Character Analysis
Nobody's Hack
She's no has-been. Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson) is a Hollywood go-getter. A script-reader for Paramount, she wants to become an actual writer. Which makes her… pretty much the opposite of our man Joe. Whereas Joe has collapsed into a kind of despair, committing himself to hackwork that he thinks will sell (though it doesn't), Betty actually wants to make good movies with a message. And she's not too shabby at it, either.
After giving one of his scripts a firm two-thumbs-down, she criticizes Joe for churning out fluff, and Joe replies that she's one of those "message people" who "would've turned down Gone with the Wind." Yet even though Betty hates Joe's hackwork, she can tell he used to be something.
And after their obvious chemistry at a New Year's Eve party, Betty makes a move. Salvaging part of his screenplay, Dark Windows, she wants to make a movie about the lives of schoolteachers. Joe goes along with it, reluctantly at first, but then starts to sneak out of Norma's house to work on the script with Betty. Eventually, a real attraction blooms—and an artistic partnership.
Of course, there are two giant problems with this: Betty is the girlfriend of Joe's friend Artie—which isn't much of a problem, ultimately, it seems. Norma is the bigger problem. She sabotages the relationship before it can really get started (though Betty and Joe still manage to get a kiss in before it goes south), and Joe has to explain that he's Norma's kept-man to Betty.
At first, Betty says this doesn't matter, but Joe acts like he's got a good thing going with Norma and tells her she should go and marry Artie, which provokes her to leave, if regretfully. (And Norma murders Joe shortly thereafter.) Poor Betty. While Norma may be a delusional fallen star—and Betty an honest-to-goodness star-on-the-rise—Betty still can't quite compete with Norma's ability to pull people into her warped orbit.
Home Sweet Hollywood
Betty comes from a long line of movie people—which was kind of unusual, since the movie business was still relatively new in America (it had only really been around for about forty years by the time Sunset came out).
Because of her family history, Betty feels a certain affection for the fake scenery and cardboard settings that make up her world. She feels at home on a movie studio set, saying to Joe:
BETTY: Look at this street. All cardboard, all hollow, all phony. All done with mirrors. I like it better than any street in the world. Maybe because I used to play here when I was a kid.
It's a weird moment, right? Betty acknowledges the phoniness at Hollywood's core. But instead of complaining about it, she embraces it. Maybe it's that sense of awareness that allows Betty to remain uncorrupted—at least, so far. She can see through the hullabaloo, whereas has-beens like Norma just want that hullabaloo back.
Of course, Betty's not totally immune to the Hollywood mystique. She tells Joe that she had to get her nose fixed in order to try to act—but they didn't like her acting:
BETTY: I come from a picture family. Naturally they took it for granted I was to become a great star. So I had ten years of dramatic lessons, diction, dancing. Then the studio made a test. Well, they didn't like my nose—it slanted this way a little. I went to a doctor and had it fixed. They made more tests, and they were crazy about my nose—only they didn't like my acting.
So, she's familiar with the way Hollywood makes people try to change themselves in order to become celebrities. But instead of taking that route, she's decided to write and become a movie-creator—to make films that matter. Unlike Joe or Norma, she's the person who survives the movie's wreckage in order to do something that isn't just pure illusion. If only Joe could've joined her and somehow stayed honest in the process (i.e., not betrayed Artie), he might've escaped the hole he was in.