Sunset Boulevard (film) - Other Films About Hollywood

Other Films About Hollywood

While Hollywood had been making films about itself since the 1920s, many of them, such as It's a Great Feeling (1949), were good-natured and fun. Others, such as What Price Hollywood? (1932) and A Star Is Born (1937), hinted at the darker side of Hollywood without explicitly showing it. Sunset Boulevard is considered to be the first to employ such extreme cynicism. It was soon followed by The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Singin' in the Rain (1952) and the musical remake of A Star Is Born (1954). Though none was as harshly self-critical, each depicted the ease and cruelty with which Hollywood could discard a movie star past his or her prime.

Sunset Boulevard was followed by other films which varied the story of an older actress desperately clinging to her past glory, such as Bette Davis in The Star (1952) and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Joan Crawford in Torch Song (1953), Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), Susan Hayward in Valley of the Dolls (1967) and Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest (1981). The scenario of an older woman with a gigolo was also used without the Hollywood setting in such films as Senso (1954) with Alida Valli and Farley Granger and The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961), which starred Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty, while Katharine Hepburn's descent into madness in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) has been compared to Norma Desmond's final scene. The Day of the Locust (1975), The Last Tycoon (1976), and S.O.B. with Julie Andrews (1981) depict Hollywood in bitter terms and, like Sunset Boulevard, make use of real backstage settings. Rainer Fassbinder's 1982 film Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, this time set in the post-war German film industry, was heavily influenced by Sunset Boulevard, detailing a tragic love affair of a doomed faded movie star and a younger reporter.

Among the more recent films to discuss Sunset Boulevard in their screenplays or imitate its scenes or dialogue are Soapdish (1991), The Player (1992), Gods and Monsters (1998), Mulholland Drive (2001), Inland Empire (2006) and Be Cool (2005). The ending of Cecil B. Demented (2000) is a parody of Sunset Boulevard's final scene.