Kenneth Anger’s ‘Hollywood Babylon’
In 1959, the experimental filmmaker Anger (“Fireworks”) published “Hollywood Babylon,” which cataloged, with a tongue-clucking tone, the supposed details of deaths, drug habits and sex lives of members of the movie industry. Serious film historians regard it as pernicious nonsense and have been trying to correct its claims ever since.
While Anger’s “Babylon” is not the official source for Chazelle’s “Babylon,” the connection is tough to ignore. When Nellie is trailed by University of Southern California football players after beating them at craps, the scene evokes Anger’s assertion that Bow played “party girl” to the entire U.S.C. football team “during beery, brawly, gangbanging weekend parties.” (Nellie’s overalls-and-nothing-else outfit, on the other hand, resembles a widely circulated photo of Bow’s contemporary Bessie Love.)
In his biography, Stenn traces the rumor to Bow’s true-enough habit of hosting the U.S.C. Trojans on Saturday nights at her Beverly Hills bungalow. But Stenn, who interviewed players, concluded that “even the wildest party, which ended in a 4 a.m. game of touch football on Clara’s front lawn, was tame.”
‘Singin’ in the Rain’
Throughout “Babylon,” Chazelle nods to “Singin’ in the Rain,” which memorialized the transition to sound from the standpoint of 1952. But in “Babylon,” you’ll hear the song “Singin’ in the Rain” in a scene that takes place decades earlier: Chazelle shows the shooting of “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” a characteristically stiff, celebrity-packed musical that featured Gilbert. The song is staged twice in “Hollywood Revue,” and Chazelle re-creates the reprise — the film’s Technicolor finale, in which cast members bob along to the tune on rock-shaped risers in front of a Noah’s Ark set. In “Babylon,” Jack is among them.
Black Jazz Greats
During the “Singin’ in the Rain” shoot, the trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) tells the rising studio executive Manny Torres (Diego Calva) that the camera is pointed in the wrong direction. Soon Sidney and his band are starring in films, until he quits after being asked to don blackface to darken his skin.
Chazelle took inspiration from Black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who appeared onscreen in the early sound era. And like Sidney, Armstrong and Ellington contended with degrading scenes. In “A Rhapsody in Black and Blue” (1932), Armstrong performed two numbers “dressed as an African savage in a sparsely cut leopard skin,” Thomas Brothers writes in “Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism.” In “Check and Double Check” (1930), a film version of the “Amos ’n’ Andy” radio show, lighter-skinned members of Ellington’s band “were ordered by the studio to wear dark makeup for a ballroom scene, a stipulation that was covered as news by the Black papers,” according to Terry Teachout’s biography “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.”
