Margot Robbie, Jean Smart, Cast on Queerness, Gender, Race in Babylon
By all accounts, early Hollywood was one big bacchanal for those at the top before the Hayes Code and censorship more closely monitored the public and private lives of celebrities.
La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (a call-out to problematic but influential director D.W. Griffith’s epic Intolerance, which included a story about the fall of Babylon) begins with a debaucherous party scene replete with cocaine, nudity, water sports, a nod to Marlene Dietrich in Morocco (Margot Robbie as Nellie and Li Jun Li as Lady Fae in the lead photo).Epic in scope, Babylon introduces various characters via the party scene at a loaded mogul’s mansion set high in the Hollywood Hills.
There’s Brad Pitt’s aging matinee idol, Jack Conrad, and Jean Smart’s Elinor St. John, a gossip columnist with the power to make and break careers in the vein of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons.
Margot Robbie’s untamed Nellie becomes the ingenue who takes the industry by storm (that is until the talkies come in — a clear nod to Singin’ in the Rain).
