Babylon: The truth behind the outrageous Hollywood epic (2024)

It's no great surprise that Babylon – the new unhinged period epic set in 1920s silent-era Hollywood from La La Land director Damien Chazelle – seems to be generating mixed reactions from its viewers so far. Those expecting anything like La La Land will find themselves awash in vomit, cocaine, and off-the-wall homages to the sleaziest undersides of Old Hollywood history: murder, addiction, suicide, and more. With its spinning overhead shots of frenzied, hedonistic parties, mountains of Class-A drugs, and depiction of a fledgling movie colony who regarded health and safety on set as something of an afterthought (to say the least), you can see why some critics may have been taken aback by its full-throated, enjoyably naughty squalor.

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In principle, the film is told from the perspective of a young studio lackey, Manny (Diego Calva, excellent in a part that requires him to be largely reactive to the madness surrounding him) who is drawn further into the depraved swirl when he befriends a rough-and-tumble aspiring starlet with a scrappy Brooklyn accent, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie, whose every whirling dervish move in this film further corroborates her screen power). Meanwhile, he is also offering assistance to a dipsomaniac legend of the silver screen by the name of Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), majestically bumbling through the latter part of his career with one new wife after another.

Babylon imagines the silent film era as a hedonistic maelstrom, capturing the spirit, if not the letter, of what went on (Credit: Alamy)

Babylon mixes fact, fiction, and lore with a head-spinning number of historical Easter eggs, making it both profoundly cine-literate and also incredibly dense with references. And while not all of it clicks entirely – it can be too unwieldy and OTT to really lock onto a central thesis much of the time – Babylon is also a film with a series of insightful, gorgeously-wrought, delightfully funny set pieces riffing on real historical issues. In particular, there's one where Nellie tries – and fails, repeatedly – to get a scene right in her first-ever talking picture. Even the wrong sole on a shoe can cause background noise with the primitive sound technology, so movement is suddenly restricted on camera in a way it never was in the silent era; and films can no longer be shot side by side on set, with a western shoot-out within spitting distance of a period romance. Much of this is absolutely correct to the difficulties of early sound tech, and there's ahilariously over-egged moment when the cameraman, locked in an insanely overheated sound-proof box, passes out from the temperature.

The question many may be forced to ask is simply whether any of this – the sound snafus, wild parties, studio cover-ups of bad behaviour, and so forth – had any bearing in reality. The answer is that Babylon is a film that captures the spirit, if not the letter, of the era it depicts, which Chazelle imagines as a freewheeling, wild place beyond the realms of even what the pearl-clutching censors of the time might have assumed.

As film historian Marya E Gates tells BBC Culture: "Babylon captures the fervour of Jazz Age Los Angeles and questions the very nature of history in a place that sells itself as the ultimate fantasy. Chazelle directs his deeply researched script with a wink and knowing grin, exploring how the darkness and the light operate in tandem."

One obvious reference point for the film is Hollywood Babylon, the notorious 1959 book by filmmaker Kenneth Anger about the supposed scandals of early Hollywood whose purple prose about murder via ivory dild*s, orgies and the like would infect the minds of a generation even without any real evidence to back up his claims.

In Babylon, some of the most infamous bona fide scandals of the 1920s are omitted – say, the unsolved 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor – or glancingly invoked, like the infamous multiple trials of star comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle for the killing and sexual assault of actress Virginia Rappe (he was eventually acquitted).

But Babylon isn't interested in slavishly adhering to reality so much as it is expanding on the salaciously fantastical drama that Anger evoked, while using those extremes to burst other stereotypes about the past: namely, that Hollywood history of this time – long before the Humphrey Bogarts and Judy Garlands – is too long ago to be of any real interestto people in 2022.

Comedian Fatty Arbuckle's trials for the killing of actress Virginia Rappe are one of the real-life bits of history referenced (Credit: Alamy)

It's a film which sticks up for an era that has long been painted as dusty, desiccated, and antique in an irretrievable way. Even the most famous films about the silent era – Singin' in the Rain (1952), for example, which Babylon is in constant, often literal dialogue with – trade in these same hoary cliches about how embarrassingly protean and vulgarthe period was, making fun of the silent-era style of "stagey" acting in a way that would invariably come to define the stereotypes about that time.

Babylon does imagine real figures of the motion picture industry in some cases: the powerful mogul William Randolph Hearst, for example, (most famously the inspiration for Citizen Kane) or MGM "boy wonder" producer Irving Thalberg, portrayed by Max Minghella (Thalberg was revered for being unusually creative and gentle for a mogul, though in truth had just a big a mean streak as any other). Then there are the fictionalised amalgamations: Nellie LaRoy resembles one of several street kids who made good in Hollywood, though particularly "it" girl of the silver screen Clara Bow, whose wild child reputation and hot temper were the talk of the gossip mags for years. Bow came from New York tenement poverty and became famous for – among other things – being able to cry on cue in a rather remarkable fashion, something we see reflected in a brilliant scene in Babylon where Nellie is called upon to do so.

So too you have the unforgettable supporting character Li Jun Li as Lady Fay Zhu, a thinly-veiled version of Anna May Wong: one of the few actors of East Asian descent to succeed in Hollywood in its early decades – in spite of the vast racism of the time – Wong appeared in films like The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and later opposite Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932). Although she was still exoticised and limited in her roles, it was only when the more regulated period of talking pictures arrived that she began to find her career on the downward trajectory. Chazelle is pointed about how – unwittingly perhaps, but nonetheless – the lack of regulation or major oversight in 1920s Hollywood allowed for working-class people like Nellie, people of colour like Manny, and queer people like the bisexual Lady Zhu to slip through the cracks and find a place for themselves in the movie industry.

Then there's the fictional creation Elinor St John (played by a memorable, eye-wateringly self-aggrandising Jean Smart), a gossip columnist in a series of large hats. She seems to be based on Adela Rogers St John, a real columnist who worked for Photoplay magazine and had connections to the Hearst newspaper empire but would have been much younger in the 1920s than how she is depicted in Babylon. St John herself was a fascinating character, nicknamed "the greatest girl reporter in the world" in the 1920s and later a chronicler of the period in several memoirs.

She was protective of her peers and her world against accusations of decadence, as she wrote in her 1978 book Love, Laughter, and Tears: My Hollywood Story. "When I read what is written by those who look only for sensationalism, for ugliness and degradation, my very heartstrings protest," she writes. "There emerges a false picture [...] Can anyone truly believe that the movies and all they have given us came from a gaggle of drunks and degenerates?"

Wild child "it" girl Clara Bow was one of the main inspirations for Margot Robbie's character Nellie LaRoy (Credit: Alamy)

Well, Chazelle is asking us to believe precisely that, though he doesn't seem to mind whether that's a half-truth or not. Hollywood of the era was a young place, still rural and full of ranchers; it was peopled with chancers and hustlers who did not necessarily believe that motion pictures were much more than a fad or a get-rich-quick phase. It became a second Wild West of sorts, attracting the unusual (gangsters, as represented in Babylon by a crazed Tobey Maguire, former Gold Rush miners, cowboys), the opportunistic (Eric Roberts is spot-on as Nellie's grasping stage dad) and the immigrant (like the Mexican-American Manny). If the movies and all they have given us did come from a gaggle of drunks and degenerates – and frankly, at least some of them were, from the sozzled Wallace Beery to the cocaine-loving Tallulah Bankhead – it's all the more impressive that silent era Hollywood produced such masterpieces as Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Greed (1924), The General (1926), and everything Charlie Chaplin ever made.

Jean Smart's St John's monologue to Brad Pitt's fading matinee idol about the immortality afforded to you by appearing in motion pictures, very much of a piece with the real St John's hyperbolic prose style, seems like the closest we get to an actual thesis in Chazelle's deranged, swing-for-the-fences blockbuster – and is combined in its conclusion with an utterly unexpected and probably ill-judged "love of the movies" montage. Babylon will never be for everyone, but for those of us who appreciate what Chazelle is trying to express about this moment in film history, it really is a delightful viewing experience. As the real St John wrote: "Hollywood was a gilded slum with tinsel covering the drama and heartbreak, a centre of the beautiful and damned." Chazelle couldn't have come up with a better epilogue for Babylon.

Babylon is out US cinemas now, and is released in UK cinemas on 20 January 2023

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