Excerpted from "The Screen: Inner Workings of Filmdom" by Thomas M. Pryor, The New York Times, August 11, 1950:

A segment of life in Hollywood is being spread across the screen of the Music Hall in Sunset Boulevard. Using as the basis of their frank, caustic drama a scandalous situation involving a faded, aging silent screen star and a penniless, cynical young script writer, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (with an assist from D. M. Marshman,Jr.) have written a powerful story of the ambitions and frustrations that combine to make life in the cardboard city so fascinating to the outside world.

Sunset Boulevard is by no means a rounded story of Hollywood past or present. But it is such a clever compound of truth and legend -- and so richly redolent of the past, yet so contemporaneous -- that it seemingly speaks with great authority. Sunset Boulevard is that rare blend of pungent writing, expert acting, masterly direction and unobtrusively artistic photography which quickly casts a spell over an audience and holds it enthralled to a shattering climax.

With uncommon skill Brackett and Wilder, who also produced and directed this splendid drama for Paramount Pictures, have kept an essentially tawdry romance from becoming distasteful and embarrassing. Aside from the natural, knowing tone of the dialogue, the realism of the picture is heightened by scenes set inside the actual iron-grilled gates of the Paramount Studio, where Norma Desmond goes for an on-the-set visit with her old comrade, Cecil B. DeMille himself. And the fantastic, Babylonian atmosphere of an incredible past is reflected sharply in the gaudy elegance of the decaying mansion in which Norma Desmond lives.

Sunset Boulevard is a great motion picture, marred only slightly by the fact that the authors permit Joe Gillis to take us into the story of his life after his bullet-ridden body is lifted out of Norma Desmond's swimming pool. That is a device completely unworthy of Brackett and Wilder, but happily it does not interfere with the success of Sunset Boulevard.

Excerpted from On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder by Ed Sikov (New York: Hyperion, 1998):

In March and early April, the writer-producer, the writer-director, and their for-hire script writer jointly worked out more of the details of their "peculiar" Hollywood project. Since this was a film about an industry they knew and loved, they wanted to suffuse it with familiar people and places. In this spirit [Charles] Brackett and [Billy] Wilder hired the nudgy Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky to appear in a sequence set at Schwab's Drugstore in the heart of downtown Hollywood. Enticing Skolsky to play himself wasn't difficult; as Brackett told him, "It won't be Schwab's without Skolsky. And the whole picture won't be typically Hollywood without you and the Schwabadero."

Paramount's location scouts were busily finding excellent examples of the way Hollywood's citizens variously lived. The Alto-Nido apartments, at 1851 North Ivar at the top of the hill at Franklin, would work well for the drab barracks of an unemployed screenwriter. For Norma Desmond's mansion, they had to look farther afield than the 10,000 block of Sunset Boulevard, on which the fictitious house is situated in the script. They found it, about six miles away, at the northwest corner of Wilshire and Irving Boulevards. The immense heap of a house, built in 1924 for the then-astronomical figure of $250,000, currently belonged to J. Paul Getty's ex-wife, who hadn't lived there for years. More ghostly than derelict, the building itself fit the filmmakers' description superbly, as did the vaguely seedy-looking yard and garage.

On April 21, the company was called to the mansion location at Wilshire and Irving for exterior shooting, but the quality of light deteriorated and Billy had to call off shooting early. Holden, Billy, and the crew spent the next day rushing from location to location: from Stone Canyon Road to the Bel-Air golf course, from North Vine Street (for Rudy's shoeshine parlor; "Rudy never asked any questions about your finances—he'd just look at your heels and know the score") to Paramount's ornate entrance gate—not the imposing main gate on Melrose, but the smaller, more beautiful one set back from the corner of Melrose and Bronson.

One problem was the weather; Los Angeles was plagued by unusually foggy days, so whenever a little sun came out they would drop what they were doing and film outdoor scenes. They weren't looking for the characteristically brilliant sun of Los Angeles, however—not for Sunset Boulevard. The film may have been set under the cruel sun of Hollywood, but both Wilder and [cinematographer John F.] Seitz preferred more gray than Southern California's sky tended to provide.