flirting after hours on the Paramount lot
may I say that you smell real special?
Happy September!
Listen, some of us are Pumpkin Spice Latte Girls and some of us are “buy every 12-pack of Waterloo Spiced Apple seltzer at Target the second they drop” girls. Fall enthusiasm is a broad spectrum! (I also love pumpkin, for what it’s worth. Though my coffee stays the same year-round. Venti iced Americano, black. Serious business.)
what’s living rent-free in my head this week
the “Joe Gillis and Betty Schaefer on the Paramount lot” scene of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard
I’m not exactly saying anything radical when I say that Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) is an absolutely flawless film. It was inducted into the Library of Congress in 1989 and is ranked #12 on the AFI’s list of the best 100 American movies of the 20th century. (I’m also a big fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version. Fight me, nerds.)
But when I say that Sunset Boulevard’s like a nesting doll of brilliance and the actual greatest thing in it is a random scene in the middle that doesn’t even involve Norma Desmond… that’s when I’m getting into weird territory. But it’s true. Here it is:
I’ve seen this movie dozens of times. When I first discovered Pluto TV right before the pandemic, I would often happen upon it on the Paramount Movie Channel late at night and if it was on, I watched it to the end. Didn’t matter that I’d already seen it the week before, or that it was going to positively wreck my sleep that night. (At a certain point, I had to start ignoring the existence of the Paramount Movie Channel full stop.)
But it wasn’t until I saw it in a theater on a big screen with an audience for the first time last summer that I was truly knocked sideways by the perfection of this scene. Here’s why: Up until this moment, Sunset Boulevard is one of the most acidic movies ever made. It’s about all the various ways in which the machinery of Hollywood grinds people down, be they forgotten stars or out-of-work screenwriters. This applies to all aspects of the entertainment industry, in my experience — for those of us lucky enough to get to do the thing, the mere act of doing the thing can be an intoxicant, which makes not getting to do the thing a brutal reality check.
So when sweet aspiring screenwriter Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson, who as of this writing is still with us at age 96!1) convinces sour failed screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who out of desperation has become the kept man of forgotten silent movie star Norma Desmond, to try his hand at writing something on spec with her — it’s a startling moment of warm optimism in an ink-black night. In his book Close-up on Sunset Boulevard, Sam Staggs puts it this way:
The emotional color scheme of Sunset Boulevard ranges from twilight shadow to haunted midnight, brightening occasionally to ominous afternoon but shading back, always, to darkness visible. Wilder’s palette assumes the conventional tones of film noir and adds a wash of melodrama. If most forties films noirs could be called “men’s pictures,” Sunset Boulevard is the great aberration: it’s a “women’s picture” where the tears turn to dust. It’s Mildred Pierce with a swimming pool through the eyes of Euripides.
What’s unique about Sunset Boulevard, however, is not its noir thesaurus but rather the subject and style of this tableau. That’s because no other filmmaker dared paint Hollywood stark naked. Or if they dared, they lacked the Wilder touch, meaning Billy Wilder’s technique, his bravado, his genius, and his gift for humanizing even a Godzilla ego like Norma Desmond’s. Better than anyone who preceded or followed him, Wilder knew how to mirror the backside of the silver screen as a kind of purgatory.
If you knew nothing about this movie and only watched this scene (and who knows, maybe you’ve never seen this movie before, in which case GO NOW AND WATCH IT, it’s on Paramount+, and come find me afterwards so we can laugh about the spectacularly funny fact that it’s on Paramount+), you would still get such a richness of character and story from its self-contained elements.
For a start, Franz Waxman’s jangly, twinkly after-dark scoring (where my Waxmanheads at?) tells you instantly what a beautiful little bubble these two people have found themselves in — the kind of delicate dream-like situation in which people fall dangerously in love. They’re meeting after hours on the mostly empty Paramount lot to write a screenplay together, but what’s really happening is two people realizing how much they enjoy each other’s company. The spark between these two people is real, and it’s happening against a literal fake backdrop. They flirt like writers do, and let me tell you, when we’re flirting with each other, we’re real good at it… but it can get weird fast. Nothing rings truer to me than one writer saying, “May I say that you smell real special?” and the other one-upping the weirdness of that line with “must be my new shampoo?”
In the hour-ish of movie leading up to this scene, Joe Gillis is an asshole. Any spark of a dream that existed in this guy was long extinguished before the story even starts. But then Betty — young, smart, surprisingly well-adjusted Betty — manages to ignite Joe’s pilot light, and he goes from merely surviving to having something (and someone) to care about. And of course, this is what sets the tragedy in motion — after all, we did meet Joe at the end of his story, face down in the pool. (Spoiler? I did tell you to watch it.) We know it can’t work, that poor Joe and Betty are doomed, that hiding in the twilight is poor wounded Norma Desmond, and no one ever leaves a star. But for a brief, twinkly moment in the land of make believe, we see what the stakes are, and they’re breathtaking. It’s quietly the thing the entire movie hinges on, and it’s brilliant.
Incidentally, I too have walked the fake New York streets of the Paramount lot at night, but for a food truck festival situation. No handsome smart-mouthed gigolo told me I smelled like handkerchiefs, but I did have a couple of decent tacos.
what I did this week
If you haven’t heard, it’s been triple-digit temps in L.A. this week. The vast majority of my time has been spent drinking gallons upon gallons of water and making terrible faces at the heat!
I did see a screening of Brokeback Mountain at Vidiots over the weekend (still gorgeous, still devastating) as well as a program of 16mm jazz-related shorts that included this Tex Avery cartoon, which I’d never seen and which absolutely must have been one of the foundational texts for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, right?
what’s next?
Get yer tickets for The Fitzgeralds of St. Paul at Irish Classical Theatre Company in Buffalo, New York! It runs November 8-24. The hookup’s at Irish Classical’s website!!! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!!! (Er, something less unhinged. What can I say, I’m excited!)
Meanwhile, did I mention that September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday? Mark your calendars, kids, we’re gonna party in a major way…
in conclusion, a cute picture of my dog
Nancy Olson put out a memoir last year and I was lucky enough to go to her book event at the Ebell of Los Angeles. I still haven’t read it yet, but she signed it for me. I’m looking forward to digging into it, though — in particular, her stories from when she was married to Alan Jay Lerner…
I also think the Betty/Joe songs in the musical adaptation are some beautiful hopeful moments but I am also of course willing to fight nerds over the Sunset Blvd. musical!!!