Peter Viney's Blog

Directed by Damien Chazelle
Written by Damien Chazelle
Music by Justin Hurwitz

US release December 2022 / UK release January 2023

CAST:
Diego Calva – Manny Torres
Brad Pitt – Jack Conrad
Margo Robbie – Nellie LaRoy
Jean Smart- Elinor St. John
Jovan Adepo – Sidney Palmer

with

Jeff Garlin – Don Wallach, studio boss
Rory Scovel- The Count
Li Jun Li- Lady Fay Zhu
Tobey Maguire- lead gangster
Olivia Hamilton – Ruth Adler, director
Max Minghella- Irving Thalberg
Olivia Wilde- Ina Conrad

Warning. Watch it as soon as you can to see it on a big screen. As The Sunday Times Culture and Guardian mention, the film had a very short run in the USA. Good films are doing that here too. As the Sunday Times article points out, mega cinema films are now teen-oriented, often based on Marvel Comics, and 80% explosions. Nuanced films, even ones as epic in scale as this, are not getting long cinema runs. People got used to streaming in lockdown. 65 inch screens and good 5.1 or 7.1 systems mean home viewing is now pretty good, no one sneezes over you and the room doesn’t smell of popcorn. Cinema prices (£14.50 for this, £20 for Avatar) have people saying, ‘I’ll wait a fortnight and stream it.’ Trust me, the big screen is way better for this than even the biggest OLED TV can manage. The soundtrack is also amazing and needs to be LOUD.

Let’s say at the start that three of my favourite films are The Artist, Day of The Locust, The Last Tycoon. My research MA was on Hollywood & The Novel, and the novelists went back to the silent era both in their employment as writers, and in the subsequent novels they produced. You name them, they tried it. Even Maurice Maeterlinck went there in 1919. Samuel Goldwyn didn’t use any of his stories. Maeterlinck submitted a script of The Life of the Bee. After reading the first few pages Goldwyn burst out of his office, exclaiming: “My God! The hero is a f***ing bee!” If only Maeterlinck had waited for Walt Disney. The script is probably a winner now, as long as the bee gets a cute name. Buzzy Bee?

I’ll claim a degree of expertise. This film owes a debt in title and stories to Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, but that in turn claims its title from Intolerance by D.W. Griffith (1916). It was arguably the most expensive film of all time (if you factor in inflation etc) and also arguably the highest box office success in seats sold, or at least second to Gone With The Wind. It toured with a full orchestra to play the score.

The best section of the very long Intolerance film is the Babylon sequence with its orgy.

This comes just after the start of this other very long film, Babylon.

If you ask me, the very best book on early Hollywood is The Parade’s Gone By by Kenneth Brownlow. No competition.

Look at Intolerance, then consider Margo Robbie’s initial red dress for Babylon.  That’s Margo Robbie crowd-surfing in the orgy scene above.The film Babylon starts in 1926, so while the Movie Code came in 1922, there is still a ‘pre-code’ feel to the film sequences. They want to see the nipples through the blouses … the code became far stronger in 1930.

This is a film which starts with the biggest onscreen shit you have ever seen (from an elephant), has a fat movie star’s face being pissed on by a starlet for pleasure, and later contains the longest vomit sequence I’ve seen, and it is true, whatever you’ve eaten, what comes out is peas, carrot and sweetcorn. There’s a particularly upsetting blood-sucking sequence too. Let none of that put you off. In one word, the film is fantastic.

The characters in the film echo history. Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad looks like Clark Gable (there’s an almost lost rude aside which I won’t spoil, but it’s referencing Gable’s most famous movie line). Conrad is based on a silent star like John Gilbert, whose career was ruined by Talkies. Then Margo Robbie’s Nellie La Roy channels silent stars, most of all Clara Bow. The German director Otto (Spike Jonze) is a take on Erich von Stroheim. Hollywood columnist Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) represents Hedda Hopper and the others. The character who kills a starlet in the orgy scene is based on the 1921 Fatty Arbuckle case, though the version here is sanitized, probably the wrong word after the ‘golden showers’ scene, but the Arbuckle case was a savage rape resulting in death, not an accident. Kinescope is a fictional studio, but then MGM and Warner Bros also appear. Irving Thalberg, MGM’s wonder kid producer retains his real name in the movie … Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon is transparently Irving Thalberg.

The central character linking the film together is Manuel, or Manny (Diego Calva), a Mexican-American, initially a very minor gopher tasked with transporting an elephant to the big party. He starts and ends the film, and this is one of many connections to Nathanael West’s The Day of The Locust, which centres on a minor Hollywood employee rather than a star, director or producer. 

Manny meets Nellie La Roy outside the Hollywood party and he blags their way into a scene of complex and detailed debauchery. They find the room with piles of coke and heroin, get completely and frantically stoned and reveal their hopes in Hollywood. It’s hard not to see the two young hopefuls in Damien Chazelle’s previous Hollywood-based film, La La Land. She turns out to be a wild dancer, and when the producers realize the dead starlet was due on set the next day, they offer Nellie the part.

Meanwhile, Manny gets asked to take the coked up drunken Jack Conrad home to his mansion. Thus we link the two film leads, Brad Pitt and Margo Robbie via their separate connections to Manny, who has fallen in unrequited love with Nellie.

After the party, we see the poverty in which the outer fringe of Hollywood live, the filthy run-down rooms, especially where Nellie lives. This is he point where we realize that black trumpet-player Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) is going to be the fourth character strand, as we see him going home too, after playing at the orgy.

I’m not doing plot spoilers, but when we get to the studio lot, we are into a filmed essay on the sheer noise of Hollywood production in the silent era. It was common to have bands playing along live to set the mood, which was also a spur for much jazz improvisation. In romantic scenes with major stars, a whole orchestra might be employed to set the mood for the actors who were of course being filmed silently. One I think they under-played was that directors didn’t need to give movement instructions before a scene, they just shouted it out during filming: move to the left, turn, stare into his eyes …

Then there were camera trucks belting alongside the action they were filming. Brownlow describes films where there was a camera truck filming the horsemen, while a second truck raced along behind with a music combo setting the mood. It took me back a few years. I had a SAAB, and the SAAB dealer also sold and serviced Rolls-Royces (and I knew him via our dads). He took me in the workshop, and showed me a car being restored and told me I’d never guess what it was. I knew, ‘Rolls-Royce flat bed camera truck. About a dozen were made for Hollywood studios because they ran so smoothly.’

Back to the film. Nellie impresses in an extremely sexy dance scene in a cowboy bar and is on her way to stardom. She has the ability to produce real tears on cue at will. Richard E. Grant can do it. A girlfriend in 1966, a drama student, could do the same. It is amazing to watch closeup.

There’s a problem with the extras for the medieval film, and Manny is told to sort it out and does. The extras are a violent crowd. Again, historical fact:

Joseph Henabery: We used to get a lot of extras from Skid Row, a slum area of Los Angeles. Skid Row had what the term implies – a great many people who were booze hounds, and down-and-outers. Unfortunately, as I soon learned, there were many, many people who were physically unable to work, or hold a steady job.

Interview in Kenneth Browlow, The Parade’s Gone By.

During the massive battle scene, extras get mutilated and killed, as does a horse. All true. There was such a fuss about killing horses in on screen battles, that they nipped over the border and filmed those bits in Mexico. Then in Ben Hur, filmed in Italy, after the sea battle they found sets of uncollected clothes on the beach and assumed that a few extras had been drowned in filming … they were wearing heavy armour in the sea. So they burned the clothes. A few days later the extras turned up from the fishing boat that saved them in full Roman armour demanding their clothes. It caused such a fuss that the company was thrown out of Italy.

All the cameras get destroyed in the violence of the battle sequence. Manny saves the day, going to get a camera and getting it to the set on time to film the battle ending at sunset,

The film changes pace when Talkies come in … Jack Conrad sends Manny to the New York premiere of The Jazz Singer to see what the fuss is about. He runs into Nellie, now a major star.

There is a long very funny sequence where Nellie is in her first talkie and they’re trying desperately to record it.

It’s accurate. Film changed, because noisy cameras had to be in soundproof boxes, and the microphones were directional. Therefore early sound movies are vastly more static (and visually inferior) compared to late silent movies where the camera was light and filming fluid, and noisy motors didn’t matter. I could feel the tension and exasperation, which we see in all concerned. I’ve done advertising voice-overs and there is incredible tension about getting the lines right. It’s much worse for actors on set with a large circle of exasperated people trying to get past repeated slips – and once you start slipping on lines it gets ingrained. Actors fear the ignominy of being ‘idiot-boarded’ and having to read the lines from a board. I recall two hours of trying to get an elderly actor in Mystery Tour to get his lines right. His eyesight was too poor for idiot-boarding. In the end I laid on the grass next to the bench where he was sitting, said the line, then he repeated it, and we cut my lines out in editing. He wasn’t much good at repeating accurately either. Everyone was so pissed off that he was avoided by all at the lunch break, so I sat with him. He thanked me profusely for being his ‘dialogue coach.’ (The correct term was scriptwriter!)

Talkies cause a problem for Jack Conrad. There is a key sequence where his actress wife (his third or fourth in the film) tries to coach him on lines. Jack has a lot to say about film for the masses versus theatre, and tells her that her Eugene O’Neill on Broadway is ‘only for rich geriatrics.’ I’ve often felt the same, especially in Bath Theatre Royal, though also to a degree in Chichester and Stratford-upon-Avon.

Jack is carrying a lot of the script’s polemic. Another key scene is where he goes to confront the gossip columnist about a nasty article suggesting he’s washed up. Her explanation struck chords with me. It wasn’t his voice, it wasn’t his lifestyle. It was just that he’d had his time, and it had passed on and left him. Yes, I’ve been a best-selling textbook author, and listened to applause after talks from two thousand people. It’s long gone for me too. Sniff. Obviously after recent court action, the future might not be too rosy for Brad Pitt either.

One of the very best bits in the film is the nightime rattlesnake fight in the desert. I will say no more. Watch out for Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) who is the famous Lesbian star singer and appears throughout. Her first appearance had the party singing My Girl’s Pussy. Say no more,

The music is a major plus. It’s early jazz in style, with a much heavier beat. The Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) sub-plot takes off, thanks to Manny. His band become early talkie era stars. A powerful scene is where they realize he is lighter skinned than his backing musicians and under strong light might even look white. An integrated band would not be allowed to play in cinemas, so Sidney has to black up.

The stories of Jack and of Nellie bump along separately, they meet, but the paths are different. Nellie is washed up too, she is a drunk and coke snorter. She is a known scene-stealer too. I remember asking a club owner why he didn’t book a particular very famous band from the past. He said they had earned the ultimate curse word in the business: Unreliable. She has that brand.

Manny is now an executive charged with cleaning up Nellie LaRoy’s act and moving her into more serious roles. The attempt to rescue her career involves her having a stiff perm, an awful frock and attending a party with William Randolph Hearst and the Rothchilds. It is extremely funny, and Margo Robbie adds brilliant comedy to sexy dancing, tears at will, dramatic action, and close up angst. That also has some bits on the snottiness of theatre (Strindberg) and literature (George Eliot).

The last half hour is a shift. Manny has to rescue Nellie from a vast gambling debt owed to a major drug dealer (Tobey Maguire). Manny and The Count are led to a bunker of extreme depravity- bloody cage fighting is just a part. It reminded me of the cock fighting with the midget in The Day of The Locust combined with meeting the cast of Todd Browning’s Freaks, but more extreme. Is the director showing us where movies were eventually going?

The coda is Manny in 1952, looking back on it all with a terrific montage of extracts from real films, including Intolerance, and those extracts we’ve seen filmed during this one.

The downside? The stories are disjointed. Though I enjoyed every minute (or was enthralled by every minute) 189 minutes running time is doing it no box office favours. Tightening up would have made it even better.

If there’s a superior performance in 2023 to Margo Robbie as Nellie La Roy, I will be surprised. Brad Pitt looks the part of the hell-raising movie star, because he has been a hell-raising movie star. Diego Calva as Manny is under-stated. Perhaps even he lacks charisma for the main role with two superstars as support … but that IS the part of Manny. That is his viewpoint,

My rating? Well my categories are:

• Seen It. Done.
• May watch it streamed free again in a couple of years.
• Buy the DVD / Pay for a streaming
• Buy the Blu-ray disc
• Buy the 24K UHD Blu-Ray disc.

This is “Buy the 24K UHD disc the day it’s released.”