Four years ahead of the studio’s anniversary, Paramount Pictures has begun to release DVDs under the Centennial Collection banner. According to the press release, “this library of films will showcase Paramount Pictures’ best and brightest films with remastered picture and new bonus materials. Paramount also takes a design note from Criterion and each title will have a number on the sleeve.” Even though the numbers don’t appear to be a ranking system, one could certainly make the case of the significance of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard being bestowed with “1.” It’s as perfect as a film can get, and no matter what point you come into the story, it hooks you and won’t let go, much like the film’s antagonist, former silent-screen star Norma Desmond (played brilliantly by Gloria Swanson, herself a former silent-screen star.

The narrator (William Holden) opens the story telling us a murder has taken place. He wants to set the record straight before you “read all about it in the late editions,” or “get it over your radio, and see it on television — because an old-time star is involved. One of the biggest.” Then we see the dead body of a young man floating in a pool. He took “two shots in his back and one his stomach. Nobody important, really. Just a movie writer with a couple of ‘B’ pictures to his credit.”

The narrator takes the audience back six months, revealing that the dead man in the pool is our narrator, Joe Gillis. He has been struggling to sell something to the studios, which is why the repo men are after his car. As Joe considers giving up on the movie business and going back to Ohio, the repo men see him driving around town. Joe speeds off to escape them. His tire blows out and he quickly pulls into a driveway, losing his pursuers, but unknowingly goes from the frying pan into the fire.

Joe meets Norma, and after she learns he’s a writer, she pitches a movie she has written: Salome to be directed by Cecil B. DeMille. After looking at her collection of scrawled notes, Joe thinks it’s terrible, but sees an angle and gets himself hired to rewrite it. He stays the night in a room over the garage and in the morning finds all his stuff moved in. He is angered, but relents after she demands it.

Their relationship slowly evolves. She clutches him when they watch her old movies in the living room, she buys him clothes for New Year’s Eve, and she moves him into the main house. Once there, he discovers the truth behind the illusions. There’s no locks or knobs on the doors because she previously attempted suicide. Her butler, Max (director Erich von Stroheim), secretly sends her fan mail. After Joe learns the New Year’s Eve party is just for the two of them and the extent of her feelings, he rejects her, causing her to storm out. Joe heads to his friend Artie’s (Jack Webb) party and meets Artie’s fiancée, Betty (Nancy Olson), a reader at Paramount who liked some of Joe’s material and thinks they can develop a salable script from it. While there, Joe decides to make a break from Norma, but gets pulled deeper into her life.