1
Q
Love/Relationships quotes
A
- “Brand new automobile” (Joe)
- “you just can’t say those things to somebody you’re crazy about. Maybe I’d never have to. Maybe I could get away with it, get away from Norma. Maybe I could wipe the whole nasty mess right out of my life…” (Joe)
- “What are you doing, Joe? What are you doing? You’re not leaving me?” (Norma)
- “No, you’re not. Max! Max!” (Norma)
- “There are no other guests. We don’t want to share this night with other people. This is for you and me.” (Norma)
- “only costs two dollars to get married there.” (Betty)
2
Q
Beauty and Unrealistic Standards quotes
A
- “Turn that light back where it belongs.” (DeMille)
- “She went through a merciless series of treatments” (Joe)
- “Like an athlete training for the Olympic games, she counted every calorie, went to bed every night at 9.” (Joe)
- “Ready for those cameras that would never come.” (Joe)
- “Third…I come from a picture family…they didn’t like my nose …I went to a doctor and had it fixed…only they didn’t like my acting.” (Betty)
3
Q
Wealth quotes
A
- “I don’t care about the money. I just want to work again. You don’t know what it means to know that you want me.” (Norma)
- “All my things? All the eighteen suits, all the custom-made shoes and the eighteen dozen shirts, and the cuff-links and the platinum key-chains, and the cigarette cases?” (Joe)
- “Come on where? Back to a one-room apartment that I can’t pay for? Back to a story that may sell and very possibly will not?” (Joe)
- “The whole thing was upholstered in leopard skin, and had one of those car phones, all gold-plated.” (Joe)
- “Shut up. I’m rich. I’m richer than all this new Hollywood trash. I’ve got a million dollars.” (Norma)
4
Q
Deceit and Manipulation quotes
A
- “I felt caught, like the cigarette in that contraption on her finger.” (Joe)
- “Get Gordon Cole. Tell him to forget about her car. He can find another old car. I’ll buy him five old cars, if necessary.” (DeMille)
- “I haven’t done anything, Norma.” “Of course you haven’t. I wouldn’t let you.” (Joe, Norma)
- “She never will. That is my job. It has been for a long time. You must understand I discovered her when she was sixteen. I made her a star. I cannot let her be destroyed.” (Max)
- “It wasn’ t until I got back to that peculiar prison of mine that I started facing the facts.” (Joe)
- “These are nothing. You can have anything you want if you’ll only stay. What is it you want, money?” (Norma)
- “You tell her, Max. Come on, do her that favor. Tell her there isn’t going to be any picture —-there aren’t any fan letters, except the ones you write yourself.” (Joe)
5
Q
Self-delusion and Insanity quotes
A
- “I got myself a revolver. You don’t believe me, but I did, I did! I stood in front of that mirror, only I couldn’t make myself. It wouldn’t be fair to all those people who are waiting to see me back on the screen. I can’t disappoint them. ” (Norma)
- “I hate that word. It is a return. A return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” (Norma)
- “How could she breathe in that house, so crowded with Norma Desmonds? More Norma Desmond and still more Norma Desmond.” (Joe)
- “They were always her pictures - that’s all she wanted to see.” (Joe)
- “No one leaves a star. That makes one a star.” (Norma)
- “Stars are ageless, aren’t they?” (Norma)
- “So they were turning after all, those cameras. Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her…” (Joe)
- “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.” (Norma)
6
Q
Decline of Fame and inability to adapt quotes
A
- “That’s it – she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career –plain crazy when it came to that one subject:” (Joe)
- “Listen, thirty million fans have given her the brush. Isn’t that enough?” (DeMille)
- “Norma, grow up. You’re a woman of fifty. There’s nothing tragic about being fifty - not unless you try to be twenty-five.” (Joe)
- “A neglected house gets an unhappy look. This one had it in spades. It was like that old woman in Great Expectations that Miss Haversham in her rotting wedding dress and her torn veil, taking it out on the world because she’d been given the go by .” (Joe)
- “I am big. It’s the pictures
that got small.” (Norma) - “The plain fact was that she was afraid of that world outside. Afraid it would remind her that time had passed.” (Joe)
- “I used to think of them as her Wax Works.” (Joe)
- “There it was again - that room of hers, all satin and ruffles, and that bed like a gilded rowboat. The perfect setting for a silent movie queen. Poor devil, still waving proudly to a parade which had long since passed her by.” (Joe)
- “Norma Who?” (Young Guard)
- “You know pictures have changed quite a bit.” (DeMille)
7
Q
Business of Hollywood, valuing profit over art/The Corruption and deceit of Hollywood quotes
A
- “Who wants to see a Civil War picture?”- (Sheldrake)
- “If we made it a girls’ softball team, put in a few numbers. Might make a cute musical.” (Sheldrake)
- “Audiences don’t know somebody sits down and writes a picture. They think the actors make it up as they go along.” (Joe)
- “It’s that old familiar story, you help a timid little soul across a crowded street. She turns out to be a multimillionaire and leaves you all her money.” (Betty)
- “Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with a couple of “B” pictures to his credit. The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end he got himself a pool - only the price turned out to be a little high…” (Joe)
- “They must have photographed me a hundred times…Then they got a couple of pruning hooks from the garden and fished me out ever so gently. Funny how gentle people get with you once you’re dead.” (Joe)
- “ Even the newsreel guys came roaring in. Here was an item everybody could have some fun with, the heartless so-and-so’s. … those headlines would kill her: Forgotten Star a Slayer–Aging Actress–Yesterday’s Glamour Queen…” (Joe)
“Maybe they weren’t original enough. Maybe they were too original.” - Joe
“They beached me like a harpooned baby whale and started to check the damage, just for the record,” Joe
8
Q
Hollywood as the “Dream Factory” quotes
A
- “Not once. What’s wrong with being on the other side of the cameras? It’s really more fun.” (Betty)
- “But before you hear it all distorted and blown out of proportion, before those Hollywood columnists get their hands on it, maybe you’d like to hear the facts, the whole truth…” (Joe)
- “Of course you didn’t. You didn’t know Norma Desmond as a plucky little girl of seventeen, with more courage and wit and heart than ever came together in one youngster.” (DeMille)
- “Couldn’t we work in the evenings? Six o’clock in the morning? This next month I’m completely at your disposal. Artie is out of town.” (Betty)
- “I just think pictures should say a little something.” (Betty)
- “Their in a location in Arizona making a western.”
9
Q
Fame and the price of ambition and stardom, also impact on identity quotes
A
- “If I lose my car it’s like having my legs cut off.” (Joe)
- “Tell him without me he wouldn’t have any job, because without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount Studio.” (Norma)
- “smart producer with a set of ulcers to prove it.” (Joe)
- “That was last year. This year I’m trying to earn a living.” (Joe)
- “All right you wise guys. Why don’t you go out and take a crack at Hollywood? Maybe you think you could - Oh-oh!” (Joe)
- “There are no locks anywhere in this house..Madame’s doctor. She has moments of melancholy. There have been some suicide attempts.” (Max)
- “Great stars have great pride.” (Norma)
- “I understand she was a terror to work with.”, “Only toward the end. You know a dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit.” (Young Assistant & DeMille)
- “I directed all her early pictures. There were three young directors who showed promise in those days: D.W. Grirrith, C.B. deMille, and Max von Mayerling.” (Max)
10
Q
symbols
A
- swimming pool is a symbol of death, illusion, and the underlying truth beneath Hollywood’s glamorous surface contrast with wealth and fame
- “we’ve come for the car” symbolizes his career and opportunity of wealth and fame is being taken away (1946 Plymouth convertible.)
- her mansion is a characterization of herself
- casting of silent film stars
- McCarthyism and post war society
- The ‘American Dream’
- doorways
- the monkey
- her sunglasses
- portraits and mirrors juxtaposition between the two to emphasis her aging and lack of reality
- Max beeping reoccurring theme
English Unit 3&4
flashcards
Decks in class (5)
# Cards
