![]() “He’s the highest grossing leading man in the world when we meet him. “Jack is sort of the uber movie star,” Chazelle said. On the opposite end of the Old Hollywood fame spectrum is Pitt’s Conrad, an established A-lister who calls to mind big-name stars of the time like John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks, and Rudolph Valentino. I could imagine she always felt that every day she was on the planet she was on borrowed time, so she was going for broke every single day.” When I read that, the character of Nellie really started to make sense to me. “Clara’s parents never got a birth certificate for her because they had already lost two children, and they felt certain she would never make it past her childhood. ![]() “Clara Bow had probably the worst childhood of anyone I’ve ever heard of,” Robbie said. There’s a darker side to the story of that transition than I’d seen before.” You look at what these people went through, and it gives you a sense of the human cost that accompanied the kind of ambition that attracted so many people to Los Angeles at that time. In today’s terms, we’d call it disruption. Hollywood underwent a series of rapid and at times seemingly-cataclysmic changes in the 20’s, and some people survived, but many didn’t. “And, on a deeper level, I liked the idea of looking at a society in change. “I wanted to look under the microscope at the early days of an art form and an industry, when both were still finding their footing,” Chazelle said in commentary included in the film’s production notes. But was the Los Angeles of that time period really as uninhibited and debaucherous as Babylon makes it seem? Beginning in 1926 and ending in the early 1930s (with an epilogue set some years later), the movie centers on the industry’s tumultuous transition to talking pictures. From there, Babylon takes viewers on a rip-roaring ride through the last days of the silent film era.
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