Ready for My Close-Up: The Making of Sunset Boulevard and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream

For readers of Sam Wasson and Glenn Frankel, a cultural history about the making and lasting significance of Sunset Boulevard, whose piercing—and in many ways, prophetic—critiques of fame continue to resonate today.

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.

Just in time for the film's 75th anniversary, Ready for My Closeup breathes life into a beloved masterpiece of American cinema.

David M. Lubin, a former writer for Rolling Stone and a professor at Wake Forest University, has published eight books on American art, film, and popular culture. His Shooting Kennedy: JFK and 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.