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The free public film series "The Screening Room: Classics, Crowd-Pleasers, Cult Favorites and Neglected Gems" launches its summer lineup this week with the macabre 1950 masterpiece "Sunset Boulevard," director Billy Wilder’s brilliant indictment of self-destructive Hollywood decadence.

Wilder’s Oscar-winning, darkly ironic drama will be screened at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 11, at the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library, 350 N. Wood Ave., downtown Florence.

Filled with some of the most famous lines (along with some of the most iconic images) in Hollywood history, "Sunset Boulevard" features one of the biggest stars of the silent-movie era, Gloria Swanson, in her signature role as Norma Desmond, a fading queen of the silver screen who lives as a bitter, delusional recluse in a crumbling mansion off Sunset Boulevard.

Desperate for a comeback, Desmond hires cynical, down-on-his-luck young screenwriter Joe Gillis (played by William Holden) to shape up her self-penned screenplay for a proposed movie epic based on the biblical story of Salome. In the process, Gillis becomes Desmond’s collaborator and gigolo as the May-December relationship between the two Tinseltown outcasts degenerates into obsession, deception and ultimately murder.

In addition to Swanson and Holden, Wilder assembled a top-notch cast of veteran players from Hollywood’s silent era, including one of Swanson’s former directors, Erich von Stroheim ("Greed," "Queen Kelly," "The Wedding March"), as her butler, chauffeur and ex-husband. Director Cecil B. DeMille, columnist Hedda Hopper and silent-screen stars Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, H.B. Warner and Henry Wilcoxon all have cameo roles as themselves.

Co-scripted by Wilder and his writing partner I.A.L. Diamond, "Sunset Boulevard" (which eventually inspired a hit Broadway musical) was named one of the 25 landmark films of all-time by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 1989. The American Film Institute ranked Wilder’s ****ing portrait of Hollywood No. 16 on its list of the Greatest Movies of All Time and ranked Swanson’s immortal “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up!” as No. 7 on its listing of the Greatest Movie Lines of All Time.

"The Screening Room" is hosted by film historian and Pillar of Fire founder Terry Pace, who teaches English at the University of North Alabama. Screenings are free and open to the public.

For more information, call the library at (256) 764-6564 or Pillar of Fire at (256) 366-4512, e-mail pillaroffire@bellsouth.net, or visit Link.
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