Sunset Boulevard showed the damage wrought by fame. Seventy years on, popular culture is more obsessed than ever with being seen
On its release in August 1950, Sunset Boulevard punched its own industry in the face. Showbiz royalty, normally enclosed in an echo chamber of self-congratulation, sputtered into a rage. At a star-studded private screening on the eve of the film’s debut, MGM studio mogul Louis B Mayer lambasted the film’s Austrian-born director, Billy Wilder: “You befouled your own nest. You should be kicked out of this country, tarred and feathered, goddamn foreigner son of a bitch!” Wilder’s response: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”
Audiences, however, piled into cinemas. Serendipitously released in the same year as Joseph L Mankiewicz’s All About Eve – a ruthless dissection of the
American theatre world – Sunset Boulevard became a landmark statement on the perils of celebrity culture. But 70 years later, at a time when visibility has been weaponised as a tool of social change, the film is no longer just an indictment of Hollywood’s vanity but of a whole cultural ethos that values “being seen”.