I don't know how many times I've seen Sunset Boulevard (1950). I've never counted. A dozen, perhaps? More? The last time I saw it, on a DVD, I noticed something that I never caught in previous viewings. In the scene in which Joe Gillis (William Holden) goes to Artie Green's apartment (Jack Webb, who was soon to become a huge TV star in his show Dragnet) on New Year's Eve, he wants to use the phone to call Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), to have him send all of Gillis' clothes to Artie's house. He's decided to move out of Norma Desmond's mansion on Sunset Boulevard and stay at Artie's until he gets his bearings. Two blondes are sitting on the couch, laughing hysterically as one of them is talking on the phone, which is on a side table next to the couch. On the table, in the lower right hand corner of the screen, there is something else, which I never paid attention to. After seeing the film umpteenth time, I realised it was a model for the statue of Dagon in the temple that Samson brings down in Samson and Delilah (1949). Samson and Delilah was made for Paramount, as was Sunset Boulevard, and shot around the same time. In the huge temple seen on the screen at the end of the movie – the famous set piece of Samson bringing down the temple – there is a roaring fire in Dagon's belly. A nice little touch, barely visible in Sunset Boulevard, are cigarette butts stubbed out in the belly of the Dagon maquette.

Ever since the Nouvelle Vague in the early ‘60s, filmmakers have been making references in their films to other films. Part homage, part pointing the way to their influences, it's somewhere between a joke and a genuflection to the directors they admire. They are actes gratuites – perhaps références gratuites would be better – which are planted strictly for the cognoscenti to recognise. As for those who do not, maybe footnotes can one day be appended at the end of the film. Michel Piccoli, in Contempt, always wore his hat, emulating Dean Martin in Some Came Running. 1963, the year Contempt was made, was not that far away from 1958, in which Some Came Running was produced – and Godard's audiences at the time could easily make the connection. But now, over forty years later, young viewers might need a special study guide to help them identify Some Came Running and even who Dean Martin was, much in the same way we need notes in reading Shakespeare in order to know what certain words meant in Shakespeare's day. François Truffaut names his main character Lachenay in The Soft Skin (1964) after Marcel Dalio's de la Cheyniest in Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game (1939), and has an inn called La Colinière – the name of the country house in Rules of the Game – and expects some people, if only his friends and fellow cinephiles, to recognise them.

In Hollywood, this was a rarity. When a poster advertising The Proud Land appears in the ‘Girl Hunt’ ballet in The Bandwagon (1953), we know it's a joke that Vincente Minnelli intended for himself and his pals, but for not the rest of us. The Proud Land was the name of the movie which Kirk Douglas (the unscrupulous, arrogant producer in Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful, made a year earlier) directs – a huge turkey of a film after firing the director. The title also appears earlier in The Bandwagon, on a movie house marquee when Fred Astaire is on 42nd Street. But you would have to attend a Minnelli retrospective to make the connection.

He is shooting a Biblical epic on Soundstage 18. And he was, on that same soundstage, when Sunset Boulevard was being filmed. When Norma Desmond visits DeMille's set, he is preparing a scene from Samson and Delilah. All the players are old and, very likely, people who (like Swanson) worked with DeMille in the silent era. (1) One can even glimpse, if just barely, Henry Wilcoxon, who played Prince Ahtur in Samson and Delilah, as well as Julia Faye, who plays Delilah's handmaiden – a former mistress of DeMille's who had appeared in almost all of his sound movies, even though their affair and her career had ended many years ago.

Erich von Stroheim's role is another example of the collaborative effort, if we want to think of Paramount and its history a vital ingredient that was responsible for the remarkable outcome of this film. Can anyone else have ever been considered? Who but von Stroheim to play the role? And clearly Wilder knew it. Von Stroheim was paid $5000 a week plus 1,500,000 French francs (equivalent to $36,000 in 1950) upon completion of the shoot. (2) When a director hired von Stroheim to appear in his films, he was getting two people for the price of one: von Stroheim, the scene-stealing actor, who could draw attention away from the other actors merely by letting his unsmoked cigarette burn down to his finger tips; and also a brilliant director who would invest his character with a variety of attention-getting costumes, props and acting tricks. It was he who suggested, to Renoir, that he wear a neck brace in Grand Illusion (1937). His electric, over-the-top presence enlivened many dull, barely-remembered French films of the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s, in which von Stroheim, directing himself, imbues the character he plays with a richness and complexity that the writers and directors were unable to furnish. As for him playing the once-famous director, his tribulations regarding Greed (1925) were already the stuff of folklore. The half-finished Wedding March (1928) and the unfinished Queen Kelly confirmed his reputation as some kind of undisciplined, profligate director, and Sunset Boulevard doesn't hesitate to capitalise on that tarnished reputation.

These are the things we know for sure about von Stroheim vis-à-vis the two films he acted in, directed by Billy Wilder. He wanted a riding crop with him at all times in his previous appearance in Wilder's film as Rommel in Five Graves to Cairo (1943). He advises Mouche, the French chambermaid (played by Anne Baxter) to remain five feet away from him at all times, as if she were a fly that he could swat away with his riding crop. In Sunset Boulevard it was he who suggested to Wilder that Queen Kelly be used as the movie that Swanson watches. It was he who suggested to Wilder that Norma receive fan mail, all written by him. ‘I wouldn't look too closely at the postmarks’, he advises Gillis. He came up with the idea of the Maharajah from Hyderbad who begged for one of Norma's stockings. ‘Later, he strangled himself with it’, a line that is echoed in Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) – Joe (Tony Curtis as Josephine) to Jerry (Jack Lemmon as Daphne): ‘I heard a very sad story about a girl from Bryn Mawr. She squealed on her roommate and they found her strangled with her own brassiere.’ Von Stroheim also suggested to Wilder that he be filmed, as von Mayerling, ironing Norma's underwear, an offer Wilder could refuse. In any case, von Stroheim had already done this earlier in Queen Kelly – Prince Wolfram keeps a purloined pair of Kitty Kelly's panties and sniffs them. We'll never know for sure whether it was Wilder or von Stroheim who came up with the bit in which Max, driving Norma to the studio, looking at her through the rear view mirror, points out that her eye shadow is ‘not quite balanced’. Once on the Paramount lot, he points out to Gillis that his offices (could they actually have been his offices when he was making The Wedding March at Paramount?) were where the readers' department is now. He adds, ‘I remember my walls were covered in black patent leather’. Neither of these two moments – the eye shadow and the leather-covered walls – sound like details that Wilder would have been interested in, but they sound very much like the obsessive, fetishistic situations and details that abound in von Stroheim's films.

It's hard to imagine what Sunset Boulevard looked like and felt like at the time it was released. The adult moviegoing public grew up on silent films and Gloria Swanson was still a star, although absent from the screen for many years. Audiences knew DeMille not only as a silent director but as the director of epics like Cleopatra (1934), Sign of the Cross (1932) and, of course, Samson and Delilah, which had been the highest-grossing movie of 1949. Now for the waxworks: Buster Keaton, H.B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson. Keaton's career as a great comedian and filmmaker was long over. But he was still around, mostly in walk-ons in low-budget films. He played in a musical remake of Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner (1940) called In the Good Old Summertime (1949), an easy-to-take vehicle for Judy Garland and Van Johnson (featuring baby Liza Minnelli in her first screen role). H. B. Warner had played Christ in DeMille's 1927 King of Kings. A casualty of the sound-era, he was a supporting actor in several Capra films and had a bit part in DeMille's 1956 The Ten Commandments. As for Anna Q. Nilsson, apparently she was a big star in the teens and early ‘20s, but was also a casualty of sound. It's important to remember that in 1950 the silent era had ended only twenty-one years earlier; many of the silent movie allusions and stars mentioned passingly in the film – Valentino, Vilma Banky, Mabel Normand, Wallace Reid and, of course, Adolphe Menjou, who was still working at that time – were still familiar names to the movie-going public, and former Paramount stars. To put it another way, Sunset Boulevard, made over fifty-five years ago, is much further away from its initial audience than the silent film was to talkies.

Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist phoning in her story of the murder at the end of the film, when Norma is being taken into custody, was in fact one of the two most influential newspaper gossip columnists in America at the time. Hopper, famous equally for her hats and her venom, had been – before becoming a gossip columnist (4) – a moderately successful actress playing supporting roles in Paramount films, most notably in DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind (1942) and Leisen's delicious and undervalued Midnight (1939, with a script by Wilder and Brackett). In the latter film she plays a snooty society lady who also is a customer in a milliner's shop that specialises in extravagant and outlandish hats. Parenthetically (or not so parenthetically), Leisen himself started in films by designing costumes and then serving as art director on several lavish DeMille spectacles before becoming a director. One could go on. Leisen was hated by Wilder, who co-wrote with Brackett three scripts (Arise, My Love [1940] in addition to Midnight and Hold Back the Dawn) that Leisen directed. Wilder felt that Leisen so mangled his scripts that he resolved, in the future, to direct his scripts himself. Which, of course, he did. If there is a direct link from DeMille to Leisen to Wilder and back again, it's hardly a coincidence. I'm not in the least suggesting here a conspiracy theory that ripples out endlessly and turns in on itself. But studios have histories and traditions and overlapping stories, relationships and gossip that build up into an overwhelming dense texture that runs parallel and sometimes spills over into the film itself. Perhaps another way to put it is that Sunset Boulevard is only enhanced and enriched by what is sometimes called ‘the genius of the system’, constantly referring to its own vertical and horizontal archaeology.

But it's not just Paramount's past that the film trades on. Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) is a reader at Paramount. And her boyfriend, Artie, is an assistant director, presumably at Paramount. At Artie's New Year's Eve party, two guys are pounding out a popular song at the time, ‘Buttons and Bows’, a tongue-twisting ‘novelty' number which won the Oscar for Best Song the previous year. It was written for Paramount's Bob Hope movie, The Paleface (1948). Playing and singing the tune are Ray Evans and Jay Livingstone, the bespectacled writers of the song, under contract to Paramount. This kind of cross-amortisation of music is not uncommon. Studios, having paid for the music to be written, could use it in the context of any film they chose to. This is found to a remarkable degree in MGM films – MGM, the home of the movie musical. It's usually used as background music. In this film, however, the music is very much foregrounded, another Paramount-reflexive moment, but with a very big difference. In this case, the words have been altered to fit the situation. The original song was such a hit at the time that viewers were assumed to know the original words and appreciate how the song was subverted:

Hollywood for us ain't been so good.
Got no swimming pool, brand new clothes
All we earn are buttons and bows. (5)

The impression given is that everyone at the party works in films, in some underpaid, lowly capacity or other, and probably for Paramount – hence, the statuette of Dagon. In addition to referring to how little everyone gets paid, it also refers to Joe Gillis' situation – he has gotten his swimming pool and lots of brand new clothes. There are in the film, in addition, references to scripts being tailored for Bing Crosby as well as for Alan Ladd and Betty Hutton (who is not mentioned in the script, but is in the final film), all of whom were big Paramount stars at the time. The name of William Demarest, a character actor at Paramount now mostly remembered for his roles in the movies he made with Preston Sturges, also crops up. (6) When Betty (Nancy Olson) tells Joe about her childhood aspirations and her life as a third-generation Hollywood brat, they start by walking through the Paramount backlot streets. (7) They pass through the Western street, stop and talk, and leave via Washington Square as Gillis lets us know – the same Washington Square set used in the previous year's William Wyler's Paramount film, The Heiress, which starred Olivia De Havilland and Montgomery Clift. Paramount is more than a backdrop – its history and present-day production both play an active role in the film.

Sunset Boulevard has all these echoes, tethering it to the real Hollywood, thus lending the film an air of unimpeachable authenticity – as opposed to The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), which never attempts to suggest that the people in the film or the films within the film have any relation to an existing studio, much less MGM. It's some made-up studio, with made-up stars and fake names in made-up movies. The movies within the movies in no way trace their lineage to other MGM productions or refer to the meta-studio with the authenticity, affection and distaste that Sunset Boulevard does. None of the films glimpsed or alluded to in The Bad and the Beautiful have any MGM reality quotient. There are indirect allusions to Val Lewton and Cat People (1942) – even though The Bad and the Beautiful is supposed to take place in the ‘30s – and to John Barrymore and his alcoholic daughter. But these are, at best, half-hearted feints. The generic German director, von Ellstein (played by Ivan Triesault), complete with cigarette holder, is, of course, a genius and a tyrant, as we know all German directors are or were, but it's a caricature that has no teeth. Although in his later Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), another movie about filmmaking that might have had more suggestions grounding it in the reality of its milieu of Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, Minnelli references The Bad and the Beautiful as one of the greatest triumphs of Kirk Douglas (who plays a washed-up actor) and the fictional director (played by Edward G. Robinson), and shows a clip from the earlier film. Here is a movie about movies and nothing at all is made of the fact that Erich von Stroheim Jr (sic!) is Minnelli's assistant director – as he was on Nicholas Ray's Party Girl (1958)! Similar opportunities are either missed or deliberately avoided in George Cukor's A Star is Born (1954), in which one could easily imagine many real-life hints encrusted in the screenplay referring to the legendary Judy Garland's personal history, much of which was public knowledge. Nor is there any Warner Brothersness about the film in the way that Sunset Boulevard incorporates and blends in Paramount in its own Sunset Boulevard myth-making. These possibilities are also ignored or remain unpursued in Joseph Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa (1954), despite the Howard Hughes-like character in it played by Warren Stevens. However, when Ava Gardner recognises Harry Dawes' name (Humphrey Bogart) as the director of stars like Harlow and Lombard, there's very little conviction or solidity to the claim. In other words, the ‘Paramountness’ of Sunset Boulevard is not just a prop or a backdrop for the film; it is inherently part of the story. Strip the film of all of its ‘Paramount’ elements and what do you have? You may have a movie but not the same movie. Paramount is part of the DNA structure of Sunset Boulevard.

So what does all of this mean, if anything? It adds a texture and an underpinning to Sunset Boulevard that is unparalleled in movie lore. Its self-referentiality is not only proper and earned; it grounds the film in the real tinsel beneath the tinsel in tinseltown. We are watching two films at the same time: the one on the screen, and the associations that are triggered by the extra-curricular references it alludes to – suggesting, more than is usually the case, the possibility that the feverish melodrama being presented is entirely plausible.

In those days, many of the major companies had a ‘news’ division that usually interspersed a light sprinkling of major news events with primarily shots of glamorous stars under contract to the studio, attending premieres of the studios’ latest films. These news features were used to round out a programme, along with cartoons and coming attractions before the film began. Today, of course, these so-called ‘newsreels’ from fifty years ago serve a different purpose. They have assumed historical importance, not for their news coverage (which was negligible), but for their celebrity quotient. Seeing Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell planting their handprints in cement in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in conjunction with the release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) is a document that more than transcends its origins, although at the time it was merely part of the movie studio’s publicity machine. As Norma makes her final descent down the staircase, in her greatest role as Salome, pathetic, over-the-top, and unbearably moving, the newsreel cameras are there to catch it all. The news cameras filming Norma Desmond's descent into hell are, fittingly enough, of course, those of Paramount News, which called itself ‘the eyes and ears of the world’, a slogan that is emblazoned on the camera crew truck. Once again, we're in a bitterly ironic mode. Norma says, earlier in the film, ‘There was a time when this business had the eyes of the whole wide world. But that wasn't enough for them. Oh no! They also wanted the ears, too.’

At this point, Norma is completely deranged and is off, most likely not to prison, but probably to the same place where they will put Blanche Dubois a year later (although Blanche will work for another studio). Norma is Salome. She has become the creature she invented in her own script, written for her to play. Erich von Stroheim is standing in between the two Paramount newsreel cameras. She is confused. She thinks he is DeMille. Why hadn't we noticed before what she, in her madness, notices - how much DeMille and von Stroheim look alike? Did DeMille and von Stroheim run into each other during the Sunset Boulevard shoot? Can anyone imagine what they might have talked about? ‘What is the scene?’ He, von Stroheim/Max von Mayerling/Cecil B. DeMille barks out: ‘This is the staircase of the palace.’ The cameras start rolling. Erich von Stroheim is now finishing the unfinished Queen Kelly with Gloria Swanson. He, von Stroheim, is behind the cameras once again, for the first time in almost two decades. We can be sure that the irony of the situation was not lost on him. He is directing in a film but he is not directing a film. In Swanson's slow, tragic descent down the staircase, Wilder, subverting DeMille for his own purposes, wryly commenting on the man and his kitsch Biblicals, is creating a tragedy about cinema and delusions and illusions, glamour and aging in a culture that adores the former and abhors the latter, shot through with a dizzying orgy of intertexuality and self-referentiality that places the movie and its themes in a completely different arena from other movies. In a sense, it is the first meta-film, a film that is not only commenting on itself but also on the process of, the apparatus of, and the meaning of filmmaking itself. (Other meta-films? The Killing [1956]. Once Upon a Time in the West [1968]. Le Samourai [1967]. And perhaps even Keaton's Sherlock Jr [1924].) Finally, the cameras are turning for Norma again. With the Paramount newsreel division there to film it.