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Sign up todayReady for My Closeup
Today, more than 70 years after it premiered, Sunset Boulevard remains the finest ever movie made about the pathology of fame: those who lose it, those who abuse it, and those who never attain it at all.
Great films are born of great collaborations, and Sunset Boulevard represents one of the most extraordinary confluences of cinematic talent in film history, but its production was surprisingly fraught, filled with unexpected twists. Why was William Holden, who had never caught fire as a leading man, hired to play Joe Gillis after the fastest‑rising star in the business dropped out at the last minute? After Mae West and Mary Pickford turned down the now iconic role of Norma Desmond, how did Billy Wilder convince Gloria Swanson, who had long been absent from Hollywood at this point, to leave her low‑paying job as a TV talk show host to join the cast? From the writers' room during Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett’s final collaboration to the moment when the film won three Academy Awards, scholar and former Rolling Stone staffer David M. Lubin takes readers on a fascinating journey through film history that proves, once and for all, why Sunset Boulevard is one of the most iconic films in cinematic history.
By exploring the history of Sunset Boulevard in time for the movie’s 75th anniversary, from its inception to its making to its present-day legacy, Ready for My Closeup breathes life into a beloved masterpiece of American cinema, not only marking its influential place in film history, but also proving how prescient it really was in terms of the human costs of relentless technological change and our obsessive quest for fame, youth, and immortality.
As an undergraduate, David M. Lubin studied filmmaking at the USC School of Cinema while reviewing music for Rolling Stone. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Among his seven books is an in-depth study of the blockbuster film Titanic. A professor at Wake Forest University, he has been a visiting professor at Oxford and lectured throughout the United States, Europe, China, and Australia. His Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images won the Smithsonian Institution’s Charles C. Eldredge Prize for “distinguished scholarship in American art.” Lubin is a Guggenheim Fellow and an NEH Public Scholar.
Reviews
"Sunset Boulevard belongs in the Hollywood pantheon, alongside such classics as Chinatown and The Wizard of Oz, both of which have deservedly received their own “biographies.” Now David Lubin gives Sunset its due with this fast-paced journey through the making of the movie, sprinkling his well-researched tale with rich nuggets about the Golden Age. Anyone who admires Billy Wilder, adores William Holden and is mesmerized by Gloria Swanson will hunger for more."—Stephen Galloway, New York Times bestselling author of Truly, Madly "David Lubin’s deep dive into Hollywood’s darkest take on Hollywood seamlessly analyzes process, motive and meaning, as well as the confluence of talents that brought this bleak, beloved tale to life and, eventually, immortality."
—Scott Eyman, New York Times bestselling author of John Wayne: The Life and Legend "Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is one of the most majestic and original works of Hollywood’s golden era, and David M. Lubin's entertaining book casts a wide net in capturing and exploring all of the elements of the film's brilliant artistry, from great writing and acting to set design and cinematography for a movie that is both a scathing critique and a requiem for the studio system, its grandeur and its cruelties."
—Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Shooting Midnight Cowboy “With the perfect blend of journalistic brio and scholarly erudition, David Lubin’s Ready for My Closeup invites us on an eminently pleasurable journey through the production history, the critical and popular reception, and the enduring resonance of Sunset Boulevard. The gripping story he tells will surely be catnip to cinephiles and equally seductive to readers of Hollywood history and lore.”—Noah Isenberg, bestselling author of We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie “David Lubin’s exhaustively researched and fluently written anatomy of Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder’s classic about `the pathology of fame’ (Lubin's phrase), is an example of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ genre at its best.”—Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Expand reviews
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