A Can of Beans by Joe Gillis
Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about five o’clock in the morning. That’s the homicide squad. Complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported from one of those great — big houses in the ten thousand block. You’ll read about it in the late editions, I’m sure. Because an old timer star is involved. One of the biggest. But before you hear it all distorted, and blown out of proportions. Before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe you’d like to hear the facts, the whole truth.
If so, you’ve come to the right party. You see, the body of a young man was found floating in the pool of her mansion. Nobody important really, just me, a movie writer, with a couple of B-pictures to my credit.
Now let’s go back to about a few decades and find the day it all started. I, Joe Gillis, was brought to life by writer turned director, Billy Wilder, and his ol’ reliable writing partner Charles Brackett in the 40s. Back then I was more of a Dan/Dick than a Joe and so was my actor, Montgomery Clift, who turned down a $60,000 paycheque and gave the role to William Holden. Clift was chicken. Poor dope was too scared of my meeting with Norma Desmond. A dizzy ageing silent film dame who lived in her luxurious Sunset Boulevard mansion. Eventually I had to play chippy for her just as Clift did for Libby Holman.
Well, it didn’t begin like that. Norma was convinced that her major comeback is just around the corner and that it was a script I had to write. But Hollywood didn’t want to see an ageing woman, not even if she was one of the greatest of its stars once. Well Norma…nobody should have to be an ageing woman that sits still and fades.
If anything really, this is the story of Hollywood and its skint love for the pictures. I am after all just another struggling Hollywood screenwriter — writing things that are either far too original or not original enough for the industry after the 1910s boom of Studios, creating all sorts of grift characters on its way. Including those like Wilder and I, who think about writing the movies when no one does.
Wilder and Brackett blew out one of the most haunting, memorable, and honest stories of Hollywood. Its fleeting glory, melancholic vanity, departure from reality, obsession with sex, jealousy, and profit. It could have been another bougie kick but it was honest, deep, and a work of self reflection for both of them, enough for them to boot out their entire collaboration after the film. Their frustrations were personified in myself and my writing partner Betty Schaeffer, who came from a show biz family, showing how you’ll still find a way to be in the movies if you love it that much.
That’s the beauty of this audacious story. It’s based on no real-life characters, and if they were, they got those folks to play the roles. As suggested by George Cukor, Gloria Swanson who plays Norma was Paramount’s forgotten doll. She was the star of Paramount’s early successes who helped to establish the place as a studio. No exaggeration to say that there won’t be no Paramount without her.
Her devoted butler, also first director and husband, was written specifically for Austrian-American director and actor, a star of the silent era himself, Erich von Stroheim. Who agreed only for the money.
They got away with the story in Paramount of all the places. Submitting it excerpt by excerpt, disguising it as a picture called A Can of Beans, saying on the script cover that “This is the first act of Sunset Boulevard. Due to the peculiar nature of the project, we ask all our coworkers to regard it as top secret”. And top secret it was, especially since Wilder had not finished writing the script itself.
You can only imagine how such an audacious script trampled on egos of the Hollywood Ballers. MGM head, whinge Louis B. Mayer called Wilder a bastard, to be deported for biting the hand that feeds him.
On the technical side Wilder commented how “You will not find in my pictures any phone camera moves or fancy setups to prove that I am a moving-picture director. My characters don’t rush around for the sake of being busy. I like to believe that movement can be achieved eloquently, elegantly, economically and logically without shooting from a hole in the ground, without hanging the camera from the chandelier and without the camera dolly dancing a polka.”
So they were grinding after all, those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Hollywood. The dream we had clung to so desperately had enfolded us…and from the other side, go on an watch the pictures already.
