after that i drove down move in toward drug store to headquarters. that's and the way a lot of us think about schwab's drug store. dissolve to: actors and stock girls and waiters. kind of a combination office,kaffee- a-13 int. schwab's drug store klatsch and waiting room. waiting, waiting for the the usual schwabadero gravy train. crowd sits at the fount- ain, gossips at the cigar-stand, loiters by the magazine display. move in towards the two telephone booths. in i got myself ten nickels one of them sits gillis, and started sending out a stack of nickels in a general s.o.s. couldn't front of him. he's get hold of my agent, doing a lot of talking naturally. so then i into the telephone, called a pal of mine,name hanging up, dropping of artie green -- an awful another nickel, dialing, nice guy, an assistant talking again. director. he cquld let me have twenty, but twenty wouldn't do.
driving down sunset as i drove back towards town towards hollywood. he i took inventory of my pros- drives slowly. his pects. they now added up to mind is working. exactly zero. apparently i just didn't have what it takes, and the time had come to wrap up the whole hollywood deal and go home. maybe if i hocked all my junk there'd be enough for a bus ticket back to ohio, back to that thirty-five- dollar-a-week job behind the copy desk of the dayton evening post, if it was still open. back to the smirking delight of the whole office. all gillis stops his car at right you wise guys. why don't a red light by the main you go out and take a crack at entrance to bel air. hollywood? maybe you think suddenly his eyes fall you could -- oh-oh! on:
was i far enough ahead?
he goes out. gillis i pegged him as slightly looks after him, hangs cuckoo, too. a stroke maybe. his coat over a chair, come to think of it, the walks over to the win- whole place seemed to have dow, pulls down the been stricken with a kind of rickety venetian blind. creeping paralysis, out of as he does so, he looks beat with the rest of the down at: world, crumbling apart in slow motion .
there is no water in and of course she had a pool. it, and hunks of who didn't then? mabel norm- mosaic which lines its and and john gilbert must enormous basin are have swum in it ten thousand broken away. midnights ago, and vilma banky and rod la roque. it was empty now. or was it?
on the table in front i didn't argue with her. of her are the photo- you don't yell at a graphs which she is sign- sleepwalker-- he may fall ing. on the long table and break his neck.that's in the living room is a it -- she was still gallery of photographs sleepwalking along the in various frames -- all giddy heights of a lost norma desmond. on the career --plain crazy piano more photographs. when it came to that one above the piano an oil subject: her celluloid portrait of her. on the self, the great norma highboy beside him still desmond. how could she more photographs. breathe in that house, so crowded with norma dissolve to: desmonds? more norma desmond and still more norma desmond. b-9 the big room -
shooting towards the big it wasn't all work - of gold rush painting. max, course. two or three white gloves and all, times a week max would steps into the shot, shoves haul up that enormous oil the painting up towards painting that had been the ceiling,revealing a presented to her by some motion picture screen. nevada chamber of com- max exits. merce, and we'd see a movie,right in her living room.
they sit on a couch,facing "so much nicer than going the screen. on a table in out," she'd say. the front of them are champagne, plain fact was that she cigarettes and coffee. was afraid of that world above their heads are the outside. afraid it typical openings for a pro- would remind her that jector. the lights go off. time had passed. from the opening above their heads shoots the wide beam of light.
absolutely no makeup. a after that, an army of hand with a strong small beauty experts invaded flashlight comes into the her house on sunset picture. the beam of the boulevard. she went flashlight travels over the through a merciless face, exploring it merci- series of treatments, lessly. while the light is massages, sweat cabinets, still on it, two pairs of mud baths, ice compres- creamed hands come into the ses, electric devices. shot and start to massage it. she lived on vegetable juices and went to bed dissolve to: at nine. she was deter- mined to be ready -- ready for those cameras e-2 a short montage of various that would never turn. beauty treatments applied to norma.
it's all right, max. i'll take it.