It was the happiest moment of the 20th century, the one with the most fun and debauchery. Europe experienced the interwar period with cultural explosions in Paris and its roaring twenties, in New York, Chicago, Berlin and Buenos Aires. And in Los Angeles. So far, cinema pioneers were escaping Thomas A. Edison’s patent claims and looking for a place with as many hours of sunshine as possible to shoot films outdoors. This meat grinder, multiplying money, needed young bodies, beautiful faces, talented people and energy to work tirelessly. In return, huge profits, fame and honor. On the mountain that borders Los Angeles, you could read the huge Hollywoodland sign advertising a development. The studios had blossomed at his feet: in the 1920s, cinema was already the fifth industry in the United States, but this Los Angeles neighborhood still had vacant lots, crops, and animals. On the other side of the mountain, in the valley, lay the orange groves and the vast estates of the landowners. In this ecosystem, depravity, art, and business merged. And various directors, descendants of the original filmmakers who came to California, have paid tribute to this fusion. The latest is Damien Chazelle, who will premiere Babylon in Spain next Friday.
More information
In Babylon, which was not well received by critics in the US, the director of La La Land uses almost no real names, but the references are so obvious that debunking them becomes a fun game of cinematic archaeology. The protagonists are a Mexican immigrant looking for wealth; an actress who will do anything to succeed and is angered by her wild side; and a gallant who sees the end of his career approaching. And of course Hollywood in the late 1920s, when the arrival of sound swept away the established paradigm.
Brad Pitt and Diego Calva in Babylon.
Chazelle himself has said that early in pre-production he saw a lot of classic and contemporary cinema in a room with an analogue projector and surrounded by his staff. Titles like Intolerance by DW Griffith; Pandora’s Box by GW Pabts or Wings by William Wellman, the first film to win an Oscar. Curiously, he does not mention more obvious references: Good Morning, Babylon (1987) by the Taviani brothers, or, hidden in inspirational books, the sacred tables of cinephile gossip, Hollywood Babylon (Tusquets), the two glorious volumes of Shadows and Scandals in the Mecca of the Kinos, which made its author, the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, the most important concierge of the Empire. With them he not only shares biblical data, Babylon, the city of a thousand languages and where anything could happen thanks to man’s ambition and hunger, but also the drawing of an exciting and lustful time. There are even glimpses of Mervyn LeRoy’s Her Success (1930), where the protagonist sang, “For every smile in Hollywood there’s a tear.”
John Gilbert, 1927.
Babylon is limited to this drama, though historically it’s as lax as Hollywood, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series. Some characters play with the benefit of good performers behind them. Jack Conrad, the heartthrob played by Brad Pitt, draws inspiration from Rodolfo Valentino, Chazelle assures us, but above all from Douglas Fairbanks, who died in 1939 at the age of 56 without any success with the sound film, and from John Gilbert, who competed with Valentino as a rival and the great lover , who died in 1936 at the age of 38. Pitt and Gilbert’s Conrad have several things in common: a marriage to a theater actress who despises the cinema, the mustache—an obligatory accessory for those leading actors who survived only in Hollywood and a few more decades with Clark Gable and Errol Flynn—the alcoholism, and the laughter provoked in the sessions of his first romantic sound drama, full of hilarious dialogue. This failure ended his career.
Clara Bow, in a silver dress, in an undated picture with Hulton Deutsch (Corbis via Getty Images)
Aspiring actress Nelly LaRoy was a transcript of Clara Bow, history’s first It girl, as Emma Stone was set to play her. Due to the delay caused by the Covid, Stone left and in his place came Margot Robbie, who has further animalized the character without forgetting the essence of Bow, this woman’s iron determination to leave behind the poverty of her family and stranger Experience with sound (Chazelle steals an anecdote from Bow blowing up the recording system on the set of La loca orgía). His staging of sneaking into a party on the first day of shooting and glancing around the next day is more reminiscent of Joan Crawford’s early days. The wild heart, says Chazelle, naturally comes from “Lya De Putti, a Hungarian actress who fought against Hollywood standardization.” Lost. The third contender, Mexican Manny Torres, played brilliantly by Diego Calva, Chazelle says in the promotion, “takes inspiration from immigrants like René Cardona, a Cuban who became the youngest manager in Hollywood in the 1920s before turning to success.” in Mexico” or Enrique Vallejo, a Mexican who started out in cinema as a cinematographer for Chaplin and ended up as a director and production manager. Max Minghella brings to life the only character to appear by his real name, Irving G. Thalberg, the mythical mastermind of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the innovative producer of immense talent, the “Wonder Boy” who died at the age of 37 at the peak of his career in 1936, as he added a tremendous work tempo to his poor health.
Spike Jonze in a tank top as Otto, Erich von Stroheim’s “alter ego,” in Babylon.
Other alter egos appear in disguise. Jean Smart (hacked from the series Hacks) plays a gossip columnist with career-destroying powers like Hedda Hopper of the early days and later Louella Parsons in the late 1930s. Chazelle notes another reference: Addison De Witt’s character in Naked Eve. The director who made the young actress famous, the filmmaker who spotted the fire in LaRoy’s eyes, pays homage to Dorothy Arzner (and brought to life by Olivia Hamilton, Chazelle’s wife). Two more: Spike Jonze, uncredited, plays Otto, an outrageous German-accented director trying to achieve monstrous cinematic perfection, clearly taking his cues from Erich von Stroheim. And in Babylon, the one-of-a-kind actress Lady Fay Zhu, who dances in a tuxedo and flirts with men and women alike, reflects the legendary figure of Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s first star of Chinese descent, who has been lauded by Asian performers in recent years . -American. Like her, he’s bisexual, lives in the family laundry, and they both know they don’t fit into their times.
Anna May Wong, 1930’s Pictures From History/Universal
Like some of those mentioned, that spasmodic tonal jump sent half the members of the film industry off a cliff: stars who didn’t vocalize or had an unbearable accent, who found success on the big screen solely because of their appeal, creators who caught on in the cumbersome technical process of the sound recording… Not to mention that the 1920s were, as Babylon aptly describes, a time of debauchery. Where some ended badly: There was no comedian more famous than Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, and in 1922 he was charged in three media trials with the rape and murder of actress Virginia Rappe. He was acquitted, there was no evidence against him, but he never returned to work.
Margot Robbie and Li Jun Li, who plays Lady Fay Zhu, in Babylon.
Arbuckle was the discoverer of Harold Lloyd and mentor of Charles Chaplin, and oddly enough, in a city, Los Angeles, that hasn’t bothered to trace its legacy back to the 21 The first Babylon sequence, in which an orgiastic dance in a large Halle was filmed at the downtown Ace Theater, a venue created by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, DW Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks to found his company United Artists. The exterior of this mansion, away from everything and everyone, safe from prying eyes, was filmed at Shea’s Castle in the hills of Palmdale, 100 kilometers from Los Angeles. The castle was built in the 1920s on behalf of a businessman named Tommy Lee, aware that his guests would need a two-hour drive to get there, and built an airstrip nearby for flights from Los Angeles. Babylon also includes sequences in the mansion of Busby Berkeley, the filmmaker of the great kaleidoscopic musicals, whose home is adjacent to Arbuckle’s.
From left: Li Jun Li, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Damien Chazelle at the London premiere of “Babylon” on Thursday 12th. Scott Garfitt (Scott Garfitt/Invision/AP)
Little remains of all this. 90% of American silent films are gone. At the end of Babylon, one of the characters slips into a performance of Singing in the Rain, a masterpiece about this dramatic industrial shift, and illustrates the ballad of his success: “For every smile in Hollywood, there’s a tear.”
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Babelia
The literary novelties analyzed by our best critics in our weekly bulletin
GET IT
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits