Sunset Boulevard/Recap

As the film opens, a man (not yet identified) has been found dead floating in a pool in the backyard of an enormous Hollywood mansion on Sunset Boulevard. Our narrator, a jaded and struggling screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William Holden), takes us back and tells us How We Got Here.

Some months earlier, Joe, blindly fleeing his creditors, winds up in what appears to be an abandoned mansion, only to find that silent movie great Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) still lives there with her Austrian manservant, Max von Mayerling (Eric Von Stroheim). The delusional Norma believes that her adoring fans still desperately want her to return to the screen, more than two decades after the advent of "talkies" have obsoleted her and every other silent-film star on the block. Once Norma learns that he's a screenwriter, she offers him room, board and refuge from his creditors -- in exchange for his help in revising the truly hopeless screenplay she's been writing for twenty years to prepare for her comeback--sorry, return.

At first, Joe sees her as a sap he can use to bide time and make some easy cash, but it becomes increasingly blurred just who's playing whom. More and more, he's trapped in his gilded cage: Norma buys him expensive things but never actually pays him, leaving him more and more dependent on her every fickle whim. Convinced her script (which is juvenile, trashy, and hours too long) will restore her to her rightful place as the greatest star of her day, she puts herself through a strict and at times absurd regimen to prepare herself for her return. She chooses to forget that she's now fifty rather than twenty-five, and for a Hollywood beauty queen, fifty might as well be one hundred.

Meanwhile, in secret, Joe has been working with Betty (Nancy Olson), an attractive young female screenwriter, on another script -- a script Joe sees as his redemption in more ways than one. Max, who has a few secrets of his own, appears increasingly annoyed at the attention Norma lavishes on Joe, and at Joe's dismissive attitude toward it. After a failed suicide attempt by Norma on finding out about the Other Woman, things come to a head, leading to a shocking conclusion which is also the film's opening.