Actress as Medusa

First, you have to keep Barbra Streisand away from the script and not let her produce. Otherwise she won't be able to resist the temptation all movie stars have to make their character likeable at all times.

But she'd be perfect as a modern Norma Desmond.

Born to be Norma Desmond?

I disagree with David Thomson—my favorite film critic—about director Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. Thomson says the movie is about the character of screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden). It's about the aging (she's only fifty!) former silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) and her insanity as a way of dealing with rejection by Hollywood.

David Lynch recognized the importance of madness when he made his own skewed version of the story, Mulholland Dr. In Mulholland Dr. Naomi Watts plays a nineties version of the fifties has-been Norma Desmond. In Lynch's movie a failed young Hollywood actress named Diane Selwyn convinces herself she's really Betty Elms. Unlike Diane, Betty's talent is recognized by everyone in the business she meets.

Betty: An innocent arrives in Hollywood

The difference between the David Lynch and Billy Wilder versions is that Lynch lets us see his actress's inevitable death.

The white makeup mask Gloria Swanson wore fit Billy Wilder's 1950 movie. Even young women in fifties films (Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, and Vera Miles, just to pick some of Alfred Hitchcock's obsessions) already looked like older women with their tailored suits and heavy makeup. Swanson's Norma Desmond had been a silent film star, as we see in scenes taken from Gloria Swanson's own silent films, which means operatic overacting.

Norma Desmond: No longer innocent

But Norma Desmond today would be a slightly older Julia Roberts. The “age difference” Joe Gillis was so ashamed of between himself and Norma Desmond just wouldn't matter. (Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, anyone?) Even in Billy Wilder's version, Gillis tells Norma that there's nothing wrong with being fifty, as long as you don't try to pretend you're not.

A movie starring Barbra Streisand as Norma Desmond would make a nice bookend to her remake of A Star Is Born. I think Streisand did a good job in a role inherited from Judy Garland and Janet Gaynor (directed by William Wellman in 1937—my favorite version of the story). Kris Kristofferson is no Fredric March or James Mason, though.

One change I would make is getting rid of the pseudo-noir narration by a dead man. Spirituality and the afterlife are popular on junk TV but movies should be more realistic. They're the land of the dead and the soon-to-be dead. (Especially movies by David Lynch, who critic Pauline Kael said put “the dreamy willies” on screen—and the only widely seen films he'd made up to that time were Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Dune. If you want the willies, wait for Blue Velvet and Lost Highway.)

Another thing I'd make clear is that Gillis deserved what he got, winding up face down in a swimming pool. I want to see a Norma who's insane but knows she's insane and is using it. I'm confident that her ex-husband/chauffeur/factotum Max has the phone number of the lawyer who got O.J. Simpson off.

I'm ready for your closeup, Miss Desmond.

End of the story