Sunset Boulevard

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• The directions made by the Paramount guard for Norma and Joe to go meet Cecil B. DeMille on "Stage 18" is accurate: this stage, one of the largest on the Paramount lot, was known for years as "The DeMille Stage," and now is called "The Star Trek Stage", as all the "Trek" movies and some scenes from the TV shows have shot there (the TV series, from Star Trek: The Next Generation onward had their main sets right across the studio street on Stages 8 and 9, which are right below the second-floor office occupied by Betty Schaefer in Sunset Blvd.. Those offices later became the home of the "Star Trek" art department.)
• Movie Goof (errors made by characters, possibly deliberate errors by the filmmakers): Norma tells Joe how Mabel Normand was a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty with her in the old days, but Mabel was never in that group, having left Keystone for Goldwyn by the time they became a film staple.
• SPOILER: Highly unusual at the time, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder had Joe Gillis narrate, from beyond the grave, the sad tale of the final months of his life, while the film simultaneously depicts the still-living Gillis experiencing those events unaware of the fate his dead self already knows. This parallel narrative - two perspectives from the same character, one omniscient, the other blissfully ignorant - that converge at the moment of Joe's death, are a major reason the film retains such dramatic and emotional power.
• In "On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilder", Ed Sikov relates a story about Wilder's explanation of the true meaning of the strange dead chimp scene from the start of the film. Sikov says that during the mid-1990s, both Wilder and Nancy Davis [First Lady Nancy Reagan] were at a party for an opening of one of the productions of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on the film, when, with Reagan nearby, an older woman approached Wilder with a question about what the chimp scene meant. Wilder's typically outrageous answer, probably intended to shock the former First Lady as much as to inform the woman of the true meaning of the scene, was, "Don't you understand? Before Joe Gillis came along, Norma Desmond was f**king the monkey."