Michelle Farmer-Amon, her mother stayed in character throughout the entire shoot, even speaking like Norma Desmond when she arrived home in the evening after filming. On the last day of shooting, Swanson drove back to the house she, her mother and daughter shared during production, announcing "there were only three of us in it now, meaning that Norma Desmond had taken her leave."
As a practical joke, during the scene where William Holden and Nancy Olson kiss for the first time, Billy Wilder let them carry on for minutes without yelling cut (he'd already gotten the shot he needed on the first take). Eventually it wasn't Wilder who shouted "Cut!" but Holden's wife, Ardis (actress Brenda Marshall), who happened to be onset that day.
At Cecil B. DeMille's first appearance, his on-set cry of "Wilcoxon!" is directed toward his associate producer, Henry Wilcoxon, who had starred in his epics Cleopatra, The Crusades and Unconquered, later moving to a position behind the camera as DeMille's associate until the older man's death in 1959.
Despite the fact that Erich von Stroheim plays a butler/chauffeur, he could not drive in real life. During the scenes in which he drove, the car was towed by another car. In the scene in which he drives Norma Desmond to Paramount Pictures, it was rumoured he crashed into the famous Paramount gate. According to the DVD commentary by Wilder biographer Ed Sikov, this story was most likely invented/exaggerated by Billy Wilder.
Highly unusual at the time, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder had Joe Gillis narrate, from beyond the grave, the sad tale of the final months of his life, while the film simultaneously depicts the still-living Gillis experiencing those events unaware of the fate his dead self already knows. This parallel narrative - two perspectives from the same character, one omniscient, the other blissfully ignorant - that converge at the moment of Joe's death, are a major reason the film retains such dramatic and emotional power.
In "On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder", Ed Sikov relates a story about Wilder's explanation of the true meaning of the strange dead chimp scene from the start of the film. Sikov says that during the mid-1990s, both Wilder and Nancy Davis First Lady Nancy Reagan were at a party for an opening of one of the productions of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on the film, when, with Reagan nearby, an older woman approached Wilder with a question about what the chimp scene meant. Wilder's typically outrageous answer, probably intended to shock the former First Lady as much as to inform the woman of the true meaning of the scene, was, "Don't you understand? Before Joe Gillis came along, Norma Desmond was f**king the monkey."
In 1989, the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress selected this film as one of twenty-five landmark films of all time.
In 1998, the American Film Institute selected this as the 12th greatest film of the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time.
In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #16 Greatest Movie of All Time.
In the penultimate scene, as Max tells Norma that "the cameras have arrived," the high strings in composer Franz Waxman's Oscar-winning score quote a chord from Richard Strauss's "The Dance of the Seven Veils" (from his opera "Salome", a reference to the now-mad Norma's final possession by the woman Salome with which she'd been so obsessed). The same musical quote from "Salome" is used again as she descends the stairs, where Waxman segues into his own original musical statement of "The Dance of the Seven Veils".
It was George Cukor who suggested Gloria Swanson for the role of Norma Desmond. Billy Wilder had worked on a script for a Swanson picture years earlier called Music in the Air and had forgotten about it.
Joe Gillis mentions that the painting of wild horses that covers the projection screen in Norma Desmond's mansion was given to her by "some Nevada Chamber of Commerce." This is a nod to retired silent movie star Clara Bow, whose husband Rex Bell, a former star of Western B-movies, was the current president of the Nevada Chamber of Commerce. (Bell was later elected Lieutenant Governor of Nevada.)
Originally opened and closed the story at the Los Angeles County Morgue. In a scene described by director Billy Wilder as one of the best he'd ever shot, the body of Joe Gillis is rolled into the Morgue to join three dozen other corpses, some of whom - in voice-over - tell Gillis how they died. Eventually Gillis tells his story, which takes us to a flashback of his affair with Norma Desmond. The movie was previewed with this opening, in Illinois, Long Island, New York, and Poughkeepsie, New York. Because all three audiences inappropriately found the morgue scene hilarious, the film's release was delayed six months so that a new beginning could be shot in which police find Gillis' corpse floating in Norma's pool while Gillis' voice narrates the events leading to his death. Distortion caused by water meant that this scene had to be filmed via a mirror placed on the bottom of the pool.
Other actresses considered for Norma Desmond were Mae Murray and Mary Pickford. In fact, Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett even went to Pickfair to pitch the story to Pickford, but her horrified reaction as the story progressed made them stop halfway through and apologize to her.
Paramount were more than happy to be the subject of the film, and didn't ask for the studio to be disguised. In fact, such was the buzz about the film during production that the viewing of the daily rushes became one of the hottest tickets on the lot.
Set non-holiday all time house record of $166,000 at Radio City Music Hall when it opened.
The "Desmond mansion" was located not on Sunset Boulevard, but on Wilshire Boulevard. It was built in 1924 by William Jenkins, at a cost of $250,000. Its second owner was Jean Paul Getty, who purchased it for his second wife. Mrs. Getty divorced her millionaire husband and received custody of the house; it was she who rented it to Paramount for the filming. The mansion was torn down in 1957, and a gas station now stands on the spot.