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61 W I N T E R Q 4 I S S U E B O O K R E V I E W acters," wrote Sarris, and certainly there is a strong preference for the grotesque in "Sunset": No adjective better fits Erich von Stroheim's performance as Norma's butler, Max, to say nothing of the assorted cameos by the once and formerly famous, including Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille. On the other hand, perhaps "Sunset Boulevard" is a classic precisely because of what some perceive as its shallowness and outrageousness. Since Wilder and Brackett had focused their satiric energies on Hol- lywood, whose gloss and glitz have always concealed striving, despair, and self-delusion, isn't it f itting that their movie would reflect their subject? As is revealed in "Ready for My Close-Up," David M. Lubin's first-rate new book about the making of the film, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer indeed zeroed in on the threat "Sunset Boulevard" posed to the image he sought to propagate of the industry. "You should be tarred and feathered and run out of town," Mayer told Wilder, and this was not merely the words of a jealous man at the helm of another studio. "No one had a greater hand in creating and maintaining the star system," Lubin writes of Mayer. "MGM's publicists boasted the studio had 'more stars than in the heavens.' "Sunset Bou- levard" suggested that many, if not most, Hollywood stars were not so heavenly; that they were incorrigible narcissists who grew increasingly out of touch with reality and had little ability to adapt to life when their stardom waned, as inevitably it would." The film endures, Lubin suggests, because it uses a unique stew of genres — including comedy, crime film, horror story, and Hollywood exposé — to make this point. "'Sunset Boulevard' is above all an unsentimental examination of our innate unwillingness to accept the inevitability of decline, decay, and death," he writes. "Norma's game is to avoid looking death, or its earthly emissary, old age, in the face." What was the source of Wilder's seem- ingly immovable cynicism? His story will not be unfamiliar to film history buffs, but Lubin offers fresh insight into the basic details. Born in 1906 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wilder grew up in an atmosphere that worked to per- manently sour his view of human beings, especially when it came to romance. Liber- tinism surrounded him. "In high school, he spent several years looking out the class- room window at the pay-by-the-hour hotel across the street, where men and women entered together, only to leave separately a short time later," Lubin writes. Although his parents, Max and Eugenia, were per- fectly respectable members of society in the hotel business, Billy found reason even to mistrust the apparent propriety of his home life. Lubin reveals: "While still in high school, Wilder inadvertently opened a let- ter addressed to Max, [who], he discovered on reading it, had fathered an illegitimate son nearly Billy's age." Eventually pulling up stakes for Berlin, Wilder tried to make inroads as a reporter and aspiring screenwriter, but his most profitable vocation was working as what was called a "tea dancer" or "taxi dancer" at a pair of fancy hotels. "Both terms were euphemisms for a dance partner or social (and perhaps sexual) companion available for hire: a gigolo," Lubin writes. He drew u p o n t h i s e x p e r i e n c e i n a s e r i e s o f m a ga z i n e a r t i c l e s t h a t b o re t h e t i t l e, "Waiter, A Dancer Please!" — a title that, o n e i m a g i n e s, c o u l d e a s i l y h av e been repurposed for one of Wilder's deliciously hard-bitten screenplays. Lubin plots out Wilder's progress f r o m t h e G e r m a n f i l m i n d u s t r y (where, in time, he had success as one of the scenarists on the influ- ential 1930 production "People on Sunday") to Hollywood, where, in partnership with the far more strait- laced Brackett, he dreamt up the dialogue for such classic comedies as Ernst L ubitsch's "Ninotchka" (1939), Mitchell Leisen's "Midnight" (1939), and Howard Hawks's "Ball of Fire" (1941). Then, in 1942, Wilder prevailed upon Paramount to let him occupy the director's chair on the Wilder-Brackett script "The Major and the Minor" (1942), starring Ray Milland and Ginger Rogers. Here, Lubin gives us a first reference to p i c t u r e e d i t o r D o a n e H a r r i s o n , who would remain Wilder's close cutting-room collaborator and pro- duction associate well into the 1960s. On that first directorial effort, Lubin writes, Harrison "taught the almost novice director to 'cut within the camera' — that is, to pre-think how shots would stitch together so that a minimum of editing would be necessary, and the resulting film would glide effortlessly from one moment to the next." Of course, such editorial smoothness can also be achieved without "cutting within the camera," but undeniably, such a spare, unfussy approach appealed to Wilder. "You will not find in my pictures any phony