| On Sunday, a new revival of the musical “Sunset Boulevard” premièred on Broadway, putting an Andrew Lloyd Webber spin on one of Hollywood’s most quotable films. In an unlikely feat of casting, the pop singer Nicole Scherzinger follows in the footsteps of Glenn Close, Patti LuPone, and Gloria Swanson, playing Norma Desmond, a has-been silent-film star with a delusional plan for a comeback. The original movie, released in 1950, featured no songs and was nominated for eleven Oscars, and marked a meta comeback for Swanson, a real-life giant of silent film who is now probably best remembered for her “Sunset Boulevard” dialogue. (“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”) In 1993, shortly before “Sunset Boulevard” took the Broadway stage for the first time, The New Yorker’s David Freeman revisited the film with its director, the legendary Billy Wilder. (Richard Avedon shot the accompanying portrait.) Wilder was born in what is now Poland and started his film career in Germany before immigrating to America with the rise of the Nazis. Safely transplanted to Hollywood, Wilder won six Oscars out of twenty-one career nominations; he wrote and directed classics that ranged from “Some Like It Hot” and “Sabrina” to “Double Indemnity” and “Witness for the Prosecution.” By the time Freeman caught up with the director, he was almost eighty-seven, largely retired but still quick with a quip. Looking back at his long career, Wilder recalls a regrettably brief encounter with Sigmund Freud; the expensive on-set demands of the real Mr. DeMille; and feuding with Arthur Miller, after some unkind words had been said about Marilyn Monroe. Wilder’s use of language was as lively offscreen as it was in his scripts. “I’d worship the ground you walk on,” the young director had once told a love interest, “if you lived in a better neighborhood.” | 
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