Babylon 2022
Babylon is a 2022
Drama, Comedy
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.
Babylon premiered at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles on November 14, 2022, and was released in the United States on December 23, 2022. The film was met with a polarized response from critics and was considered a box-office bomb, grossing $63 million against a production budget of $78–80 million.[6] Babylon received five nominations at the 80th Golden Globe Awards (including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, winning Best Original Score), nine nominations at the 28th Critics' Choice Awards (including Best Picture), three nominations at the 76th British Academy Film Awards, and three nominations at the 95th Academy Awards.
Plot
In 1926 Bel Air, Los Angeles, Mexican immigrant Manuel "Manny" Torres helps transport an elephant to a debauched bacchanal, rife with sex, jazz, and cocaine, at Kinoscope Studios executive Don Wallach's mansion. He quickly becomes smitten with Nellie LaRoy, a brash, ambitious self-declared "star" from New Jersey. Upon meeting, Manny reveals his wish to be part of something bigger. While the elephant walks through, distracting partygoers, Manny helps carry away young actress Jane Thornton, who overdosed on drugs with urolagniac actor Orville Pickwick.
Also attending are Chinese-American lesbian 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 meets and befriends Jack Conrad, a benevolent but troubled, oft-married film star, and drives the drunken Jack home. Jack helps Manny secure assistant jobs at Kinoscope (like finding Otto Von Strassberger a new camera to film Jack in an outdoors love scene before nightfall). Manny climbs the studio system's ranks.
Nellie quickly 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 technical changes, eventually becoming a director. Nellie struggles to navigate sound film's demands (one cameraman dies filming her), and increases her drug use and reckless 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 publicly fight a rattlesnake during 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 begins to sense that his popularity has waned, but still works in low-budget Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films. As Hollywood becomes less libertine, executives tell Manny to fire Fay, a Kinoscope title writer, because of her perceived lesbian affair with Nellie. While practicing lines with new wife Estelle, Jack is devastated to learn his longtime friend/producer, George Munn, has committed suicide. Sidney secures his own musical film and orchestra.
Elinor and Manny attempt to revamp Nellie's image and ingratiate her into Hollywood's high society, but at a party with William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, Nellie lashes out against upper-class snobbery, vomiting on Hearst. Jack finds Elinor's cover story about his declining popularity and confronts her; she explains that although his star has faded, he will be immortalized on film. Sidney is offended when studio executives convince Manny to request he don blackface for Southern audiences; 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 fatally shoots himself.
Eccentric gangster James McKay threatens Nellie's life over her massive gambling debts. Manny initially rejects her distraught 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 own prop-maker. James invites the men to a subterranean gathering-space for zoosadist debauched parties, raving about potential film ideas. When James realizes the cash is counterfeit, he attempts to kill them, but they narrowly escape, killing James's henchman Wilson.
Manny asks Nellie to flee with him to Mexico, marry, and start a new life. She resists, but eventually agrees. James's associate tracks Manny down, killing The Count and his roommate but sparing Manny's life if Manny leaves Los Angeles. Nellie reneges on her decision and dances away into the night. A montage of newspaper clippings reveals Elinor's death at age 76, and Nellie's death from a drug overdose at 34.
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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]
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 but 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 various films follows. As the focus returns to Singin', Manny tearfully smiles.
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