I’ve tried to think of possible ways to update Sunset Blvd., but I cannot think of anyway to update Norma Desmond (a filthy rich totally faded middle-aged superstar of a genre that no longer exists). This is for several reasons:
*50 year old stars today look 30 due to plastic surgery and personal trainers
*With television and direct to video movies, the chances of being as unemployable as Norma would seem to be less
*I cannot think of anything that even remotely compares to silent film as a worldwide supherhuge genre that vanished almost completely within 5 years
If you were to update Norma, what would you do with her? My takes:
*A prequel (perfect for Eve to write if she has a few spare minutes) that examines Norma & Max in their heydey, from the time she’s a psychotic 15 year old new face and he’s a sexually strange wunderkind genius- great way to splice some of the great anecdotes of the silent era into a roman’a’clef
*A 1970s disco diva who refuses to change her sound and is a joke to most young people
A late-60s “old hippie” former rock/movie star who sank her career by going radical and who is frozen artisticly and politically in 1969. Think of a mix of a Janis Joplin who never died, and a Jane Fonda who never got tired of radical chic.
Slightly OT – this has long been one of my very favorite films. Imagine my astonishment a year or two ago when I realized that Norma was 50 in the story (and IRL, roughly – she was 53). I was 48 when I had this epiphany. Well, maybe not completely OT – neither I nor any of my same-age friends consider 50 “old” in any real sense, joke though we might about it.
Supposedly, the first actress offered the role was Mae West, who turned it down because she thougt she was way too young to play a washed-up silent film actress, so the role went to Gloria Swanson who really was a washed-up silent film actress and was several years younger than Mae West.
Fifty-year-old actresses had jobs in the 50s, at least the ones who would play 50-year-old characters, and weren’t loony. Norma thought she should still be starring as the 20-something ingenue. I think a 50-year-old actress who only wanted to star in teenage sex romps would have problems, plastic surgery or no.
But I don’t think an update would work very well. Part of what makes “Sunset Boulevard” work is Norma’s grandiose, melodramatic manner, which seems more befitting a queen of the silent screen than someone who was big in the '70s. (Yes, I know silent-film actors could deliver subtle, nuanced performances, but that’s probably not how most people think of them.)
Consider the graduate, where 35-year-old Ann Bancroft attempts to seduce 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman. The horror!
I know we’ve previously had threads about age mis-castings (and it seems this thread has mentioned a few so forgive this slight hijack).
Anyway, one of my favorite mis-castings is Norman Alden (you’d know him if you saw him) playing a college football player in the original “Nutty Profesor” (1963). When that film was made he was 39 !!!
I agree with the new version having a “rock star” angle. In fact, what might work would be to have the main characters change sexes. The “Norma Desmond” of the remake can be a reclusive, once-influential, aging rock star (think a combination of Bob Dylan, late-period Elvis, and a bit of Phil Spector thrown in) who’s surrounded by a small group of flunkies/hangers-on who continually feed his delusions that he’s still relevant while sponging off his royalty checks. A young woman who’s a struggling singer/songwriter (i.e., William Holden’s “Joe Gillis” character) then unexpectedly enters the picture with tragic results for all.
I think to update Norma you’d have to add some scandal which, while not completely destroying her, had enough of a damper on her career that her natural nuttiness put the final nail in. Of course in our modern age she’d end up working for either John Waters or Quentin Tarantino and all would be forgiven.
Imagine my astonishment a year or two ago when I realized that my girlfriend was that same age and a grandmother. I was 36 when I had this epiphany. :eek:
I’m not sure what order it was offered in, but I know the role was turned down by West, Pickford (who wanted way too much salary and creative control) and Pola Negri before Swanson grabbed it. Swanson was pretty desperate for work at the time and unlike Norma she wasn’t filthy rich from her days in the sun; the $50,000 the role paid was far less than she’d earned in her heyday but far more than she’d earned since. (I know that Mae West and Mary Pickford were two of the richest women in Hollywood and most certainly did not need the money, I’m not sure what Negri’s finances were like or why she turned it down.)
“I’m rich. I’m richer than all this new Hollywood trash. Huh! I’ve got a million dollars…Own three blocks downtown. I’ve got oil in Bakersfield. Pumping, pumping, pumping…”
Hell, Chico and Harpo were 45 and 44 when they were on the Huxley College team in Horse Feathers.
But to unhijack this, look at the Stepford Wives and King Kong movies coming sooner and later. Those were movies completely of their era, with underlying references to their ages that really can’t be extracted and easily moved. Peter Jackson’s King Kong at least will be set back in the 1930s. But why should audiences thrill to the tallest building in the world! and scenes of airplane warfare in New York City! in this day and age? The juxtaposition with the possibility of unknown animals and our less-than-understood human heritage in the personage of savage black natives can’t be reproduced either, and dare not be.
At least Sunset Boulevard is not a hopelessly 1950 film, because its base includes universal themes that like A Star Is Born can survive a transformation.
Norma Desmond - #27 on E!s 101 Most Starlicious Makeovers!
Who would be Michael’s Max? Perhaps a mysterious housekeeper named Diana who makes the Isotta Fraschini weave a lot when she drives.
This sounds like a South Park episode. (Actually, one of the few scripts I’ve ever written [which I never did anything with] was a Simpson’s episode in which Bart becomes the Joe Gillis of Melissa Gilbert, who holed herself up in Springfield working on The Return of Laura Ingalls, a new series in which Laura fights Jack the Ripper and battles Nellie on the Eiffel Tower. This is not to imply that Jackie Gleason is not overrated.)
