CLOSE-UP ON SUNSET BOULEVARD: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream By Sam Staggs St. Martin's Press $24.95
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Sam Staggs presents multiple public plays on Norma Desmond's final words — from a Newsweek story on Monica Lewinsky ("Ready for Her Close-up") to the epitaph on an AIDS memorial quilt ("Ready for my close-up now, Mr. DeMille"). Such lists keep good company with more substantive information on how Sunset Boulevard (1950) — the most compelling Hollywood movie on Hollywood ever made — was cast, written and filmed.

Staggs, who is also the author of All About 'All About Eve,' describes Sunset Boulevard as "an extreme work ... as black as obsidian, and as lustrous. This is, indeed, Billy Wilder's Othello, his Paradise Lost, and also his Day of the Locust." What are the ingredients that make this the celluloid equivalent of works by Shakespeare, Milton, Nathanael West? Staggs explores many possibilities, from Wilder's personal vision to especially harmonious relationships on the set to Paramount's rather lenient front office.

Sunset Boulevard is tragic and certainly noir — right down to the midnight rats in Norma's empty pool. It is also really funny, with a lot of the humor coming through movie business in-jokes. When the film first opened, much of the shop talk may have been lost in the hinterlands; today, with television, videos and the internet making Hollywood a global company town, the picture's multi-layered appeal continues to gain momentum. "No other filmmaker dared to paint Hollywood stark naked," Staggs writes. "Or if they dared, they lacked the Wilder touch, meaning Billy Wilder's technique, his bravado, his genius."

Staggs analyzes the writing partnership of Wilder and Charles Brackett, with whom the director had also collaborated on such films as The Lost Weekend (1945) and A Foreign Affair (1948), and tries to parse out who might have contributed what. "[T]he language in a Wilder film, and its flow, belong mainly to Brackett ... or to any other collaborator in Wilder's career. The wit, the verve, and probably much of the plot no doubt come routinely out of Wilder's mouth." And, Staggs reminds, there was also "a third man," D.M. Marshman, Jr., who had come on board to "develop the story line."

Sunset Boulevard had started shooting without a completed script, continued without one "and only when the picture was over would anyone know how, or why, William Holden's character ends up dead in Norma Desmond's pool." One of the main reasons, Staggs believes, "they got away with such an unorthodox script timetable" was because they were at Paramount. "Had Wilder and Brackett worked at 20th Century Fox, under [Darryl F.] Zanuck, they would have been required to turn in for his personal approval a completed script before anything took place in front of the camera."

Anyone familiar with Billy Wilder's own anecdotes about Sunset Boulevard knows that it originally began with the deceased Joe Gillis — via Holden's voice-over narration — describing his demise from a slab at the morgue. It didn't play in Peoria and was re-shot, giving us one of the screen's most memorable openings: Dead Man Floating, above the camera's eye.

Samples of other changes in the developing scripts are a trivia lover's dream. Who would have thought that Norma's Isotta-Fraschini was, at one point, a Hispano-Suiza? Then there are the lines retrieved from the cutting room floor: in a scene at "headquarters," i.e., Schwab's, columnist Sidney Skolsky asks would-be screenwriter Gillis if he's "Got anything for the column." "Sure," Gillis replies, "Just sold an original for a hundred grand. The Life of the Warner Brothers. Starring the Ritz Brothers. Playing opposite the Andrew Sisters."

As with any film worth writing about, Sunset Boulevard is more than the sum of its parts, but few films have had such fascinating cross-pollinations. Wilder, who had directed Erich von Stroheim as Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo (1943), now directs him as Max von Mayerling, the butler of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond, her first husband, and her one-time director. Von Stroheim had, in fact, directed Swanson in Queen Kelly (1928), from which a scene is projected on Norma's living- room movie screen. A key figure in Wilder's film is fellow director Cecil B. DeMille, for whom Norma fantasizes her "return" to pictures, and who, in real life, helped make Swanson a star through the six films she did for him between 1919 and 1921. "How many other directors," Staggs wonders, "would have intuited the quirky finesse of this ensemble?"

Staggs calls DeMille's cameo one of the most famous in film history. "He's on screen for only a few minutes, yet he seems to command star billing ... In terms of the script, DeMille's career is the counterpoint to Norma's, for he has endured." The same could be said in comparing DeMille as a director still succeeding in the sound era with Max von Meyerling and Erich von Stroheim. Staggs says that DeMille also "plays the only character with an uncorrupted heart," but Nancy Olson's Betty Schaeffer would fit that too.

It's fun to read about ways Swanson, von Stroheim and DeMille suggested line changes and bits of business that Wilder incorporated. Staggs isn't shy about giving us "fillers" — yes, Olson and Swanson were talking to each other in real time in the telephone scenes — and plenty of dish on Sunset Boulevard, the musical.

One of the book's highlights is its section on cinematographer John F. Seitz (who did three pictures for Preston Sturges, including Sullivan's Travels, 1941). In Sunset Boulevard's tango scene where Norma tells Joe, "Valentino said there's nothing like tile for a tango," Seitz employed a "dance dolly" that let the camera shoot the couple making a 360-degree turn around the room. Seitz had used it before — for Rudolph Valentino's own tango scene in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921).

Clearly, Staggs has given Norma Desmond's "wonderful people out there in the dark" a lot of new light.

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