Bunuel anecdote about this film (SPOILERS)

At Paramount I met Josef von Sternberg, who invited me onto
the back lot while he was shooting a film that ostensibly took place
in China; the place was swarming with crowds of extras who floated
down the canals, filled the bridges, and jostled each other in the
narrow streets. What was more upsetting, however, was to see his
set designer positioning the cameras while Sternberg seemed content
just to shout "Action!" (So much for auteurs.) In fact, most of the
directors I watched seemed little more than lackeys who did the
bidding of the studios that had hired them; they had no say in how
the film was to be made. or even how it was to be edited.
In my frequent moments of idleness, I devoted myself to a bizarre
document+ synoptic table of the American cinema. There were
several movable columns set up on a large piece of pasteboard; the
first for "ambience" (Parisian, western, gangster, war, tropical, comic,
medieval, etc.), the second for "epochs," the third for "main characters," and so on. Altogether, there were four or five categories,
each with a tab for easy maneuverability. What I wanted to do was
show that the American cinema was composed along such precise
and standardized lines that, thanks to my system, anyone could
predict the basic plot of a film simply by lining up a given setting
with a particular era, ambience, and character. It also gave particularly exact information about the fates of heroines. In fact, it became
such an obsession that Ugarte, who lived upstairs, knew every combination by heart.
One evening, Sternberg's producer invited me to a sneak preview
of Dishonored, with Marlene Dietrich, a spy story which had been
rather freely adapted from the life of Mata Hari. After we'd dropped
Sternberg off at his house, the producer said to me:
"A terrific film, don't you think?"
'Terrific," I replied, with a significant lack of gusto.
"What a director! What a terrific director!"
"Yes."
"And what an original subject!"
Exasperated, I ventured to suggest that Sternberg's choice of
subject matter was not exactly distinguished; he was notorious for
basing his movies on cheap melodramas.
"How can you say that!" the producer cried. "That's a terrific
movie! Nothing trite about it at all! My God, it ends with the star
being shot! Dietrich! He shoots Dietrich! Never been done before!" " 9 I m sorry," I replied, "I'm really sorry, but five minutes into
it, I knew she'd be shot!"
"What are you talking about?" the producer protested. "I'm
telling you that's never been done before in the entire history of the
cinema. How can you say you knew what was going to happen?
Don't be ridiculous. Believe me, Bufiuel, the public's going to go
crazy. They're not going to like this at all. Not at all!"
He was getting very excited, so to calm him down I invited him
in for a drink. Once he was settled, I went upstairs to wake Ugarte.
"You have to come down," I told him. "I need you."
Grumbling, Ugarte staggered downstairs half-asleep, where I
introduced him to the producer.
"Listen," I said to him. "You have to wake up. It's about a
movie. "
"All right," he replied, his eyes still not quite open.
"Ambience~Viennese. "
"All right. "
"Epoch-World War I."
"All right."
"When the film opens, we see a whore. It's very clear she's a
whore. She's rolling an officer in the street, she . . ."
Ugarte stood up, yawned, waved his hand in the air, and started
back upstairs to bed.
"Don't bother with any more," he mumbled. "They shoot her
at the end."