CREDITS SUNSET BOULEVARD , 1950 dir: Billy Wilder Gloria Swanson William Holden Erich von Stroheim

“You see, this is my life. It always will be. Nothing else. Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark... All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up. ”

Forget the musical – oh, you already had. This is the real thing. Ageing silent movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) takes in flat-broke screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Billy Wilder’s brilliant satire noir.

The glorious old Renaissance-style mansion, which stood at 641 Irving on the corner of Wilshire and Crenshaw Boulevards, midtown LA, was demolished in 1957 to make way for the Getty headquarters, now the glumly nondescript Harbor Building.

The mansion, seen also in Rebel Without a Cause, was built in the twenties for a former US Consul in Mexico, who abandoned the building, which stood vacant for over ten years until bought by J Paul Getty. At the time of filming Sunset Boulevard, the mansion had passed to Mrs J Paul Getty in a divorce settlement and she, in turn, rented the property out to Paramount on condition the film company built her a swimming pool.

And if Mrs Getty didn’t like the pool, the studio would have to remove it. Paramount built it, Mrs Getty liked it, and it stayed, which is just as well…

The good news is, you can still see the digs of scriptwriter Joe Gillis, which is the Mediterranean-style Alto Nido Apartments, 1851 North Ivar Street, Hollywood. Just down the road a bit, in the mock-Tudor Para Sed Apartments at 1817 North Ivar, lived real-life writer Nathaniel West who began penning the classic Hollywood satire Day of the Locust (filmed in 1973 by John Schlesinger) here in 1935.

Sunset Boulevard location: the Paramount Studio gate, now part of the Paramount lot, Hollywood

Norma Desmond visits Cecil B DeMille on set at Paramount Studio, 5555 Melrose Avenue in – where else? – Hollywood (where he was filming Samson and Delilah). The studio, built in 1917 as the Peralta Studios, became Brunton Studios in 1920, then United Studios in 1921, before being bought by Paramount in 1926. The studio has since expanded and swallowed up surrounding streets, which means that the main entrance is no longer the famous Paramount gate seen in the movie. The arch can now only be glimpsed from a distance across the lot, unless you can manage the under-publicised walking tour of the lot (tel: 323.956.1777). The tours were suspended in the aftermath of 9/11, but are, I believe, available again.

Disastrous previews (one in Evanston, Illinois, home to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union – this was Wilder’s follow-up to The Lost Weekend) led to Billy Wilder junking the original opening scene (the corpse of Joe Gillis and a bunch of other stiffs in the morgue discuss how they ended up dead) and trying something with the swimming pool. The rest is history.