In the opening of the film "Sunset Boulevard," Joe Gillis sadly says that he always wanted a ....?

The body of a young man, Joe Gillis, is found floating face down at the start of the movie, Sunset Boulevard. With the voice of Gillis as narrator, we are told, "Well, this is where you came in, back at that pool again, the one I (Gillis) always wanted." It is dawn, and the police must have photographed his body a thousand times. They got a couple of pruning hooks from the garden and fished Gillis out of the pool.

Noting the history of the street, Sunset Boulevard, it is not funny that it is seen as a mythical, deadly place. So in the film, it is also fair that it conjures up notions of shattered dreams and lost fame. It makes this a cautionary film right from the start, especially given the film’s ominous, acidly opening scene with a dead body floating in a pool.

With Joe Gillis (William Holden) dead and narrating a macabre flashback of his Hollywood failure from the great beyond, the story line here is on target. Hollywood will kill you (as it does for Joe) or make you insane (as it does Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond). Gillis is spinning a yarn about how he became just another dead, desperate screenwriter floating in a former silent movie queen’s pool on the legendary road, Sunset Boulevard.

The outcome here is clear: Joe is murdered; Norma goes completely mad; Nancy Olson as Betty Schaefer doesn’t finish developing the screenplay with Joe; and Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling doesn’t take needed steps to stop Norma from destroying Joe and herself.