by Nathaniel R
Damien Chazelle photographed by Scott Garfield on the set
Damien Chazelle's Hollywood opus (of some sort or another), Babylon, wasn't ready for the fall festivals so we had no clue when we'd get our first taste. Thankfully today Vanity Fair ended our long drought of information, visual and otherwise, with several lux images from the film. Naturally then it's time to discuss our thoughts, yours and mine (as they come to me). Yours go in the comments. Please don't be shy. The team misses socializing with you in this way. Okay, lots of images to get through so here we go as fast as can, thoughts in the order they came to us...
• "DIVINE DECADENCE" to quote our favourite doomed 1930s chanteuse. Of course this takes place in the Roaring Twenties which were even more decadent than the 30s.
• How do streamers and such always conjure "festive!" so quickly. This image screams for Baz Luhrmann's auteurial and sometimes horny energy. Will Chazelle understand how to put big debaucherous party sequences over on film? He hasn't shown much interest in wildness or sexuality onscreen yet.
• There was a moment where people (or was it IMDb?) were claiming Margot Robbie was playing Clara Bow, the "It" girl of the tail end of the silent film party (she's also The Girl in the first Best Picture winner Wings which from our anecdotal evidence a lot more cinephiles have seen than the films that are more focused on her like It and Wild Party... though she's top billed in Wings too despite being the third most important character). But Margot and Clara look nothing alike and neither is Margo styled anything like Clara and now the name of her character is "Nellie LaRoy" which sounds appropriately 1920s! Now we know everyone is fictional in the movie:
a scrappy aspiring actress who’s an amalgam of early stars like Clara Bow, Jeanne Eagels, Joan Crawford, and Alma Rubens
• We like fiction best so we're thrilled; Down with biopics!
• Tobey Maguire entering a new unhinged era? There was often something somnabulistic about his screen presence (in a good way) but now it looks like he hasn't slept in years which is an about face! What drug is he on in this scene? Any guesses?
• Are we imagining the sudden public warmth for his return or was that just spider-sense tingling nostalgia?
• Smoking in a movie? Cancel it! (Kidding. It's been so long since we've seen a cigarette in a movie that this feels seismic. But you can't really do Old Hollywood without cigarettes)
• At first we thought she was on one of those carnival spinwheels with someone throwing knives at her but this isn't a circus even though Old Hollywood was. Perhaps she's just passed out (glamorously) on the floor.
• Could this be an Oscar role for Robbie? We know Academy voters FAR prefer biographical roles but if she's an amalgam of all those women mentioned above, there's certainly a lot of drama to be mined
• Handsome yum yum
• There was a minor controversy online recently where people complained that the Mexican actor Diego Calva (best known in America for the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico) wasn't getting any attention for being the film's leading man and that articles weren't even mentioning him (which is true). While Hollywood and the media have certainly struggled with unconscious racial bias, in this case it feels like this was a case of people genuinely not knowing he had a large role. The movie has been shrouded in secrecy and the only thing said about it for months really was: Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt star and it's about the cataclysmic shift (for some) from the silents to talkies in Old Hollywood. When I first heard that Calva was actually a lead (or maybe a co-lead) I was genuniely confused and raced to IMDb where I struggled to find his name. Turns out his name didn't come up until you scrolled through 40 cast members after people playing roles like "Starlet" "and "Beauty" and "Soldier" and "Partygoer". It's worth noting here, though, that with IMDb the cast is usually in very random order or algorithymically dictated by searches or whatnot until actual credit order is verified. So now we wonder, how high will he be billed? Size of role is only one factor in billing, size of fame also usually factors in. Or will he get an "introducing" credit? It's not his first movie role but it is his first Hollywood / English language movie role so maybe they'll fudge facts and using "introducing".
•. According to Vanity Fair, Calva is the audience proxy, a newcomer to the scene soaking it all in along with us. We don't know how historically accurate or ahistorical the film will yet be (so many period pieces these days are wildly ahistorical even if they try to get costumes and sets right) but Hollywood was fond of importing talent in the early years, though they were often "exoticized" and limited to one kind of role or genre of film. It would make sense if Calva is playing a Ramon Novarro proxy. He was the first major example of the 'Latin Lover' stereotype that Hollywood would cycle their new Mexican, South American, or Spanish (male) stars through...which began with Novarro but continued on for decades thereafter, Fernando Lamas and Ricardo Montalban being the biggest names to follow until the collapse of the studio system.
• If he is playing a Ramon Novarro proxy, will he be gay in the film? There was so much sexual fluidity in early Hollywood but movies about that time frame rarely picture it or discuss it.
• It's Jovan Adepo with a trumpet. Didn't his screen brother play a trumpet in Fences or am I confusing that with his uncle? There was definitely a trumpet!
• Also remember how great Adepo was on The Leftovers? That series was such a showcase for (still) undersung actors... minus Ann Dowd, of course, who deserved all the singing she eventually got.
• Did Mary Zophres (finally) win her Costume Design Oscar when these photos hit. It's promising after her nearly 30 year career of fine work and 3 nominations.
• Jean Smart is playing a character named Elinor St John but since they're all fictional (save Max Minghella as Irving Thalberg) who knows?! We all know now that once wide gap between TV and Movie careers has nearly closed altogether in the past 20 years, a TV star getting a plum movie role can lead to Oscar play. But, then again, this could be a cameo.
• We once assumed Brad Pitt was the lead and then we heard that he had a small supporting role and now Vanity Fair claims he's one of the three leads. The point is WE WON'T KNOW UNTIL WE SEE IT. He's playing a Douglas Fairbanks / John Gilbert celebrated movie star type who is wondering what's next.
• What's next of course was the talkies. The transition from silent films to sound was the largest shift Hollywood has ever experienced, even bigger than theatrical vs tv and the streaming wars, probably, in that it levelled vast amounts of careers overnight and shifted the hierarchy in so many ways.
• ... will this movie be able to survive comparisons to Singin' in the Rain, the definitive silents-to-talkies movie? It will surely help that it's a drama rather than a musical comedy so the comparisons will inevitably be superficial.
• Men in tuxes never gets old, does it?
• Speaking of tuxes...
• Here's Li Jun Ji as a character named "Lady Fay Zhu". This is a bit of a Marlene Dietrich look here, or maybe closer to a Madonna doing Marlene Dietrich cosplay look from the "Erotica" era. Maybe she's an amalgam of Dietrich and Anna May Wong?
• Li Jun Ji hasn't had big movie roles yet but she's been a steady presence on TV for seven years now on numerous shows like Wu Assassins, Evil, Blindspot, The Exorcist, and Why Women Kill. Could this be a movie breakout or is it a cameo? (same question as Jean Smart)
• Have you watched the documentary Hollywood Chinese on Criterion Channel yet? It's a really interesting look at Chinese actors and filmmakers trying to make it in Hollywood since the very beginning of the industry with tons of fascinating film clips. Nancy Kwan (who we recently discussed), Tsai Chin, Lisa Lu, Joan Chen, Ang Lee and Wayne Wang are all featured as talking heads.
A FINAL THOUGHT UNRELATED TO ANY OF THE IMAGES
• The Vanity Fair article says that this is an epic movie with tons of characters. To date Chazelle has done nothing like that with all of his movies focuses almost exclusively on just two people, even the ones that technically had hundreds of actors in them (La La Land, First Man). Can he pull off a mosaic or will this just be Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Diego Calva with hundreds of other people being 'background noise' if you will?
Okay we're out of new photos but we are definitely in the process of updating all the Oscar charts (which has been a long time coming we know).
What do you think of these images?