This review was originally in a newsletter but with the recent release of the trailer, I decided to officially put it up on the site. Enjoy!
Genre: Period/Hollywood
Premise: Follows a young Mexican man in the 1920s who has aspirations of working in Hollywood. But when he falls in love with a crazed rising star, his life becomes one giant whirlwind.
About: Babylon will be Paramount’s big Oscar entry in 2022. Originally meant to bring Damien Chazelle and his La La Land actress, Emma Stone, back together, Covid reset the scheduling chess pieces so that Stone was forced to leave the project. Luckily, Chazelle appears to have upgraded the role, with Margot Robbie taking over. Robbie will re-team with her Once Upon A Time In Hollywood co-star, Brad Pitt, which seems apropos considering this is another movie about old Hollywood. Chazelle wrote and is directing the film.
Writer: Damien Chazelle.
Details: One hundred and eighty-four f@#%ing pages no I’m not lying.
I always have to be careful with Damian Chazelle because I’m not his biggest fan, yet I understand that a lot of people love his stuff.
But, I mean, come on. This is some of the most self-masturbatory writing I’ve witnessed in a decade of reading scripts. Damian Chazelle wrote this movie for one person and one person only – himself. And probably while he was on a lot of drugs. Cause there is nothing about this story that… well… works. It feels like the equivalent of a madman ranting on the corner of Melrose and La Brea for three hours.
Manny Tores is 21 years old with dreams of working in the entertainment business. He’s somehow managed to secure an assistant job with Hollywood bigwig, Don Brady. Don is throwing a party tonight and he wants it to be memorable. Which is why he’s asked Manny to secure him an elephant.
It turns out that securing an elephant for a Hollywood party in 1926 (when our movie is set), isn’t easy. There aren’t a lot of trucks that can transport an elephant. But there is no way Manny is showing up at this party without the one thing he’s been hired to secure. So Manny convinces a driver to tear off the roof off his truck in order to transport the elephant.
Don Brady’s party is crazy. Within ten minutes, an obese man accidentally kills a hooker who he’s hired to pee on him (yes, it is that kind of movie). Meanwhile, Manny’s hanging out in the back yard when a car bursts through the bushes and crashes into the fountain. Over-confident nobody and self proclaimed mega-actress Clara Bow, who’s never had an acting role in her life, asks who put this stupid fountain here then waltzes into the party like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
Clara is LOUD and BOISTEROUS and says things like, “You know you’re not bad looking,” and then, a second later, “Take your clothes off.” Which is how Manny has sex with Clara less than ten minutes after meeting her. For Manny, it’s love at first sight. For Clara, it’s one more bang in a long line of hankey-pankeying. Besides, she’s got more important things to do, like impress Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the biggest movie star in the world. Gotta mingle if she’s going to execute her plan of being the greatest actress ever.
By the way, in 1926, movies are silent. So you didn’t have to be some amazing actor. You just had to look like a star on screen. Using the party as a springboard for her first role, Clara shows up on set the next day and convinces the director to upgrade her tiny role to a bigger role and, what do you know, she nails it! When the movie comes out, Clara is officially the new hot thing.
As 1926 becomes 1927 and, eventually, 1928, the slow transition to FILM SOUND begins. You would think this would have a major effect on the plot but Chazelle isn’t a good enough writer to pull that off. So it becomes this back seat annoyance that occasionally pops its head up to the front. Clara has to learn how to read lines since her voice will be heard. Jack Conrad doesn’t like “talkies” which leads him to trying out Broadway for some reason.
Through 1929 and 1930, Manny works his way up to being a studio exec. A studio exec with a bad drug problem. Clara had a drug problem. Now Manny has a drug problem. Sure, no repetition in character development there at all. SARCASM! Manny hires Clara for roles as much as he can so he can be around her. But Clara has lost it by this point. She was a trainwreck as a nobody. As a big star, she’s a trainwreck supernova. Her big vice is gambling. When things aren’t going well for her, she drives off to Vegas and gambles.
During a particularly bad day on set, Clara does just that, leaving the production without telling anybody and playing blackjack all night at a casino. She loses 83 thousand dollars that she doesn’t have. Manny, who still loves Clara, informs the casino that he’ll take the IOU. But when Manny can’t pay the money, the bad guys come after him *and* Clara.
Manny tells Clara they have to flee to Mexico. A drugged out Clara half-agrees and off they go. But the bad guys catch up and Manny is faced with a choice. Try to save Clara one last time or get the hell out of here. He chooses to get the hell out of here, leaving Clara to the sharks. Her fate will remain unknown. Twenty-five years later, Manny comes back to Hollywood and decides to watch a movie. It’s Singing in the Rain. He cries. Fin.
I have no idea what I just read.
I guess the one good thing you can say about Babylon is it’s better than Mank. Mank was rambling and dreary. At least this is rambling and crazy. It has an energy to it. But you guys know my screenwriting philosophy at this point. Simple story, complex characters. This is not that. This is a complex story with too many characters and not enough connective tissue to bring it all together. It may sound like there was a story here by my summary. But that’s only because I moved literary mountains to write a summary that made sense.
Here’s the problem. Chazelle loves this era. In the same way that Fincher loved Citizen Kane. And when artists love something this much, they want to include everything. Storytelling is the opposite of that. It’s eliminating information that gets in the way of the story you’re trying to tell.
There’s this scene in Babylon where Clara gets really drunk at a party and decides she wants to fight a rattlesnake. She keeps yelling and screaming until someone finds her a rattlesnake, she fights it, and it bites her. This leads to a Pulp Fiction ripoff scene where they have to hurry Clara to the hospital to get her the anti-venom so she’ll survive the snake bite.
In a vacuum, you can argue it’s a fun scene. But in a movie that’s constantly zig-zagging around without purpose, it’s one more scene that takes us further away from a comprehensible storyline. Ditto spending 10 pages of your movie following an unnamed “Obese Man” with a pee-fetish who accidentally kills a hooker. How does this push the story forward at all? It’s one more wild and wacky moment in a movie full of wild and wacky moments.
During this read, I was constantly thinking about Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. There are a lot of similarities between the two. They both explore one of Hollywood’s golden ages. They both explore the weirdness and insanity of the movie business. They both endear themselves to the wily characters you find in this industry. Yet one felt utterly assured of itself while the other felt desperate and untethered.
One of the early jokes in Babylon is that this elephant Manny picks up keeps pooping. There are so many references to this elephant pooping, you’d think we were watching Horton Hears a Poo. Then, when Manny gets to the party, he’s told by Don Brady’s second-in-charge to deal with the crazy gossip columnist downstairs who’s lost her dog. So Manny locates her, she screams that her dog is missing. Manny finds the dog a few minutes later, only for the dog to take a poo on the couch.
That’s two animal pooping jokes within the first 20 minutes of your movie. I just thought, “Would Quentin Tarantino ever stoop to animal pooping jokes?” Of course he wouldn’t. Animal pooping jokes are the classic signs of a desperate writer. A writer who doesn’t have the confidence that they can keep your attention without something crazy and wily going on. A fat studio exec has to get pissed on. An elephant needs to be pooping. The lead female character needs to blurt out things, apropos of nothing, like “Should I shave my pu$$y?” That’s the writing talent on display here. I still don’t understand how this guy has become successful.
If he was a halfway decent writer, he would’ve realized he had a clear story to tell. You focus on a famous actor or actress in the silent film era who must make the transition to “talkies.” The obstacle is they have a weak voice. This happened to a lot of silent movie actors when sound came around. They didn’t sound like the audience thought they did and their careers nosedived. Just tell the story of one of those people.
Instead, we get this desperate hackneyed unfocused blitzkrieg through Hollywood in the 20s. I mean…. Hollywood loves them some movies about old Hollywood. And with Robie and Pitt, I’m sure this will look great. But I’ll eat my boxers if they’re able to salvage anything good out of this script. It’s complete and utter nonsense.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: There is no script you need extra eyes on more than your passion project. Artists have ZERO objectivity when it comes to their passion projects. They want to include everything. But like I said earlier, you can’t do it. You have to identify what your script is actually about and strip away everything else. I contend this is a movie about an actress who is great in silent films but doesn’t have the voice for when the industry transitions to talkies. If Chazelle would’ve realized that, he wouldn’t have a wandering 180 page script. He’d know exactly what needed to be cut. So when you’re writing about something you love dearly, get an extra set of eyes on it and ask those eyes what they think your script is really about. Once you get that answer, start cutting out everything else.
GET A SCRIPTSHADOW SCREENPLAY CONSULTATION! – As much as we writers think we can do it alone, we need help. We need fresh eyes on our material. Without that, we can’t identify the problems in our scripts. We won’t figure out where we need to improve as a screenwriter. I’ve read over 10,000 scripts. Done over 1000 consultations. I am the guy who can figure out the issues hampering your script AND HELP YOU FIX THEM! I have a 4 page notes package or a more detailed 8 page option designed to exponentially improve your screenplays. I also give feedback on loglines (just $25!), outlines, synopses, first acts, or any aspect of screenwriting you need help with. This includes Zoom calls discussing anything from talking through your script to getting advice on how to break into the industry. If you’re interested, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and let’s set something up!
