The boulevard of broken dreams, served with cookies and a cow in an elevator.
Sunset Boulevard stretches 27 miles from Los Angeles’ Chinatown all the way to the ocean – a ride made famous by Philip Marlowe in the Chandler books. Film star mansions give way to tatty motels; exclusive offices stand alongside nightclubs with aspiring comics, and amateur nude contests. Then the famous ‘strip’ and Hollywood’s legendary coffee shop, Schwabs, where (they say) a girl in a tight sweater turned into Lana Turner. Meet some of Sunset’s most colourful and improbable residents – the failed showbiz impresario who made his millions selling cookies, and the high-rise developer who let John Wayne take his cow up in the lift… the lucky ones have achieved a peculiarly Hollywood brand of success, but every day on Sunset you meet the other ones: still looking for a break, for a job, for a deal. All of them still trying to play their part in the Hollywood dream.
Direction
Boková's patient eye lets weirdos be poetic, not pathetic.
Production
1984 Sunset Boulevard as time capsule of neon desperation.
Director
Jana Boková
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Jana Boková was a Czech émigré who fled the Prague Spring; her outsider eye arguably made her the perfect observer of America's performance of self.
The Lana Turner 'discovered at Schwab's' myth was already debunked by 1984, but the documentary lets it breathe because the lie is more Hollywood than the truth.
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