'She stopped getting invited to parties.' The wild true stories behind Babylon.

It’s up for a mountain of awards and boasts a star-studded cast including Brad Pitt, Tobey Maguire and Australia’s own Margot Robbie and Samara Weaving but what magic is making Oscar-nominated film Babylon a must watch this year?

The answer: The way it's weaved in the true, dark and depraved history of Hollywood. 

Some back story first:

Strap in for a three-hour extravaganza, Damien Chazelle’s (Whiplash, La La Land) Babylon is set during the dying days of silent film in Hollywood. 

With the entire movie spanning across a decade starting from 1926, the film dives into the corruption of 'Tinseltown' during those turbulent years. 

The audience follow the stories of naïve upcoming actor Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a shameless actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and a famed silent film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) as they navigate the collapse of what they know through some very dark story telling. 

Before we get into it, watch the trailer for Babylon here. Post continues below.

Babylon is not a direct biopic of any singular historical figure, but a work of fiction with real history added to create depth to its plot and characters.

The 1920s saw the end of silent cinema and the beginning of ‘talkies’, where actors spoke and recorded their lines much like movies we watch today. 

This revolution in production saw the career death of many silent film stars due to the sudden importance of the way they spoke and their accents. 

Commentary included in the film’s production notes gives us a little insight into Chazelle inspiration, "Hollywood underwent a series of rapid and at times seemingly cataclysmic changes in the 20s, and some people survived, but many didn’t."

Chazelle plants Babylon amid this transition period, highlighting the exploitative origins of cinema as we know it. 

"The more I researched those early days of Hollywood, the more I became aware of just how insane that time period was," Chazelle continued in the commentary. "It was this sort of larger-than-life assemblage of misfits who came together and built a city and a new industry from nothing."

So long answer short, it’s not real, but it’s based in a very real context. 

In the film we watch Jack Conrad’s (Pitt) career dissolve as silent films are phased out of production.

In reality, this happened to many actors such as Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino, of whom inspiration must have been taken, but one actor stands out above the rest: ‘The Great Lover’ John Gilbert, a silent film star of the 1920s who was famous for his roles as romantic leads. 

Gilbert began to flop with the introduction of ‘talkies’ and people speculated that his failures were due to him having a high-pitched voice that didn’t match his on-screen masculine persona. 

Another theory was that the boss of MGM at the time disliked him and deliberately sabotaged his career which aligns with Chazelle’s view of a corrupt Hollywood.

John Gilbert. Image: Getty.

While Margot Robbie plays flapper girl Nellie LaRoy who also takes inspiration from several silent film stars like Jeanne Eagels, Joan Crawford or Alma Rubens and their struggles with addiction and transitioning to 'talkies.'

However in Time, Robbie claims she took inspiration from starlet Clara Bow.

"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," she said. 

"When I read that, the character of Nellie really started to make sense to me. 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."

Clara Bow became the face of the Roaring Twenties and something of a sex symbol, starring in 46 silent films.

Her carefree, bubbly, party girl persona made her an 'It Girl' but ultimately gave her the label of a ‘Bad Girl’ and led to the ruin of her career.

"That moment where the bad girl went out of style is certainly part of what confronted Clara Bow and wound up screwing her ascent," Chazelle said in his commentary.

"Once these changes were in the air, she became more and more aware of the parties she wasn’t being invited to anymore."

Claire Bow. Image: Getty

Breakout star Diego Calva plays Manuel Torres, a wide-eyed immigrant with big dreams of making it in Hollywood, a tale as old as time. 

His story takes from several immigrant actors but most closely parallels that of Rene Cardona who went from humble beginnings in Cuba to a successful writer, director and producer. 

Ultimately, Cardona contributed to the creation of what we consider being the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema and died a success story. 

It seems like the only historically real person written into Babylon is MGM production head Irving Thalberg played by Max Minghella. 

You can read our movie review of Babylon here.

Feature Image: Paramount Pictures.

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