Inside Story: Catch a falling star

In a new series exploring the world's greatest films, David Benedict examines Sunset Boulevard, first in a grand line of self-referential Hollywood movies

Love it or loathe it, the exhilarating friction between fact and fiction in Adaptation feels anarchic and new. Yet Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated screenplay is really just a startlingly accomplished postmodern spin on a hallowed Hollywood tradition. Years before pop ate itself – and Hannibal Lecter notwithstanding – the film studios' streak of narcissism long ago curdled into cannibalism.

When it comes to dismembering the dream factory, there's nothing that aggrieved film-makers like more than biting the hand that feeds them. A decade before Adaptation, the chief witness for the prosecution was The Player. Although far from being Robert Altman's most memorable work, it certainly opened film-goers' eyes to the excesses of an industry more dependent on the pitch than the script. Then, last year, came the scorching Ivansxtc, dishing the dirt on agents, deals and Hollywood lies and lives with electrifying compassion.

It would be fanciful to suggest that they were a kind of Hollywood office of fair trading, but it was producer David Selznick and director George Cukor who first began asking questions about insider dealing back in 1932 in What Price Hollywood? A trifle unsatisfied with their rather romanticised answer, William Wellman reconceived that story as A Star is Born five years later, itself brilliantly remade by Cukor in 1954 with knockout performances from Judy Garland, James Mason, and Jack Carson as a thrillingly venal studio press agent. Barbra Streisand and a more than usually aggressive perm wheeled the vehicle out once again in 1976, but it seems unkind to dwell on folly.

Poolside at the Château Marmont in the Fifties (which, you should know, overlooks the real Sunset Boulevard), you couldn't move for wannabes and has-beens moving up and down the Hollywood food chain, and, for the writers, a cross between grudge-bearing and kvetching was the lingua franca. So much so that those who once merely complained that their scripts never got made – or, if actually shot, ended up butchered by producers – began making a living out of their grievances. Hell, their fury would work in a novel, wouldn't it?

Ever wondered why the savage description of the making of the brainless sci-fi film in Martin Amis's Money rings so true? Well, that's because Saturn 3 starring (if that's the word) Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas, Harvey Keitel and a sex-starved robot – I kid you not – was written by Amis himself. Granted, he was drawing on direct experience, but most "Inside Hollywood" novels feel second-hand. I concede that there are exceptions – Valley of the Dolls is a truly terrible book but the movie is indescribably worse – but for the zing of "reality" you need it up on the screen in front of you.

That accounts for Vincente Minnelli's twin trash triumphs, The Bad and the Beautiful – five Oscars and Lana Turner's finest two hours – and Two Weeks in Another Town. The latter used the former picture as a movie-within-a-movie and won hideous reviews – "leaves no stomach unturned", opined the Herald Tribune – but praise from none other than Peter Bogdanovich, who declared it superior to La Dolce Vita.

And then there's the kitsch-fest that is The Oscar, which told it like it, er, is: "When you sleep with pigs you come up stinking of garbage." But then hard-boiled dialogue comes with the turf. There was certainly plenty of it in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, a film noir with Humphrey Bogart as a tormented, hard-drinking, headstrong screenwriter. Robert Aldrich brought a similar dark tone to his movie version of Clifford Odets's play about the "noisy, grabbing world" of Fifties Hollywood in The Big Knife. The latter had a peachy part for Shelley Winters as a two-bit-starlet-cum-call-girl who won't shut up. She researched it by hanging out at Schwab's drugstore, the haunt frequented by the real Hollywood hookers. The location was already known to film-goers: scenes had been shot there for Sunset Boulevard.

With the surprises and subtleties of its A-grade script, high quality production values, magnetic performances (including cameos from Buster Keaton and Cecil B DeMille), plus the fact that Paramount allowed its name to be used throughout, location was about the last thing that Sunset Boulevard needed for veracity. In fact, the home that Billy Wilder used for the exteriors of Norma Desmond's lavish mansion wasn't even on the right street.

For those who only know Andrew Lloyd Webber's inferior musical retread (Wilder's verdict: "It'll make a good movie"), this is the Hollywood movie. Even those who routinely accuse Wilder of misanthropy (his rehabilitation to the top rank of movie greats is only relatively recent) recognise the sheer quality of this engrossingly cruel portrait of Tinseltown glamour and greed, as seen through the eyes of William Holden's quite literally washed-up screenwriter. Indeed, Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett's wraparound conceit of a dead man talking was so good that Alan Ball hijacked it for American Beauty.

It was George Cukor who suggested Gloria Swanson to play the past-it prima donna Norma Desmond. The seducing spider to hunky Holden's fly, she dominates this bitterest of pictures, so much so that she never escaped the shadow of the role. Holden was 31 and Swanson just 50, but the reason they seem worlds apart is less about their ages than the wholly engaging disparity between their acting styles.

Crucially, like the other backstage masterpiece Singin' in the Rain,Sunset Boulevard is about a silent star trying to break into talkies. Holden, whose career had started well but stalled for a decade, embodies his conniving gigolo with the ease and naturalism ushered in with sound. Swanson, who had been the grandest and highest-paid silent star of them all – earlier in her career she was regularly carried from her dressing room to the set on a sedan chair – came from an acting tradition closer to dance in its concentration on the expressive use of not just the face but the whole body, especially the hands.

Take the scene where she and Holden are watching one of her old movies. Dripping jewels and scorn she cries: "Those idiot producers, those imbeciles, haven't they got any eyes? Have they forgotten what a star looks like?" She rises up, her right profile scalded by the cinema projector's cone of light, her left hand defiantly clutching the air. "I'll show them. I'll be up there again."

She's unassailable. But isn't this just camp? Only in its endless recreations by lesser actors. Dragged – you should pardon the expression – out of context by lousy impersonators, there's just the celebration of the delusion. But Wilder constantly emphasises Norma's baroque scale by withholding close-ups. She absolutely fits her surroundings. Swanson's conviction and self-control leads us to the inescapable feeling that mad though Norma is, unsympathetic she's not. This is tightrope stuff, and although Norma finally teeters into the abyss when Joe leaves her at the very end of the picture – complete with a shocking sudden close-up with her head at a terrifying angle and her eyes fully wide with rage – Swanson never does.

At that year's Academy Awards, when young Judy Holliday's name was read out as best actress, Swanson leant over and whispered: "My dear, couldn't you have waited?" She wasn't the only one disappointed. Nominated for 11 Oscars, Sunset Boulevard deservedly won best screenplay, score and art direction. The year's big winner was All About Eve. That too was a backstager, but safely set in theatreland. Perhaps the ruthless comedy of Sunset Boulevard was just too close for comfort.

'Sunset Boulevard' is at the NFT, London SE1 (020-7928 3232; www.bfi.org.uk/nft)