The Sunset Club

The year is 1970 and it’s a new decade full of both new beginnings and endings. The Sunset Club is a retirement home for single women over the age of fifty-five who have been or still are, employed in the Motion Picture Industry. Located on a quiet side street just off Sunset Boulevard, the Sunset Club offers its residents a home…a place of safety, security, normalcy, and family.

In 1926, the house was built using funds raised by some of the silent pictures’ most famous stars. The prime benefactor of the Sunset Club was non-other than the world-famous actress Gloria Swanson. It’s within walking distance of the old RKO, Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox, and MGM studios and movie lots, once called “dream factories”. In their heyday, the “Big Five” studios agreed to make movies that were an escape from, not a reflection of, reality. They accomplished this by building enormous sound stages, elaborate facades, incredible costumes, and a vast number of props to manufacture their product which was, in a word, “storytelling.” They controlled the product from start to finish.

But the sun is setting on the “Studio System” of classic Hollywood. The Supreme Court decision United States v. Paramount ordered studios to divest themselves of all theater holdings. Accelerating the Studio System’s demise was the stiff competition of television in the 50s and 60s.

The Sunset Club and its residents are full of memories and longings of a bygone era, but also hopes and dreams of the future and what it may hold.