Damien Chazelle and the Fall of Silent Hollywood in Babylon

"Movie stars should play movie stars. I wanted there to be some of that meta-baggage." Damien Chazelle on casting Margot Robbie as doomed ingenue Nellie LaRoy in his new film, Babylon. (Photo by Paramount Pictures)

Video killed the radio star, they say, but the talkies wiped out a whole era of silent cinema, and left a body count of actors who just couldn't survive the transition. For filmmaker Damien Chazelle, it was "this brutal, cataclysmic thing that was more brutal, more sordid, more tragic than I'd been lead to believe."

The tectonic shift that came with The Jazz Singer (the first film with synchronous music and singing) is often depicted as a grand advancement, or even through a technicolor comedy lens as in Singing in the Rain, "but then I would happen to read about, so-and-so committing suicide, or so-and-so really finding their life completely wrecked, or such-and-such a drug overdose that might have been a suicide, and this spate of deaths in that time."

The director of Whiplash, La La Land, and First Man became fascinated by "the collateral damage that was caused by the silent-to-sound transition. ... It almost seems like a trivial technological change - they just add one color to the palette of film, they just add sound - why was it as cataclysmic as it was?"

There have been many paradigm shifts caused by technology that have changed cinema - color, widescreen, the advent of television, streaming - but none was so immediately devastating as sound. "Those changes all took place over many, many years, and sometimes over a generation," Chazelle said. Admittedly, right after The Jazz Singer premiered in October 1927, sound was initially seen as a novelty. But studios began retooling planned silent productions to have sound. "By 1930, there are no silent films being made any more by a major studio."

This raised another question for Chazelle, about the nature of pre-sound Hollywood, "and what was it about that society that was, at its heart, so fragile?"

Writer/director Damien Chazelle on the set of Babylon, his tale of the death of the silent movies (Photo by Paramount Pictures)

The research became the high and crash of Babylon, his febrile depiction of Hollywood on the cusp of respectability. After all, Chazelle noted, Buster Keaton's father disowned him when Fatty Arbuckle convinced him to run away from respectable life of a vaudeville comic to join the disreputable world of moviemaking. "It was still 'the flickers' for many people,' Chazelle said. "It was still the tawdry, disreputable thing, and so there was this Wild West, circus town mentality to Hollywood at that time."

The movies were a massive industry that exploded out of nowhere, scarcely a generation out from its sideshow roots. Hollywood in the 1920s was a city of carnies - quite literally, in some cases. "It was new money," Cazelle said. "You have these people who, the vast majority were not born into wealth. They were the sons and daughters of carnies or plumbers or coalminers or even vagabonds, a lot of immigrants, early filmmakers fleeing the patent trusts from the East Coast, even, you could argue outlaws, criminals. People of all stripes, and no one with a silver spoon, congregating and working on this thing that most of polite society considers vulgar and low, and trying to build out of it something that will stand the test of time."

Inevitably, what they created was this "seat-of-their-pants, no rules, unfettered, unhinged, unregulated Hollywood." When the crash came, in the film as it did in real life, "it was no surprise. These people were definitely cruising for a bruising."

The talkies turned the studios on their heads. Lowly employees who were "just in the right place at the right time and knew a few thing or two about microphones, or knew how to get a performance that was conducive to sound, right away they were as powerful as studio heads." At the same time, stars disappeared overnight, like Vilma Bánky, whose thick Hungarian accent limited her casting choices, or Mary Pickford, who won an Oscar for her speaking role in Coquette but hated the limiting process of making movies with sound.

That inversion informed Chazelle's casting. For the part of Manny Torres, the studio hand who comes to rule the roost, he cast the relatviely unknown Diego Calva; but for established leading man Jack Conrad and rising starlet Nellie LaRoy he went with Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie respectively. In part, that was happenstance: Pitt was the first person attached, and initially Nellie was to be played by Emma Stone, but the chaos of Covid rescheduling meant she had to drop out. "I wound up giving the script to Margot, and she basically saved the movie and saved my life by agreeing to do it."

"[People] who knew a few thing or two about microphones, or knew how to get a performance that was conducive to sound, right away they were as powerful as studio heads." Damien Chazelle explains the new power that studio hands, like those played by Lukas Haas and Diego Calva in Babylon, had in the new Hollywood of the talkies. (Photo by Paramount Pictures)

The path to their casting was, in Chazelle's words, circuitous, but keyed into his conviction that "movie stars should play movie stars. I wanted there to be some of that meta-baggage that when you see Brad Pitt walk on screen, or you see Margot Robbie appear on screen, you feel the weight of their persona [and] as a counterpoint you can have someone like Diego Calva, who's a newcomer for most audiences and he's playing the newcomer in the movie. He's playing the everyman who's our eyes and ears to that larger-than-life world."

But Chazelle didn't just look at the emotional impact of the advent of sound, but also what it meant in terms of the art and industry of making movies. Key scenes in Babylon juxtapose the chaos of pre-sound sets, where multiple movies could be filming within feet of each other, and the razor-precise control of the new sound stages. But it was a challenge to learn much about those early days because there simply aren't archives about life on set in those days (Mack Sennett wasn't exactly releasing EPKs to the press). So Chazelle had to rely on "reading the reminiscences of people on the ground."

The transition to sound also rewrote the rules of what it meant to be a screen actor, with skills that are taken for granted now appearing for the first time. "Even having to memorize lines was really new," Chazelle said, and in some ways this was a real restriction. "In the early days, the actors would improvise, or they'd move their mouths saying whatever they wanted, or the directors would say their lines. There was this real collaborative improvisational give-and-take." It was a whole style of performance that suddenly became passé, but it was not the "silent era mugging that we have in our head. A lot of the performance styles by stars like Clara Bow are very modern and very naturalistic and subtle and full of nuance."

So sound changed cinema, but it also killed something special, and the performers of the time saw this in real time. "They felt that this thing that they had created, this beautiful art form that a universal language, that was reaching its full stride, reaching the highest peaks, truly becoming an art form in every sense of the word, they felt it taking a giant step backwards."

Babylon opens on Dec. 22. Read our review and showtimes here.