Chazelle began developing Babylon in July 2019, with Lionsgate Films as the frontrunner to acquire the project. It was announced that Paramount Pictures had acquired worldwide rights in November 2019. Much of the main cast joined the project between January 2020 and August 2021, and filming took place in Los Angeles from July to October 2021.
In Bel Air, 1926, Manuel "Manny" Torres is organizing the haphazard transport of an elephant to a debauched bacchanal at the mansion of his employer, Kinoscope Studios boss Don Wallach. Witnessing this event rife with sex, jazz, and cocaine, Manny becomes smitten with Nellie LaRoy, a brash, ambitious self-declared "star" from New Jersey. Himself the son of impoverished Mexican refugees, Manny shares his dream with her—to be part of something "bigger". He helps carry away young actress Jane Thornton, who overdosed on drugs with actor Orville Pickwick, having the elephant walk through to distract partygoers.
Also attending are Chinese-American homosexual cabaret-singer Lady Fay Zhu and African-American jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer. The flamboyantly dancing Nellie is spotted and swiftly recruited to replace Jane in a Kinoscope film. During filming, she crudely upstages Constance Moore. Manny becomes a personal assistant to the benevolent and oft-married film star Jack Conrad who helps him secure Kinoscope assistant jobs. When a camera is urgently needed for one of Jack's scenes before nightfall, Manny procures it at the last moment, helping him climb the studio system's ranks.
Nellie becomes an "it girl" covered by gossip columnist Elinor St. John, who also follows Jack's career. As sound film displaces silents in the late-1920s, Manny skillfully adapts to the changes. At Sidney's suggestion, he pitches films starring Sidney's orchestra to Irving Thalberg and becomes a studio executive. Nellie struggles to navigate sound film's demands (one cameraman dies filming her), and increases her drug use and gambling, tarnishing her reputation, despite Manny's assistance.
Nellie, shown to have an institutionalized mother, eggs on her drunken father (and inept business manager) Robert to fight a rattlesnake at a party; he passes out. Nellie fights the snake, which bites her neck; Fay kills it and sucks out the venom. Nellie passionately kisses her.
By 1932, Jack's popularity is waning but he is still finding work in low-budget Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films. As Hollywood becomes less libertine, executives tell Manny to fire Fay, a Kinoscope title-writer, due to her lesbianism. While practising lines with new wife Estelle, Jack is devastated to learn his longtime friend/producer, George Munn, has committed suicide.
Elinor and Manny try to revamp Nellie's image and get her into Hollywood's high society, but Nellie lashes out against upper-class snobbery at a party, demonstratively vomiting on William Randolph Hearst. Jack confronts Elinor over her cover story on his declining popularity; she explains that his star has faded, but he will be immortalized on film.
Comparatively light skinned Sidney is offended when studio executives insist he don blackface to assuage Southern audiences' aversion to seeing interracial orchestras; he leaves Kinoscope to perform live in black establishments. Jack encounters Fay at a hotel party; she reveals her departure for Europe and Pathé. Afterwards, in his hotel room, a despondent Jack shoots himself.
Eccentric gangster James McKay threatens Nellie's life over her gambling debts. Manny rejects her pleas for help, but later secures funds from the movie-set drug-pusher/aspiring actor "The Count", and visits James with him to pay off Nellie's debt. Manny panics upon learning the money is counterfeit, made by his prop-maker. Raving about potential film ideas, the gangster drags them along to a subterranean gathering space for depraved zoosadist parties. When he realizes the cash is counterfeit, the two are about to get shot them but they escape, killing James's henchman Wilson.
Manny asks Nellie to flee with him to Mexico, marry and start a new life; she eventually agrees. James's associate finds Manny, killing The Count and his roommate. When terrified Manny loses control of his bladder, the hitman spares him on condition he leaves Los Angeles. While Manny gathers their belongings, Nellie reneges on her decision and dances away into the night. A montage of newspaper clippings reveals Elinor's death at 76 and Nellie's death from a drug overdose at 34.
In 1952, Manny returns to California with his wife Silvia and young daughter, having fled to New York City and established a radio shop. He shows them the Kinoscope Studios entrance, then visits a nearby cinema alone to see Singin' in the Rain, whose depiction of the industry's transition from silents to talkies, albeit sanitized, moves him to tears. A century-spanning series of vignettes from films follows. As the focus returns to Singin', Manny tearfully smiles.
It was announced in July 2019 that Damien Chazelle had set his next project following First Man (2018) as a period drama set in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Lionsgate Films was the frontrunner to acquire the project after distributing Chazelle's La La Land (2016), with Emma Stone (also having worked on La La Land) and Brad Pitt in the mix to star.[7] In November, Paramount Pictures acquired worldwide rights to the project, with Stone and Pitt still circling roles.[8] Pitt confirmed his involvement in January 2020, describing the film as being set when the silent film era transitioned into sound.[9] He was set to play a character modeled on actor-director John Gilbert.[10]
By December 2020, Margot Robbie was in early negotiations to replace Stone, who exited the film due to scheduling conflicts, and Li Jun Li was also cast.[11][12] Robbie was confirmed in March 2021, with Jovan Adepo and Diego Calva also joining.[10][13]
Filming was originally set to take place in California in mid-2020 but was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It began on July 1, 2021 and wrapped on October 21, 2021.[16][20][21][22][23]Shea's Castle was used for the exterior shots of the mansion in the opening party scene, and interiors were shot inside the Ace Hotel Los Angeles. The movie ranch, Blue Sky Ranch, served as Kinescope Studios.[24]
Justin Hurwitz, a frequent collaborator of Chazelle, composed the film's score. Two tracks from the score, "Call Me Manny" and "Voodoo Mama," were released digitally on November 10, 2022, the latter track being used to underscore the film's first trailer. The soundtrack album was released by Interscope Records on December 9, 2022.[25]
Themes
In an essay for /Film, Robert Daniels asserts that Babylon is essentially a story of identity and assimilation in early Hollywood. While noting the similarities it shares with films such as The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), Bamboozled (2000), and Medicine for Melancholy (2008), Daniels focuses on character Manuel "Manny" Torres and his rise into the Hollywood studio system: "In the process, Manuel cuts off ties with his Mexican roots—though they live in Los Angeles, he never visits his family—he Americanizes his name to Manny, and at a party thrown by William Randolph Hearst, he presents himself as a Spaniard. Manuel becomes intoxicated by his proximity to the white capitalistic greed that governs Hollywood (and partly the American dream of upward mobility), causing him to traverse a tenuous betweenness of identity." Daniels writes that Manny's erasure of his identity is sparked by his fantasy romance with Nellie LaRoy—who represents what he loves about Hollywood: "An indefinable magical quality, upward mobility, picturesque happiness, and the ability to permanently define yourself." Daniels also adds that, while climbing the social ladder, Manny contributed to the mythology of Hollywood, recalling one scene where he expeditiously retrieved a camera for a large, destructive set and a picturesque scene is shot without future film audiences' knowledge of its production, and another scene where Manny pressures Black trumpeter Sidney Palmer to don blackface during the filming of a jazzshort, so that the lighting on the set doesn’t lighten his complexion in the final product.[26]
Lisa Laman of Collider observed that Babylon functions as a rumination on how human beings try to outrun and ignore their innate mortality, pointing to the various nonchalant depictions of death (such as a newscaster's casual account of the suicide of a female Jack Conrad fan) as an especially discernible example of this thematic element. Laman also pointed to a key scene in the middle of Babylon concerning Conrad briefly being overwhelmed by the death of his friend George Munn before returning to his default unflappable persona to be another key instance of the feature functioning as a tragic meditation on people trying to evade the inevitable presence of death.[27]
Release
Theatrical
Babylon was first screened for critics and industry people on November 14, 2022, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles and in New York City the following day.[28] It was released on December 23, 2022.[29] The film was initially scheduled for a December 25, 2021, limited release and a January 7, 2022, wide release,[8] but was later delayed by an entire year, with a December 25, 2022, limited release, and a January 6, 2023, wide release, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[30] In October, the film was moved two days earlier to the current date and set for a solely wide release instead.[31]
Home media
The film was released on VOD platforms on January 31, 2023, and on Paramount+ on February 21, 2023. It was released on Blu-ray, DVD and 4K UHD a month later on March 21, 2023.[32][33]
Marketing
The first red-banded trailer for Babylon premiered on September 12, 2022, at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival during a Q&A event with Chazelle and TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey. It was released to the public the following day, alongside character posters of the main cast.[34][35] Noting its uncensored nudity, profanity and drug use, several publications compared the trailer's atmosphere to that of films such as The Wolf of Wall Street and The Great Gatsby (both 2013), which star Robbie and Maguire, respectively.[36][37][38][39] A featurette about the making of the film was released on November 21, 2022.[40] The second and final trailer for the film and its theatrical release poster were released on November 28, 2022.[41]
As Maggie Dela Paz notes at ComingSoon.net, "a brand new behind-the scenes featurette ...highlight[ing] Chazelle’s ensemble cast of A-list stars and familiar supporting actors[, and] also featur[ing] commentary from the Oscar-nominated director as he talks about the challenge of handling this massive cast" was released on December 29, 2022.[42]
Reception
Box office
Babylon grossed $15.4 million in the United States and Canada, and $48 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $63.4 million.[6][5]Deadline Hollywood noted that with a combined production and promotion budget of around $160 million, Babylon would need to gross $250 million worldwide in order to break-even.[43] The site ultimately calculated the film lost the studio $87.4million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues.[44]
In the United States and Canada, Babylon was released alongside Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and was initially projected to gross $12–15 million from 3,342 theaters over its four-day opening weekend.[45][46] The film made $1.5 million on its first day (including Thursday-night previews) and went on to debut to just $3.5 million in its opening weekend (and a total of $5.3 million over the four days), finishing fourth at the box office. Deadline cited the general public's declining interest in prestige films, the threat of a tripledemic surge in COVID-19 and flu cases, and the nationwide impact of Winter Storm Elliott as reasons for lower-than-expected theater attendance.[4] In its sophomore weekend the film made $2.6 million (a drop of 27.5%), finishing in fifth.[47]
In Europe, the film took $3.3 million on its opening weekend in France and $1.6 million (£1.3 million) in the United Kingdom, coming second and third respectively at the box office.[48]
According to IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter, as well as the opinion of Chazelle himself, response to the film was "polarized".[49][50] On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Babylon holds an approval rating of 57% based on 363 reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Babylon's overwhelming muchness is exhausting, but much like the industry it honors, its well-acted, well-crafted glitz and glamour can often be an effective distraction."[51] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100, based on 63 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[52] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale, while PostTrak reported 74% of audience members gave the film a positive score, with 47% saying they would definitely recommend it.[4]
In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle praised Chazelle's ambition and direction, writing that "Babylon is what movie love really looks like."[53]THR's David Rooney described it as a "syncopated concentration of hedonistic revelry", praising the cast performances, score, cinematography, costume and production design, but criticizing the screenplay and direction—ultimately concluding "it’s hard to imagine the overstuffed yet insubstantial Babylon finding its way into many screen-classic montages".[54] Conversely, Pete Hammond of Deadline Hollywood wrote that "it is guaranteed to be a movie that will stay in your head", commending the direction, production design, and performances.[55]
In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw assigned the film three stars out of five, applauding the performances of Robbie and Pitt for elevating "a story in no hurry to engage with the true-life nastiness of its era".[56] Writing for Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson concurred with Bradshaw's sentiment, stating: "These are little islands in a sea of mannered chaos, but it begins to feel, as Babylon stretches out across three hours and eight minutes, that Chazelle has no clear idea where all of this is going."[57] In a scathing review for Time, Stephanie Zacharek highlighted Jun Li's performance, but criticized Chazelle's screenplay and direction, summarizing: "Babylon is a manic sprawl that only pretends to celebrate cinema. It's really about prurience, dumb sensation, self-congratulation and willful ignorance of history."[58]
In his review for The Ringer, Adam Nayman described Babylon as "a nauseous, high-calorie sugar rush of a movie that not only wants to have its cake and eat it too, but also to puke it up, smear it around, and cram it in the viewer's face". While praising Chazelle's direction and ambition, Nayman wrote that the film was a "deliberately designed career-killer" for the director.[59] Writing less enthusiastically about the film in Variety, Peter Debruge stated that "Babylon presents itself as the apotheosis of all that has come before, the ne plus ultra of the medium's own potential, and indeed, it's an experience that won't be easily topped, in this or any year. But that doesn't make it great or even particularly coherent".[60]
Richard Brody of The New Yorker praised Chazelle's storytelling and characters, but criticized other aspects of his screenplay, ultimately concluding: "Artistically, what Babylon adds to the classic Hollywood that it celebrates is sex and nudity, drugs and violence, a more diverse cast, and a batch of kitchen-sink chaos that replaces the whys and wherefores of coherent thought with the exhortation to buy a ticket, cast one's eyes up to the screen, and worship in the dark."[61] John Mulderig of The Catholic Review says, "Along the way, Robbie effervesces, Pitt charms and Calva smolders and endures. Yet Chazelle's depiction of Tinseltown's behind-the-scenes decadence takes needless explicitness to the point of obscenity. [He] repeatedly references ...Singin' in the Rain, which unfolds in the same place and time. But comparisons with that beloved classic only highlight the ugliness of his own portrayal of human debasement."[62]
Despite the polarizing response, later critical and public reevaluation has tended to focus more on the film's strengths while deeming it as a misunderstood masterpiece. Author Stephen King praised the film, calling it "utterly brilliant–extravagant, over the top, hilarious, thought-provoking" and "one of those movies that reviews badly and is acclaimed as a classic in 20 years."[63] In August 2023, IndieWire ranked the film's score at number 15 on its list of "The 40 Best Movie Scores of the 21st Century," writing "Filled with booming trumpets and epic saxophone solos, it’s a truly epic score, perfectly fitting the changing world of ’20s and ’30s Los Angeles perfectly. But it’s the way the score builds upon its motifs and elements from song to song, that makes it special."[64] In June 2024, Collider ranked it number 30 on its list of the "30 Best Movies of the 2020s So Far," with Jeremy Urquhart writing "It's another movie of his [Chazelle] about passion, a desire for greatness, and the ups and downs of pursuing one's dreams, only this time the scope is epic, with such an approach taken to investigating Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s, instead of just one or two people, like his smaller/more personal movies. Babylon is dazzling from a technical perspective and has some of the best music composed for a movie in recent memory. It challenges, provokes, celebrates, and condemns all at once. It's overwhelming and messy, but history will likely be kind to it."[65]
The Birth of a Nation (1915): American silent epic historical drama film, depicting the filming scenes of a horse racing in Babylon.
The Artist (2011): French black-and-white, partially silent film by Michel Hazanavicius, also depicting the transition to "talkies", and featuring a "Kinograph" studio resembling the "Kinoscope" of Babylon.
A Clockwork Orange (1971): Film by Stanley Kubrick (with heavy doses of sex, violence and reflection on art, like Babylon) which extensively uses the music from Singin' in the Rain (1952), including in the end credits (compared to Babylon's end scene showing Singin' in the Rain), albeit in a much more cynical and sarcastic way than in Babylon.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019): Film by Quentin Tarantino which, like Babylon, features not only Pitt as an aging film-industry veteran (fictional stuntman Cliff Booth) facing difficulty with changes in the industry, but also Robbie as an upcoming, celebrated young actress (Sharon Tate) facing dangerous possibilities and people.
The Wild Party, a 1975 Merchant-Ivory film shot in Riverside, California, loosely based on the 1926 narrative poem by Joseph Moncure March, about an aging silent-era star attempting a comeback via a party with a huge guest-list of industry figures, to show them his new film. (The poem was also made into two musicals, a Broadway show which followed the poem very closely, and an off-Broadway production, which took some artistic liberties, but still less than the film.)
The Last Tycoon (1976): Film by Elia Kazan, based on the 1941 unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about early Hollywood artifice, skullduggery, sex, betrayal, and desperation, ending with studio head Monroe Stahr (Robert De Niro) walking off into the darkness, as Nellie does in Babylon.
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