![]() ![]() "I didn't know you were planning a comeback," Joe says. When Norma finds out Joe's a screenwriter, she proposes that he turn the handwritten script she's labored over for years into something Hollywood will produce as a star vehicle for herself. "I am big, it's the pictures that got small," she retorts. But she changes her mind when Joe suddenly realizes that this is the Norma Desmond. Joe attempts to explain his real reason for being there, Norma overreacts and orders him off the property. She wants a white coffin, lined in flaming red satin. Joe's narration describes it as "a great big white elephant of a place, the kind crazy movie people built in the crazy '20s." Her manservant Max - played cryptically by Eric Von Stroheim, himself a one-time silent movie director - lets Joe into the house, mistaking him for the funeral planner who's been summoned to make arrangements for Norma's recently deceased monkey. ![]() When a couple of repo men show up for the car, Joe flees, but a flat tire forces him to seek temporary refuge in the garage of Norma's mansion. ![]() No one's buying Joe's scripts, so he's broke and way behind on his rent and car payments. Flashback to six months earlier, the fateful day he met Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), an aging, reclusive silent movie star with a couple of decades between her and her last picture. It's a winner, and he's not about to let a little thing like death stop him from sharing it. The incorporeal voice of Joe Gillis has a story to tell. His name is Joe Gillis (played by William Holden), "just a movie writer with a couple of B pictures to his credit." We're introduced to him floating face down in the swimming pool of an old mansion located somewhere along that 22-mile stretch of asphalt known as Sunset Boulevard. and Billy Wilder (who also directed) - made an audacious choice: the narrator of their movie is a dead man. What the Queer Cinephile Says: The screenwriters behind Sunset Boulevard - Charles Brackett, D.M. ![]()
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