Gloria Swanson was attending the coronation of George VI when the telegram P415-421 from "City of Nets" arrived . The telegram said that Harry Cohn wanted her to come over and sign a contract immediately to play a movie called "The Second Mrs. Draper". She hurried over, only to find that Cohn had changed her mind. "I don't want you to be a stepmother who falls into a relationship between old and young," he said. "You should find a very sympathetic role." Cohn agreed to let his men look for new projects while paying Swanson's wages. Someone recommended a movie by Tallulah Bankhead, which was just performed on Broadway, and the film copyright has been bought by David Selznick. Miss Swanson likes it very much. There is a wonderful scene of going to death in the play. To ensure Cohn's approval, Miss Swanson went to his house in person and read the twenty-five-page outline aloud. She was already in tears when the scene was over, and Cohn also thought she was great, but she said she would call her the next day to make a final decision.
She stayed at home all morning waiting for news. Finally the phone rang.
"Gloria, this is Harry Cohn," Cohn said. "The answer is no."
"But why, Harry?" Miss Swanson asked, retrospectively saying that she wanted to yell at the time.
"If David Selznick wants to sell it," Cohn replied with his irrefutable Hollywood logic, "it must be no better."
Miss Swanson can't remember exactly what she said later, she just remembers "deep heart." The dyke there collapsed." She began to curse, using words that she had never heard of during Harry Cohn's dictatorship. "I have never had such a big fire in my life," she said. "I confessed what I thought of him, and told him that the hillbillies in the studio couldn't tell the good or the bad even if they lost their books... I yelled and cursed,
So Miss Swanson terminated the contract with Columbia and moved her family to New York. The death scene that Harry Cohn didn't let her perform was finally performed by Betty Davis. This movie called "Dark Victory" was a great success. Then, just like the usual calendar in movies, the camera was flipped by the wind, and ten years passed by in a flash. Miss Swanson's phone rang at the New York mansion. She later said in an interview: "I suddenly received a call from someone from Paramount-it was my old club, it could be said that it was the studio I was supporting-but a little bug told me to fly right away. To the west coast-right away, don't you hear?-audition for this movie. Audition for a movie character? Me? Audition? It disgusts me. I haven't tried it in my life. Then Mr. Wilder called. I’m very rude to him. I asked him what the hell he wanted to do when he asked me to audition? I want to know if I’m still alive, right?
Billy Wilder is used to this a long time ago , and I’m afraid no one is more accustomed to it. The last time he saw Gloria Swanson had to go back to 1934, she was making a sweet film "Music in the Air" with Jerome Kern, and he was still living in the shabby room of the Chateau Marmont hotel. A folding bed and a gas stove. The director of "Music in the Air" is his friend Joe May. Wilder can hang around on the set, and finally won the title of co-writer-the first after coming to the United States. There is no record that Miss Swanson See him, or remember to meet him.
Of course, Billy Wilder has become a big man, even before Miss Swanson. ("You used to be big," Wilder wrote this understatement of humiliation, and made William Holden fire at her, which triggered the most famous line she left on the screen: "I am big. It's the pictures that got small.”) "Double Indemnity" has proved Wilder's dual talent as a director and screenwriter. The box office success of the movie drove Paramount to give him a lot of creative freedom. He put that degree of freedom into one of his greatest works, "The Lost Weekend". When Buddy DeSylva approved the purchase of Charles Jackson's gloomy novel about the self-destruction of alcoholics, production director Y. Frank Freeman happened to be absent. When he came back, Freeman announced the only prerequisite for the film to start: "Cross over my corpse." However, Barney Balaban, the chairman of the company in New York, nodded in approval, and Wilder was able to start filming. The theme of the movie is very important to him. He just witnessed and experienced Raymond Chandler's alcohol addiction and survived. His old partner Charles Brackett had a deeper understanding of the subject: his wife was a drunkard, and so did his daughter, who fell on the stairs and fell to his death after being drunk. In fact, the safe and respectable Brackett seems to have a temperament that attracts Hollywood literary alcoholics. He helped Scott Fitzgerald survive multiple binge drinking; he took care of Bob Benchley, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett.
Facing the gloomy subject matter, Wilder chose the same gloomy approach-shooting in New York: PJ Clarke's salon, the shadow of Third Avenue, and the nightmare scene of the Bellevue Mental Hospital. In that famous scene, the unshaven Ray Milland hobbled on Third Avenue, trying to pawn the typewriter, but didn't realize that it was Jewish Yom Kippur, and the pawnshops were closed-the whole scene was a certain week. Shooting every day, Milland really wandered from 55th Street to 110th Street. Wilder took the camera and sat in the pastry cart to follow the shots. There is also the scene: Milland is insane, thinking that a bat is chasing a mouse in the dark of the house, and screams hysterically-Hollywood has been obsessed with horror themes for so many years, who else has filmed a more terrifying scene than this NS?
The premiere of "The Lost Weekend" in Santa Barbara ushered in bursts of laughter, and the summary of the feedback card was that the movie was disgusting. Encouraged by Y. Frank Freeman, this tragic movie should be discarded as a clog. There are also reports that the gangster Frank Costello, on behalf of the brewing industry, wants to buy negatives from Paramount for destruction at a price of $5 million. After a six-month postponement, Balaban decided that it would be a waste to make the movie and let it go, so he ordered "The Lost Weekend" to be released in the fall of 1945. After the release, the reputation of film critics was surprisingly good, and Wilder won the first two figurines in his life-best director and best screenwriter (shared with Brackett).
With such success, Wilder has a tendency to be a little arrogant. When filming "The Emperor Waltz" in Jasper National Park, Canada, he decided that the pine trees there were not in line with his original intention, so he spent 20,000 yuan to transport pine trees from California and plant them where he wanted. Then he transported four thousand chrysanthemums and planted them where he wanted. Then he decided that the color of the chrysanthemum was unpleasant, and sprinkled it all with blue paint. At the same time, he changed the entire road to ochre. Then he decided that there should be a small island in Leach Lake, so he built an oil drum and covered it with soil and planted flowers. This island alone cost 90,000 yuan. After the release of "The Emperor Waltz" (1948), I returned the books and earned a beautiful vote, but the movie itself is very mediocre, and Wilder is almost invisible.
Billy Wilder's movies are tough, cynic, and the conclusion is that everyone can sell it. Wilder's early career was deeply influenced by Ernst Lubitsch, and his world-weariness was neutralized by Lubitsch's cheerful romance. If Ninotchka lost his asceticism in Le Du Paris, the reason is that stockings, wine and the temptation of love. But in 1944, Lubitsch, who was filming "A Royal Scandal", suffered a severe heart attack, which completely changed him. "This attack... makes him feel uneasy all day long, living in fear of another illness in the future," said Otto Preminger, who took over halfway and finished "A Royal Scandal". After thirty he got up and left the meeting and asked me to take him home immediately. He said, "I'm dying, please call my doctor." The diagnosis was only mild indigestion."
Lubitsh has always dreamed of filming " "Rose Knight", a subject that is unattractive to Wilder. There is a lot of resistance to the auction, there are difficulties in finding investment, copyright problems, anyway, it is a lot of trouble, but Lubitsh still insisted on shooting. Marlene Dietrich, who could never get around, found him the perfect romantic protagonist. She wanted everyone to come and admire her new discovery, Gerard Philipe. The time was November 1947. Hollywood was struggling with the aftermath of the HUAC (Non-American Activities Committee) Washington hearing, and was eager to spend time caring about other things, such as Philipe’s in a wonderful new French film "Le Diable au Corps." Wonderful performance. People of all colors gathered at William Wyler's home to attend this special screening for Lubitsch. Of course Miss Dietrich was there, Billy Wilder and Preminger were there, and there was even Mike Romanoff, but Lubitsch himself was unexpectedly absent. He took a bath that afternoon, and the heart attack that had been hiding for so long finally killed him.
Another force that restrains Wilder is Charles Brackett. He is as keen on witty dialogue as Wilder, and besides, he has no similar preferences. In fact, he doesn't catch a lot of Wilder labels-cruel, cynical, deadly, and utterly wild. Brackett hates "Double Indemnity" and refuses to have anything to do with it, but he knows that a script written with Wilder is much better than a script written by anyone alone. Since Brackett also served as a producer for the film directed by Wilder, the freedom the two enjoyed was almost unheard of in Hollywood. The only object of struggle is the other party.
Brackett gave the idea of writing a silent movie star trying to make a comeback, but neither he nor Wilder can figure out how to write it or how to come up with the whole story. One day, they happened to talk about it with a young Time Life reporter DM Marshman, who came up with an idea. "He suggested to write about the emotional entanglement between this silent film star and a young man," Brackett said. "She lived in the past and refused to admit that she was dead. She lived in a vast and dilapidated mansion. The man is a screenwriter with a kind heart, perhaps from China. In the West, he couldn't make a career in Hollywood, and his life was at the bottom of his life." Wilder and Brackett liked this idea so much that they even hired Marshman to write the script together. The next key point comes from Wilder. "Suppose," he said, "the old woman shot and killed the boy.
" The autobiographical nature of "Sunset Boulevard" is more than one. Wilder has been a dancer and male partner in a hotel in Berlin, so he is not unfamiliar with the humiliation of being a dancer; on the other hand, he has just divorced and is in love with a young singer who is much younger than him, so he understands. The pain of old and young love. This is exactly what "Sunset Boulevard" talks about: self-awareness, infatuation, shame, depression, unhappiness, obsession, absurdity, and being blinded by love and turning a blind eye to all of the above. Even before the movie started, Wilder had decided to part ways with Brackett, and "Sunset Boulevard" also talked about irreconcilability and breakup.
But "Sunset Boulevard" is also about Hollywood to a large extent, about Hollywood power and Hollywood labels, and about its worship of youth and history. (Because of this, Wilder insists on keeping everything confidential. The script has not been read by anyone. The project was under a pseudonym, "a jar of beans".) As for the main location, Wilder had to find a dilapidated Hollywood palace for the film queen Commander, because Hollywood in reality cannot find a palace that is grand enough or ruined enough, he can only rely on imagination to build this Frankenstein-style castle. Wilder found a Renaissance mansion at the junction of Wilshire and Crenshaw Avenue. In 1924, former Mexican consul William Jenkins spent 250,000 to build this mansion. But Jenkins moved out after living for a year, and the house was closed for eleven years before being bought by oil dealer J. Paul Getty. After Getty divorced her second wife, she got the house and now she is willing to rent it to Paramount. There is only one condition: Paramount wants to build a swimming pool. If Mrs. Getty doesn’t like it, the studio has to sell it. Remove it again.
Paramount built a swimming pool (which Mrs. Getty likes) and many other things. They installed stained glass windows in the front hall and a pipe organ in the bedroom. They also installed heavy velvet curtains, planted palm trees in the greenhouse, and hung dozens of portraits of Miss Swanson on the walls. The same procedure was used by Wilder in the luxury car looking for the silent queen, of course, the movement was slightly quieter. This Isotta Fraschini rented for 500 yuan a week is already amazing, but he also spent a few thousand dollars on leopard skins and set up a dedicated line for the empress and the royal driver. This imperial driver Erich Von Stroheim is really Isotta Fraschini in an actor, or Isotta Fraschini in a director when Wilder was young. "Erich doesn't know how to drive, he feels very embarrassed," Miss Swanson said of Yujia. "But he still acted in this scene. He drove too much into the act. As a result, every shot was exhausted, even though the car was always roped. Pull it."
Similar to history, Wilder once again relied on a series of coincidences to build this dazzling cast of actors. Just like "Double Indemnity" was saved by George Raft stupidly refusing to play the male number one, "Sunset Boulevard" survived by the bottomless vanity of Wilder's favorite female number one. Mae West made a shocked look at Wilder's invitation. The 55-year-old said she was too young to be a silent star. Wilder went to Mary Pickford again, and she was willing to play it, provided that the role had to be played up to scare Wilder away. Then he approached Pola Negri, who was just like Mae West, saying that he was still young and could not play the role of a fifty-year-old woman. In the end, director George Cukor recommended Gloria Swanson to play Norma Desmond and personally convinced her to audition.
As for the role of the young man, Wilder thought that signing Montgomery Clift would be all right, and the script was written according to him. Two weeks before filming started, Clift retired from the crew. He issued a statement through his agent: "Playing in love scenes with women who are older than me, I can't do well." It sounds strange, because Clift is in love with singer Libby Holman who is a lap older than him. Obviously, the latter felt that "Sunset Boulevard" was about her. Clift should be great if he wants to play, but the other people in Wilder's picture are expected to be a disaster: Fred MacMurray refused, Gene Kelly and MGM have an appointment. Wilder could only take second place, looking from Paramount's contracted actors, and finally picked William Holden, a young man who has not yet become popular.
Just as Wilder personally decided to look for Mae West to play Norman Desmond, Wilder personally decided to shoot the saddest opening scene in film history. This scene takes place in the Los Angeles morgue, and a group of corpses are talking about how they got here. Not only did Wilder write it, he really shot the scene. Holden recalled: "The corpse next door asked me how I died, and I said it was drowned; he asked, how can a young man like you drown, and I said back to him: "First, I was shot in the back. '; He said that he was also shot. He was a Chicago robber and died in Los Angeles. Then the kid opposite said: "I was drowned too-I was swimming at the Santa Monica Pier with my friend at the time, and I bet him Can stay underwater for two minutes.' The wife next to the child asked him not to be sad, and his parents would take him to a good place when he came over. At the end of the room, there was a big negro (negro), and he said:'Hi buddy, Did you see the results of the Dodgers game before you got shot?' I said no, the morning paper didn't come when I died..."
Of course, Bracket hated this. He said that the scene is both abnormal and disgusting, but Wilder, who has a strong Vienna/Berlin temperament, likes the smell of death, and Hollywood is a creepy place in his eyes. So he hired Von Stroheim to play the role of Gloria Swanson (and ex-husband), so he would listen to Von Stroheim's more creepy advice (to wash Norma Desmond's underwear lovingly in front of the camera), so he would leave it to the photographer John F. Seitz's golden sentence: Seitz asked him how he would like to film the funeral scene of Norma's pet orangutan. Wilder replied: "Oh, Johnny, just use your usual monkey funeral photography."
Although it looked a little rash, Wilder was right. Work is extremely serious. When Bill Holden (Bill is William's nickname) went wild like Brando, saying that he must know more about the role of Joe Gillis, Wilder asked, "Do you know Bill Holden?"
"Of course," Holden replied. He actually didn't know how shallow he knew Bill Holden, and what Wilder liked was this simplicity. Wilder said, "Then you know Joe Gillis."
Gloria Swanson's experience allowed her to see through the director's tricks. "Wilder deliberately ignored us," she recalled, "Let us figure it out for ourselves, he knew very well. A script about Hollywood's overwhelming and neurotic nature, it is destined to make Hollywood characters who participate in the performance doubt the material and self... The more you think about it, the more it feels like a modern extended version of Pirandello novels, or living in a world of science fiction. "The
above elements are found in the movies, and it also has a wonderful Gothic atmosphere, that kind of gloomy feeling; it also has a trait that most Hollywood movies lack: passion, which is largely due to Miss Swanson's performance. Norma Desmond was really mad for Joe Gillis, and when he couldn't keep him, it was a natural thing to slaughter a lover like Medea or Phaedra to go mad again. Of course, the way she went mad was purely Hollywood. She stepped down in the dazzling lights and declared that she was ready to take a close-up of Mr. Demille. However, this scene was filmed with great style and beauty, and it may be the closest scene to a classical tragedy in the history of Hollywood movies.
But the opening scene of the crappy morgue is still there. To avoid the risk, Paramount decided to have a trial screening in Evanston, Illinois. I chose this place because studio statistics show that it is the most typical American town, and secondly, it is the home base of the Christian Women’s Temperance Association. I want to be pampered by the creators of "the Lost Weekend". They were wrong. Evanston's audience laughed and booed, filling out the comment form full of insults to Wilder's masterpiece. Wilder told Paramount that the Evanston people lacked sufficient education to appreciate "Sunset Boulevard", and the studio arranged a trial screening, which was said to be the most educated town in the country-Great Neck, Long. Island. The audience there also hated "Sunset Boulevard". Not only did they laugh, they booed and hissed, hissed and mocked.
Paramount’s official response was to put the film on hold for six months. Then, through some internal rectification process, Wilder was persuaded, or persuaded himself to start with a new start. His new version is still very weird. Joe Gillis's body is floating in Norma Desmond's swimming pool, and he begins to tell the story of how he got here. But at least, this time he is the only white corpse in the scene, and the audience no longer feels that what they will watch is a somewhat abnormal comedy. "Sunset Boulevard" was released in the summer of 1950 and received due praise, and the box office performance was also good. The only viewers who really hate this movie are the big movie stars who attended the Hollywood premiere. Louis B. Mayer was still the head of MGM at the time, so he was also the king of Hollywood. Not only did he scold "Sunset Boulevard" before his entourage, he also fired on Wilder.
"You bastard," Mayer shouted with a fist. "You shame the industry that gave birth to you. You should be tarred and feathered out of Hollywood."
Billy Wilder paused, trying to find the perfect word to fight back. Then his instinct answered.
"Fuck you," Billy Wilder said.
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