Sunset Boulevard, 1950, Movie Glass Slide, William Holden, Gloria Swanson

Description

Sunset Boulevard, 1950, Movie Glass Slide, William Holden, Gloria Swanson
Sunset Boulevard, 1950, Movie Glass Slide, William Holden, Gloria Swanson
Click images to enlarge
Description
You are bidding on an ORIGINAL "coming attraction" Movie Glass/Lantern Slide that was designed to promote the theatrical release of the 1950, film-noir feature, "Sunset Boulevard".
I am selling off my entire collection of
Movie Glass Slides
this week (over 130). Please check out some of these titles:
1935, R48,
A Night at the Opera
, The Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico), Margaret Dumont
,
SOLD
1939 -
Alleghany Uprising
, John Wayne, Claire Trevor
1939 -
Destry Rides Again
, Marlene Dietrich, James Stewart
1939 -
Gunga Din
, Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Joan Fontaine
1939 -
The Roaring Twenties
, James Cagney,
Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane
1940 -
Boom Town
, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr
1940 -
Brigham Young
, Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Dean Jagger
1940 -
Charlie Chan in Panama
, Sidney Toler, Jean Rogers, Victor Sen Yung
1940 -
Gone With The Wind
, Clark Gable, Vivian Leigh, Olivia de Havilland
1940 -
His Girl Friday
, Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell
1940 -
Knute Rockne, All American
, Pat O'Brien, Ronald Reagan
1940 -
Santa Fe Trail
,
Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Ronald Reagan, Alan Hale
1940 -
Strike Up the Band
, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland
1940 -
The Great Walt Disney Festival of Hits
, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
SOLD
1940 -
The Green Hornet Strikes Again
, Warren Hull, Keye Luke
1940 -
The Mark of Zorro
, Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell
1940 -
Virginia City
, Errol Flynn, Mariam Hopkins,
Humphrey Bogart,
1941 -
High Sierra
, Humphrey Bogart, Ida Lupino
1941 -
Strawberry Blonde
, James Cagney,
Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth
1941 -
Suspicion
- Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine (directed by Alfred Hitchcock)
1941 -
The Little Foxes
, Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, Teresa Wright
1941 -
The Great Lie
,
Bette Davis, George Brent, Mary Astor
1942, R49 -
The Pride of the Yankees
, Gary Cooper, Babe Ruth
, Teresa Wright
1948 -
Fort Apache
, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple
1949 -
Little Women
- June Allyson, Janet Leigh, Mary Astor, Margaret O'Brien, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lawford
1949 -
The Fighting Kentuckian
,
John Wayne, Oliver Hardy, Vera Ralston
1950 -
The Asphalt Jungle
, Marilyn Monroe, Sterling Hayden, Louis Calhern
1950 -
Sunset Boulevard
, William Holden, Gloria Swanson
And Many, Many More Great Titles...
This hand colored glass slide is an ORIGINAL and it is NOT a reproduction. It was created to be projected onto the movie theatre screen before the film was released to promote the "coming attraction". Some people in the movie collectible world have said, that, glass slides are much rarer than the paper poster memorabilia from the same film and are very rare pieces of film history.
Format:
Glass Slide: 3 1/4" x 4"
Plot Summary:
In Hollywood of the 50's, the obscure screenplay writer Joe Gillis is not able to sell his work to the studios, is full of debts and is thinking in returning to his hometown to work in an office. While trying to escape from his creditors, he has a flat tire and parks his car in a decadent mansion in Sunset Boulevard. He meets the owner and former silent-movie star Norma Desmond, who lives alone with her butler and driver Max Von Mayerling. Norma is demented and believes she will return to the cinema industry, and is protected and isolated from the world by Max, who was her director and husband in the past and still loves her. Norma proposes Joe to move to the mansion and help her in writing a screenplay for her comeback to the cinema, and the small-time writer becomes her lover and gigolo. When Joe falls in love for the young aspirant writer Betty Schaefer, Norma becomes jealous and completely insane and her madness leads to a tragic end.
Trivia
:
In 2007 the American Film Institute ranked this as the #16 Greatest Movie of All Time.
Unlike the character she played, Gloria Swanson had accepted the fact that the movies didn't want her anymore and had moved to New York, where she worked on radio and, later, television. Although she had long before ruled out the possibility of a movie comeback, she was nevertheless highly intrigued when she got the offer to play the lead.
When Gloria Swanson finished Norma's final scene, the mad staircase descent, she burst into tears and the crew applauded. Even though it wasn't the last scene filmed, Billy Wilder threw a party for her as soon as the shot was finished.
Billy Wilder went into production with only 61 pages of script finished, so he had to shoot more or less in chronological order. This was a first for Gloria Swanson, but proved a big boon in helping her develop her character's descent into madness.
Cecil B. DeMille appears in the film on a studio set. This was the actual set of Samson and Delilah (1949), which de Mille was making at the time.
Costume designer Edith Head found working on the film to be one of her greatest challenges. She worked closely with Gloria Swanson on Norma Desmond's wardrobe, as she figured Swanson would have had a better idea of what women of that time would have worn and what they would be wearing now.
It was George Cukor who suggested Gloria Swanson for the role of Norma Desmond. Billy Wilder had worked on a script for a Swanson picture years earlier called Music in the Air (1934) and had forgotten about it.
Studio:
Paramount Pictures
Date:
1950
Genre:
Film-Noir, Romance, Drama
Director(s):
Billy Wilder
Producer(s):
Charles Brackett
Cast
:
William Holden as Joe Gillis
Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond
Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling
Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer
Fred Clark as Sheldrake, film producer
Lloyd Gough as Morino, Joe's agent
Jack Webb as Artie Green
Franklyn Farnum as undertaker
Larry J. Blake as finance man #1
Charles Dayton as finance man #2
Cecil B. DeMille as himself
Hedda Hopper as herself
Sidney Skolsky as himself
Buster Keaton as himself (bridge player)
Anna Q. Nilsson as herself (bridge player)
H. B. Warner as himself (bridge player)
Ray Evans (pianist at Artie's party)
Jay Livingston (pianist at Artie's party)
Robert Emmett O'Connor as Jonesy (older guard at Paramount gate)
Henry Wilcoxon as actor on DeMille's Samson and Delilah set (uncredited)
More Info on William Holden
:
William Holden was born William Franklin Beedle Jr. in O'Fallon, Illinois in 1918, but his family moved to Pasadena, California, when he was three. After high school, he went to Pasadena Junior College and started acting. He was in a play where he was seen by a talent scout from Paramount Pictures in 1937, who signed him to a contract.
After two uncredited parts, he had his first giant break when he was given the lead in Columbia's
Golden Boy
, about a young man who is torn between being a violinist or a boxer (it had been written by Clifford Odets for John Garfield).
The star of the movie was Barbara Stanwyck, and she insisted on casting Holden, and after filming began the studio didn't like him, but Stanwyck insisted he be kept, and he was!
Holden made 9 not very memorable film appearances over the next 4 years, and then joined the Army Air Force in 1943. After the war, he picked up where he had left off, making another 10 not so great movies, but then in 1950, he got his second big break when he was given the part of Joe Gillis in
Sunset Blvd
. (nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for this film)
Holden was wonderful, as was the movie, which is surely one of the handful of finest movies ever made, That same year he played the lead in Born Yesterday, opposite Judy Holliday, and he was a major star. While he still made a few "lesser" movies, he had a remarkable run of great ones in a short period, including
Stalag 17
(for which he won the Best Actor Oscar), Executive Suite,
Sabrina
, The Country Girl, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and
Picnic
, all of which were made in a three year period!
In 1957, Columbia was about to make
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, and they felt they badly needed a major American star to increase the box office of this story of English prisoners of war in a Japanese prison camp. They turned to Holden, who was able to negotiate a salary of 0,000, plus 10% of the gross, especially remarkable because the entire budget for the movie was three million dollars, and the bridge itself cost 0,000 to build. Of course the movie was a huge success, and Holden made a fortune from his deal.
In 1959, Holden and co-star John Wayne used their considerable box office clout to negotiate a 5,000 contract, plus 20% of the profits for each of them for making
The Horse Soldiers
, and that deal marked the beginning of major stars getting out of this world deals. Ironically, the movie was a real dud!
In the late 1960s, Holden's career appeared to be waning, but he made the great move of taking the lead in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, and Holden and the movie were wonderful. He was a great aging street cop Bumper Morgan in TV's The Blue Knight, and he took a supporting role in
The Towering Inferno
.
He had one more great role in him, as Max Schumacher in
Network
(nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for this film) in 1976. He starred with Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway (and an incredible supporting cast), and the movie was wonderful on all levels!
William Holden passed away in 1981 at the age of 63. He is not considered one of the all-time greatest actors by many, and his name does not come to mind when you think of the most charismatic actors ever, and yet he was in more truly great movies playing very different roles than almost any other actor (perhaps second only to Humphrey Bogart). He left behind a remarkable body of work, and I highly recommend all the movies named above!
More Info on Gloria Swanson:
Gloria Swanson was born Gloria May Josephine Svensson in Chicago, Illinois in 1899. At 15, she happened to tour a movie studio in Chicago, and asked to appear in a movie, and that gave her the acting "bug". She appeared in minor roles in slapstick movies for Essanay, but in 1916, she was hired by Keystone and then Triangle, and she starred in over 20 movies in 1916 to 1918. In 1919, she signed with
Cecil B. DeMille
, and starting making elaborate melodramas, rather than the light comedies she had been making. She also began wearing really wild outfits and accessories in her movies (practically costumes!).
In 1928, she had one of her best remembered roles, as
Sadie Thompson
(nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), directed by Raoul Walsh from the W. Somerset Maugham (the part would later be played by Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth). In 1929 she had a role in Trespasser (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), and she starting filming Queen Kelly directed by Erich von Stroheim and produced by
Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.
(the father of the famous Kennedy brothers, with whom she had a long term affair). This was intended to be von Stroheim and Swanson's masterpiece, but they clashed over the way her character was portrayed, and there were massive cost overruns, and von Stroheim was fired, and an alternate ending was filmed, and that altered version had a limited release in Europe only (many years later a reconstructed version of von Stroheim's original vision was created [with still photos in part]).
Swanson survived the transition to talking movies, but she could see her career was winding down, and she began acting more on stage, and painting, sculpting, and writing a syndicated column. After 1934, she only made one movie until 1950, when she took the lead role as Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard
(nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film; screenwriter Charles Brackett says the role was intended for Swanson from the start, while director Billy Wilder says they first offered it to virtually every other leading silent actress!). The movie has a marvelous script (of a once famous silent actress having an affair with a much younger man, and dreaming of a "comeback" that will never come), and the casting of Swanson and Holden is perfect, and the additional casting of von Stroheim and DeMille add much to the movie. It is a virtually perfect movie!
Swanson had six husbands over her life, marrying the first time on her 17th birthday (to
Wallace Beery
!) and the last time when she was 77, which lasted until she passed away in 1983 at the age of 84. In her day she was as big a star as Hollywood has ever known!
More Info on Erich Von Stroheim
:
Erich von Stroheim was a legendary Austrian actor, director and writer from the 1910s to the 1950s. He did not make any movies in Austria, but rather he worked at a variety of jobs in Austria, and became a member of the elite Austrian Dragoons military unit. He resigned his commission in 1914 and moved to the United States, where he became both an actor and worked behind the scenes. He became a leading actor (he was nicknamed "The Man You Love to Hate", because he mostly played German villains), and he became Hollywood's leading director with major triumphs such as Foolish Wives, The Wedding March, and Greed. But he almost bankrupted Paramount Studios with his never finished "Queen Kelly", and that ended his career as a director, but he made extremely memorable acting appearances in Grand Illusion and Sunset Boulevard (nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for this film), as well as appearing in many less notable movies. He passed away in 1957 at the age of 71.
More Info on Nancy Olson
:
Nancy Olson is an actress from the 1950s to the 2010s. She was discovered in 1948, and she got her big break in 1950 in Sunset Boulevard (nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for this film). She went on to make three movies as the lead opposite William Holden, and also starred opposite John Wayne and others. But she had married lyricist Alan J. Lerner (of My Fair Lady fame), and in 1954, she had her first child, and she temporarily retired. She and Lerner divorced in 1957, and she tried to make a comeback, but without much success. She did a lot of TV, and then she had a second career in Disney movies, like The Absent-Minded Professor and Pollyanna. She had a cameo in the Robin Williams remake of Flubber in 1997, and she has made a couple of other small appearances in recent times. As of 2020, she is still alive at the age of 92, and the only surviving cast member from Sunset Boulevard!
More Info on Fred Clark
:
Fred Clark was an actor from the 1940s to the 1960s. He was the first Harry Morton on TV's "The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show" in 1951. He left the show in 1953 because he was in much demand as a character actor in top movies of that time, including A Place in the Sun, Sunset Boulevard, and Auntie Mame. He passed away in 1968 at the age of 54.
More Info on Jack Webb
:
Jack Webb was an actor from the 1950s to the 1970s. Some of his movies include: Sunset Blvd., He Walked by Night, and the Men. Of course, he is best remembered for his movie of Dragnet, and the two very long running series of the same name! He passed away in 1982 at the age of 62.
More Info on Cecil B. DeMille
:
Cecil B. DeMille was a legendary director from the 1910s to the 1950s. What makes him so remarkable is that he made some of the very first great movies, including "The Squaw Man" in 1914, but he was one of the only great silent directors to have no trouble transitioning to sound, and he made great movies in the sound era, even into the 1950s! Some of his movies include: The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Show on Earth, and Samson and Delilah. Of course, he also had a memorable acting role in Billy Wilder's "
Sunset Boulevard
" in 1950 (he did a great job, but it was made easier because he was playing himself!). He passed away in 1959 at the age of 77.
More Info on Anna Q. Nilsson
:
Anna Q. Nilsson was a Swedish model and actress from the 1910s to the 1950s who appeared in almost 200 movies during that time! Some of her movies include: Sorrell and Son, Adam's Rib and The Farmer's Daughter. She passed away in 1974 at the age of 85.
More Info on H.B. Warner
:
H.B. Warner (billed as "Harry Warner" early in his career) was an English stage and screen actor from the 1900s to the 1950s. Some of his movies include: Lost Horizon, The King of Kings,
It's A Wonderful Life
,
Sunset Boulevard
and
The Ten Commandments
. He passed away in 1958 at the age of 82.
More Info on Hedda Hopper
:
Hedda Hopper (now known solely as a newspaper columnist) was an actress from the 1910s to the 1960s. Some of her movies include: The Women, Wings, Topper, Nothing Sacred, Midnight and
Sunset Boulevard
. In the 1930s, she became a very famous newspaper columnist writing about Hollywood, and she became famous for wearing outrageous hats. She passed away in 1966 at the age of 80.
More Info on Buster Keaton
:
Buster Keaton ("The Great Stone Face") was an actor from the 1900s to the 1960s. He was (along with Charlie Chaplin) one of the two most famous comedians in silent movies, and he continued to make sound movies as well. He has too many wonderful movies to list, but some of his movies include: The General, Sherlock Jr., The Cameraman, New Moon,
Sunset Blvd
and he made a very memorable final cameo appearance in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He passed away in 1966 at the age of 70.
More Info on Billy Wilder
:
Billy Wilder was a famous director and writer from the 1930s to the 1980s. Some of his movies include:
Sabrina
(nominated for the Best Director Academy Award for this film),
Sunset Blvd
,
Some Like It Hot
(nominated for the Best Director Academy Award for this film), Double Indemnity,
The Apartment
, Witness for the Prosecution, and Stalag 17 (nominated for the Best Director Academy Award for this film). He certainly produced more great hits (and ones of truly enduring high quality) than almost any other director! He passed away in 2002 at the age of 95.
Please, let me know if you have any questions about this item or any of the items I am selling.
Slide Condition: EX-NM. Please see the scans for actual condition.
This Movie Glass Slide would make a great addition to your collection or as a Gift (great for Framing in a Shadow Box).
Please checkout my 1880's Baseball Victorian Trade cards in my Ebay Store
Please checkout my 1870's Baseball Tintypes in my Ebay Store
Please checkout my Movie Glass Slides in my Ebay Store
Please checkout my NASA Items in my Ebay Store
Visit My eBay Store
To see all my Postcards
To see all my Movie Items
To see all my Disney Items
To see all my Baseball Items
To see all my Boy Scout Cards
To see all my Stereoview Cards
Add me to your Favorite Sellers and Sign up for my Newsletter
This glass slide will be wrapped in bubble wrap and shipped securely inside a sturdy box.
I will combine lots to save on the shipping costs and I use USPS 1st class shipping (it gives both of us tracking of the package).
Please look at my other Auctions for more Collectibles of the 1800's-1900's.
Get images that
make Supersized seem small.
Showcase your items with Auctiva's
Listing Templates!
THE simple solution for eBay sellers.
Track Page Views With
Auctiva's FREE Counter