Why Did Norma Desmond's Career Go Straight Down The Shitter?

Her love of young cock.

She insisted on playing age-inappropriate parts. Salome is supposed to be 17. Convent girls are supposed to be 15, not 29.

She had a face for radio and a voice for silent movies

She relied on her face, not realizing that she did indeed need words too.

Too bad that face started sagging right around 1927.

She needed rhinoplasty.

Good thing Frenchie left.

She was too stuck up to shift into character roles.

Because she didn’t learn how to adapt. Instead she just lived in the past and talked about the good old days when she was a star.

Word got around that she was sleeping with her pet chimp.

At that point, nobody was willing to touch her in any way, shape or form.

Getting caught in a Mexican brothel with a horse, dog and burro can kill a career rather quickly.

oh well, she starred in the best movie of 1950 and one of the most legendary films ever.

R11, I can’t decide if you’re being serious or not. If you are, I worry for you.

[quote]Getting caught in a Mexican brothel with a horse, dog and burro can kill a career rather quickly.

Didn't slow me down a bit!

R12, yes, I"m being serious. Sunset Bouelvard was the best movie of 1950. And yes, it is legendary.

R14, honey, Norma Desmond was a fictional character. She did not star in Sunset Boulevard.

r14 turn in your gay card immediately

I thought the loudest trolls had established that knowing about this stuff is no longer gay card material. You are all supposed to be wrist deep in a stranger's colon right now, while pointedly not watching Golden Girls or talking about old Hollywood....

Because the pictures got small.

Norma Desmond posed for that iconic photo where she stood in the ruins of a New York theater. I don’t think she worked much after that except when she gust hosted for a week on the Mike Douglas Show. She also hated sugar.

Wow, holy shit, I immediately thought Gloria Swanson when I read Norma Desmond. My bad.

You are forgiven, r20

Sunset is a noir parable on deadly results when a trans refuses to transition. Just as the movies needed to transition to sound, to survive, Normal needed to assume her male gender to thrive in the brutal capitalist hegemony Hollywood was becoming. Her muet performative femininity was demode and as powerless as Max, the cis male Prussian militaryesque film director Norma had emasculated and. Norma's deluded need to remain a cis woman was her downfall.

All film noir is about transgender body politics.

When you do the sums 1950's wasn't that far removed from silent film era which ended in 1920's (or so). Thus film stars/actors from latter era if still alive would be around Norma Desmond's age.

Regardless if you break them down into those who survived into the "talkies" and had longer careers, or those who didn't it was still a different world by 1950's.

What Ever Happened To Baby Jane and many other films from 1950's and even 1960's (IIRC) had similar themes; old vaudevillian and or silent film people who were stuck in their past heyday.

I wonder how her career was AFTER the end of the events in the movie. Would she have become even more famous as a convicted criminal? (Assuming she was convicted. Maybe she was popular enough to pull an OJ.) I think we need a sequel!

I'd settle for a good remake of Sunset Blvd, we're long past due. But IIRC some Hollywood big shot is sitting on the rights and hasn't done a damn thing with them since.

Too much melisma.

Oh, she kept trying to keep her career going into the 1930s. She still looked great, but she sounded stagey and was over thirty anyway. By 1933, she got tired of being offered nothing but rich-bitch roles, and married that old oil tycoon.

She didn't really fit into the zeitgeist of the 1930s, she just didn't click with audiences after 1929. Not with that giant car and her day diamonds in every publicity photo, and her insistence on calling herself "countess", even two husbands after that fortune-hunting fake aristocrat.

r27 = Greta Garbo

Ok, Glenn Close was signed to do film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Sunset Blvd", but I want another film, not a musical.

Life in prison for murder can do that.

Two words: opium den.

It feels inevitable that Ryan Murphy will remake Sunset Boulevard as a series - Hollywood is set around the same period, and Ratched looks like (visually, if not thematically) more of the same.

He'll give Norma's monkey an origin story episode and Max will have a Sondheimy sex dungeon in one of the apartments on Norma's property. Billy Wilder will be a character, Betty will be black, Artie non-binary, and Judy Davis will reprise her Hedda Hopper from Feud.

She never learned to rooooooollll with the punches. And in this business they come left, right, and below the belt!

She didn’t take better care of herself.

They should do a sequel in which Norma, sprung from the loony bin after a decade or two, gets her career back on track, returning to her fans—and making legions of new ones—in 70s disaster movies and witty cameos in the "Airport" series, ultimately writing a well-received memoir as her glorious swansong.

"Glorious Swansong" -- marry me, R35

Nora Desmond was a fictional character, not based on Gloria Swanson's life at all! Gloria was one of the FEW stars who made the transition from silent to talking films, she had a prolific career spanning decades. People often confuse her with the character she played and they had absolutely nothing in common.

[quote]It feels inevitable that Ryan Murphy will remake Sunset Boulevard as a series - Hollywood is set around the same period, and Ratched looks like (visually, if not thematically) more of the same.

Coming soon to Netflix: "FEUD: Norma Desmond vs. Betty Schaefer."

She couldn't suck cock like Nancy Davis a/k/a Nancy Reagan.

She was a Communist.

"None of us floozies were that nuts."

Madonna should be cast as Norma in a remake--she's already there.

Norma Desmond is amazing!

I think a central question the film asks is whether or not Norma really had talent - or talent that could survive the weirdness of the silent film as a medium. "All About Eve" came out the same year, IIRC, and although we never see Margo Channing or Eve Harrington act, the film implies they both are superb on stage. Norma is something of an unknown quantity. It must have been a bit bittersweet for Gloria Swanson overall.

I also think she would not have been jailed. It's obvious she is insane, and she is an older woman with some powerful friends. It would be easy - and not entirely inaccurate - to characterize her kept man as a cad.

Again if you read Hollywood Babylon (not the most accurate source I know), but more than a handful of murder investigations and other crimes were interfered with by powerful Hollywood film moguls.

True the 1950's wasn't 1930's, 1920's or even 1940's, but still agree with above posters that strings would be pulled, and or favors called in to see Norma Desmond never saw inside of jail cell much less prison.

Unlike Margaret DeLorca/Edith Phillips at end of Dead Ringer being lead away by a matron to prison and her eventual date with gas chamber; Norma Desmond would have likely not even been charged with manslaughter or murder.

Norma was a good actress in that the studios made her a star and kept her a star - which meant she delivered box office. Now its possible Norma could have been the Demi Moore of the silent era, but Demi delivered what was required during her era of stardom.

Marry me r43!!

Because a swarm of killer bees was coming her way.

She's still very popular in Bugtussle!

It was actually Norma who pulled the plug on Max von Mayerling's career. He was bipolar and went into an uncontrollable manic phase in the middle of filming a project that Norma's current boyfriend had sunk a lot of money into. He went to France for a while, then came back to Hollywood just before the invasion of Paris (he was one of those Hollywood "vons") and played Nazis for the duration as well as touring as Dr. Einstein in "Arsenic and Old Lace." The whole butler thing wasn't real. Max was just heavily into roleplay, and Norma, well, she really good at that.