Screenwriting from Sunset Blvd.

It’s been many years since I watched the classic Billy Wilder film Sunset Boulevard. I don’t recall seeing it in the over five years since I moved to Iowa. What I realized seeing it recently is that perhaps the most famous on-screen screeenwriter had Midwest roots.

“As I drove back into town I added up my prospects and they added up to exactly zero. Apparently I just didn’t have what it takes. The time had come to wrap up the whole Hollywood deal and go home. Maybe if I hawked all my junk there’d be enough for a bus ticket back to Ohio. Back to that $35 a week job behind the copy desk at the Dayton Evening Post if it was still open. Back to the smirking delight of the whole office. ‘Alright you wise guys, why don’t you go out and take a crack at Hollywood.'”
Joe Gillis (William Holden)
Sunset Boulevard 

A modern day Joe Gillis hopefully wouldn’t end up floating dead in a pool in a mansion on Sunset Boulevard but would return to Dayton and hook up with some actors from there and Yellow Springs, as well as some creative folks from nearby Cincinnati and that little fat girl in Ohio with her digital camera and they’d made their own films.

(By the way… I’ll be one state over from Ohio in Michigan next month speaking on screenwriting and production and will fill you in as I know more details in case anyone in the area is interested in attending.)

Re-write 101:
The script version I have of Sunset Boulevard is dated March 21, 1949 and here is what the writers (Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder & D.M. Marshman, Jr.) had written originally:

“So, I started back towards Hollywood. All the way down Sunset Boulevard I was composing a letter: ‘To W.W. Agree, Managing Editor, the Dayton Evening Post, Dayton, Ohio.  Dear Mr. Halitosis: I am in a terrible predicament. I have just been offered a writer-producer-director contract at seven thousand a week for seven years straight. Shall I do it? Shall I subject myself to the corruption and sham of this tinsel town with its terrible people, or is my place back home where there are no people —just plain folks? In other words, how’s about that thirty-five-dollar-a-week job behind the rewrite desk?’”

Scott W. Smith