Apropos of yesterday’s post featuring a 1965 interview with Gloria Swanson, here’s a nifty little 22 minute doc about the making of Billy Wilder’s masterpiece. I’ll let the film speak for itself. The only thing missing is a discussion of the film’s original opening, shot but cut after a bad preview reaction. Instead of opening on the police cars racing down the eponymous street, it began in a morgue and involved a series of corpses asking each other how they met their end. One of them is Joe Gillis. And he tells the story of his ensnarement with Norma Desmond to another corpse. A perfectly dreadful idea that only Wilder/Brackett might have been able to pull off. (It makes ‘Kiss Me Stupid’ seem positively tasteful).  No surviving footage exists nor do any stills appear to be extant. Next to the missing 45 minutes of footage cut from The Marx Brothers ‘The Cocoanuts’ prior to its release, it is my most yearned-for cinematic recovery item.