In the spring of 1949, Billy Wilder was in overdrive, cursing feeble actors and wondering if his new, tricky project could ever work. Tricky? Late in l948, when Wilder and his partner, Charles Brackett, showed Paramount the first 60 pages of script, they wrote on it, "Due to the peculiar nature of the project, we ask all our co-workers to regard it as top secret."

They knew there were going to be eyebrows raised. They had one central character - a half-crazy relic from silent pictures, a diva dreaming of comeback in a mouldy mansion on Sunset. And the other was a screenwriter who'd be dead when the picture started, but telling the story to the other stiffs in the county morgue. Wilder was eager to shoot that scene. And things looked up when Montgomery Clift agreed to play the writer. He had opened that year in Red River, and no one was in greater demand.

Not that this was an actors' showcase. It was one of those movies that said actors were close to nuts. There would be a sour, sardonic tone to Sunset Boulevard - that's what they called it - that suggested Hollywood itself was a sick place, and that the widespread human urge to be in the movies was a malaise. "So why are you in pictures, still, Billy?" someone might have asked. And Billy would likely have answered, "Because I'm the sickest of them all."

That spring, Wilder was close to 43, and hotter than Clift. Born in a village near Krakow, he had been raised in Vienna, first as a journalist, then a screenwriter. He was a counter-punching wit, not far from cruel sometimes - a joker, a survivor, ambitious, dark in his assumptions about human nature. He had a lot of cronies, and plenty of women, but few got close to him - because he never trusted anyone. He was too volatile, too itchy with killer remarks.

He arrived in Hollywood in 1934 (his mother and other relatives would die in concentration camps), and wrote screenplays - Bluebeard's Eighth Wife for Lubitsch (written with Charles Brackett), and then, as a team, Midnight, Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire. By 1942, they had written The Major and the Minor, Wilder's first American directing job, and thereafter they were a production partnership on Five Graves to Cairo, The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair. The Lost Weekend - with Ray Milland as a drunk - had been a typical Wilder experience. Hollywood said the project was too bleak and unappealing. But he ignored them, made a tough, nasty picture and won Oscars for best picture, director, screenplay, and for Milland. There was another knock-out in Wilder's record: without Brackett, he had done Double Indemnity, which got nominations for picture, direction, script and for Barbara Stanwyck as maybe the most glowing bitch in all film noir.

Wilder's world view was blunt, if gloating; his best jokes left an acid aftertaste. In Double Indemnity, an easy-going insurance salesman commits murder because he's infatuated with a snake; in The Lost Weekend, a brittle charmer tells any lie to protect a bottle of booze from discovery. And in Sunset Boulevard, Wilder promised, there'd be a murder. "Well, who murders whom?" asked Gloria Swanson, an actress he was talking to. To tell you the truth, he said, I haven't made up my mind yet.

He was lying: he had the idea al-ready of the hack writer whose most saleable story concerns his own death, with the great lady of the silent screen being limo'd to the nuthouse. But maybe Swanson didn't see herself as a killer. So he wouldn't offer that until he'd got her hooked and signed. After all, he and Brackett had been up to see Mary Pickford about the part first, but as they sat in one of the salons at Pickfair, and confronted America's sweetheart - then aged 56 - they couldn't admit what they had to offer her because it seemed so squalid. Who could believe in Mary losing her mind, keeping a pet monkey and a gigolo, and killing the latter when he turned on her?

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