Casual viewers of Damien Chazelle’s three-hour-and-change opus Babylon — a luminously insane, shrilly hedonistic interpretation of the mad kingdom that was 1920s Hollywood — may be forgiven for assuming that it takes a lot of artistic license with its depiction of the past. But the fact is, while embellishment is par for the course, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest this era really was as wild as Margot Robbie’s coke-snorting aspiring star and Brad Pitt’s dipsomaniac matinee idol suggest. Set in an era before the moral arbiters, censors, or even the law (usually on the take or paid up by studio lackeys) had truly got a grasp on the bad behavior of starlets and cigar-munching producers, Babylon is a spirited and larger-than-life imagining of a time when there really were no rules. Given Chazelle’s own intense interest in Hollywood past, and his tendency to pay homage to or reference the films, and the true stories, of decadent Tinseltown history, it only seems right to give some homework to enhance your viewing of the movie.
10. Kevin Brownlow’s Hollywood (1980)
The first of these may be a slight cheat: This one is a TV show, made by groundbreaking historian and filmmaker Kevin Brownlow and featuring dozens of interviews with elderly luminaries of the silent era. If that sounds creaky and boring, you’re sorely mistaken; these hour long episodes are packed with juicy gossip and madcap tales of the wild early days of the motion picture industry. It reveals a time of remarkable artistry, brash experimentation, and absolutely zero health and safety rules: The episode on silent era stuntmen, who wrangled wild horses, leapt off moving cars, crashed airplanes and lost fingers in explosions is a particular highlight.
9. Show People (1928), dir. King Vidor
King Vidor, one of the most revered and talented directors of his era, was also one of the earliest to lampoon Hollywood and make a film about filmmaking. In Show People, he gets some of the biggest names of the day. Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks among them, to play themselves as a young woman (Marion Davies, the comedienne who would go on to be the mistress of Citizen Kane subject William Randolph Hearst, who are both depicted briefly but memorably in Babylon) trying to work her way up the ranks of the studio. If you ever thought silent movies were dusty relics, Show People proves that they could also be meta before “meta†was in anyone’s vocabulary.
8. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), dir. Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen
As it pertains to Babylon, Singin’ in the Rain is practically the skeleton key to the entire movie. (It is, after all, about the transition from silent film to talkies, a subject Babylon takes on squarely.) But you’ll have to see Chazelle’s three-plus-hour opus to find out exactly what I’m talking about. More than just paying homage to what the recent Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll rated as the tenth best film ever made, Chazelle also looks askance, in a fashion, at that film’s own biases and in-jokes, wondering if its depiction of the silent era as excessive and obnoxious is fair.
7. IT (1927), dir. Clarence Badger
No, not the one with the clown. Back in 1927, right in the period Babylon depicts, a Brooklyn girl who came from the tenements and scrapped her way to the top with moxie, sex appeal, and a cartoonishly beautiful face, all wide-eyes, red hair, and lipstick painted on in a heart shape. That was Clara Bow, in a film that would define the phrase “it girl†for generations to come. You can see much of Bow in Margot Robbie’s spitfire Nellie LaRoy: Her scandalous, hotheaded high jinx and propensity for being able to cry on cue among them.
6. The Last Tycoon (1976), dir. Elia Kazan
You’d be forgiven for not noticing this amidst the showers of vomit and mountains of cocaine, but there’s a minor supporting character in Babylon, played by Max Minghella, called ‘Irv’. That’ll be the one and only Irving Thalberg, known as the ‘boy wonder’ of MGM Studios in its golden years. He was a creative producer par excellence, helping to structure the studio system as it would exist for decades to come. In Elia Kazan’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous unfinished novel fictionalizing Thalberg’s life, Robert De Niro takes on the part of the unusually sensitive mogul— a romantic canard, perhaps, but one that has long served Hollywood’s own nostalgia about itself.
5. The Cat’s Meow (2001), dir. Peter Bogdanovich
Among the many scandals of 1920s Hollywood — the murder of film director William Desmond Taylor, the trial of ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle, the drug overdose of star Wallace Reid — one that is sometimes less discussed is the mysterious death of production company head Thomas Ince, who passed suddenly on newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst’s yacht in 1924. Rumors long spread that Charlie Chaplin, who was onboard, witnessed his murder; that Ince was caught in a love triangle and Hearst had him disposed of. The truth is almost certainly more banal, but the legend inspired this Peter Bogdanovich film about its events. It’s a great whodunit trussed up in period dress, with the film history knowledge of a real expert behind the camera. In an early scene in Babylon, studio moguls cover up a young starlet’s drug overdose in a matter-of-fact way that suggests this is just par for the course.
4. Flesh & The Devil (1926), dir. Clarence Brown
In this silent film that features the first pairing of some of the most famous screen lovers of that time — Greta Garbo and John Gilbert — Garbo is a temptress who comes in between two heroic best friends, forcing them to fight a duel for her love. In real life, the pair had shacked up before production had finished, but Garbo’s infamous reserve (‘I want to be alone’) and Gilbert’s frenzied alcoholism would end up destroying the romance between them. It’s said that Brad Pitt’s dashing but drunken Jack Conrad is partly based on Gilbert, whose own career went badly south after the rise of talking pictures.
3. LA Confidential (1997), dir. Curtis Hanson
This slick, stylish adaptation of James Ellroy’s hardboiled novel of LAPD corruption and Hollywood vice is one of the all-time best movies about the movies. But it’s less interested in the art of cinema itself than it is in the seedy permutations beneath the surface of 1940s Hollywood. What it shares with Babylon is its taste for depicting the insidious leak of gangsterism into the politics and social manners of the movie colony. Same as it ever was: the studio cover-ups of everything from abortion to drug charges to murder are as accurate here as they were a few decades before.
2. Our Dancing Daughters (1928), dir. Harry Beaumont
A film long recognized as a landmark because of its depiction of the so-called ‘flapper’ phase we most associate with the Roaring Twenties: newfangled freedoms for women including cropped hair, shorter hemlines, public boozing and smoking, and more obvious wearing of cosmetics. That flapper was, in fact, a young and beautiful Joan Crawford, who reportedly stripped naked for the producer in order to get the lead part. Make of that what you will, but F. Scott Fitzgerald went on to describe Crawford as the epitome of the ‘Flaming Youth’ of that generation, and seeing her dancing on tables certainly is a predecessor for the whirling, decadent parties we see in Babylon.
1. Sunset Boulevard (1950), dir. Billy Wilder
It would take several decades and an outsider (Wilder was a European emigre) to most thoroughly capture the wistful, desiccated feel of the silent era and its stars, and it happened only a few decades after the period had come to a close. Perhaps in the way that some of us now turn our noses up at VHS or DVD formats in favor of newer and shinier options, silent film had become deeply passé by 1950 when Wilder decided to frame a film noir tale around the story of the fictional Norma Desmond, played by a very real screen goddess of the 1920s, Gloria Swanson. With appearances from the real Buster Keaton and Cecil B. DeMille, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone could ever think the silent era was dull. Babylon is proof positive that it certainly was anything but.