When she played Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, silent screen icon Gloria Swanson’s career was reborn. Hoping to stay in the limelight, she came up with the idea — long before Andrew Lloyd Webber did — of transforming Billy Wilder’s 1950 movie into a musical. Swanson hired two young songwriters, Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley, who were also lovers (in the closet), and summoned them to her Palm Springs home to create her star vehicle. But their big break took its own gothic turn as Swanson fell for the handsome Stapley (who had his own brush with stardom as an actor), and as the diva became more Desmond-like in her demands, life began to dangerously imitate art. This is just the beginning of Tab Hunter Confidential director Jeffrey Schwartz’s astonishing, archive-rich chronicle whose twists and turns, dreams and disappointments, must be seen to be believed.