Down on His LuckIt's hard times for Joe Gillis. When we first meet him, he's got, well, nothing. Nothing but his car, and he's barely got that. His career and ambitions have stalled and he has noth...

You Can Call Her Queen Bee… and Let Her Rule that FantasyNorma Desmond is the irregularly beating heart of Sunset Boulevard. She may not be the protagonist—that's Joe—but she is what makes th...

Can't Let GoYou can't possibly know the meaning of loyalty—we're talking deluded, die-hard, crazy loyalty—until you meet Max. Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim) is Norma Desmond's steadfast...

Nobody's HackShe's no has-been. Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) is a Hollywood go-getter. A script-reader for Paramount, she wants to become an actual writer. Which makes her… pretty much the opposi...

Real TalkClever casting alert: Cecil B. DeMille was a storied, revered old director—in real life. Today, he's probably best known for his Ten Commandments movie with Charlton Heston as Moses. In...

Artie (Jack Webb) is a good guy, really. But he's not exactly a mover and a shaker. He's Betty's boyfriend and one of Gillis's close friends, and he seems like a happy enough dude. But he probably...

Every movie about the movie biz needs a movie maker, and in Sunset Boulevard, that's Sheldrake (Fred Clark). He's a producer at Paramount. Joe Gillis tries to pitch him a story for a movie about a...

Played by Lloyd Gough, Morino appears for about a minute… and that's it. He's Gillis's agent. Having failed to successfully hit Sheldrake up for cash, Gillis heads to a golf course, where he find...

The repo men are Joe's worst nightmare. These two guys (Larry J. Blake and Charles Dayton) are trying to track Joe Gillis's car down and repossess it. Although they're not major characters in the f...

When Norma Desmond makes her return to Paramount—to triumphantly agree to make a movie with Cecil B. DeMille, she believes—she immediately confronts the gap between old Hollywood and new Hollyw...

We're not talking wax figures here, although we might as well be. Norma Desmond regularly meets with a group of three other famous silent-screen stars to play bridge. None of these people have spea...

Gordon ColeGordon Cole (Bert Moorhouse) is one of Cecil B. DeMille's assistants. When he calls up Norma, she thinks he's presenting her with an offer from DeMille to direct her movie, yet she refus...