Hollywood has a reputation for being a coke-fueled raging orgy of parties when cameras stop rolling on movies and television shows. And the trailer for Paramount’s Babylon, from the Academy Award Winning director, Damien Chazelle, shows exactly how the nightlife of showbiz in Tinseltown became a world where anything can happen. The movie unites Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie after their last ode to the movie business with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Chazelle had already portrayed a fantastical vision of Hollywood in the modern day with his musical, La La Land. With Babylon, it takes everything back to the 1920s era, when talking pictures changed the industry and brought a new era of excess and uncertainty. The official synopsis describes it as “A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess; it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.”
Joining Pitt and Robbie is a newcomer to American cinemas, Diego Calva, along with an ensemble of characters played by Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, P.J. Byrne, Lukas Haas, Olivia Hamilton, Tobey Maguire, Max Minghella, Rory Scovel, Katherine Waterston, Flea, Jeff Garlin, Eric Roberts, Ethan Suplee, Samara Weaving, and Olivia Wilde.
Chazelle has had this epic project in his mind for around a decade and felt he was finally in the right place to bring his grand vision to life. Chazelle spoke to Vanity Fair about the movie, saying, “Everything is shifting underneath people’s feet. And I became really fascinated by the human cost of disruption at that magnitude, at a time when there was no road map when everything was just new and wild.”
Babylon will feature an original track, “Voodoo Mama,” by his composer, Justin Hurwitz.
Babylon is set to release in select theatres on December 25 and wide on January 6, 2023.