Trivia / Babylon (2022)

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• Actor-Inspired Element: Margot Robbie revealed in an interview that she suggested a scene where Nellie kisses Jack because she really wanted to kiss Brad Pitt and might never get the opportunity to do so ever again; when she told this to Damien Chazelle, he found it to be in-character for Nellie and wrote it into the film.
• Approval of God: Diego Calva is very appreciative of all the content made by the fandom and frequently shares fanart and edits on his Instagram account.
• Billing Displacement: Brad Pitt is billed above Margot Robbie and Diego Calva despite having the least screen time and focus of the three leading characters. Jean Smart, Jovan Adepo, and Li Jun Li are all important but have significantly smaller roles and feature on the poster.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $80-110 million (according to the California Film Commission, not counting marketing). Worldwide total, $50,451,455 ($15,351,455 domestic, $35,100,000 international). Despite its esteemed director, stacked cast, and opening during the normally busy Christmas season, the movie barely scraped by $5 million its domestic opening weekend and limped to a dismal $15,351,455 total domestic gross by the time it left theatres in late January — nowhere near enough to break even, with some sources claiming that the film required $250 million to break even. The most cited reasons for the film's box office failure are mixed and polarizing critical reviews and word of mouth, Avatar: The Way of Water dominating the holiday box office, a low-profile advertising campaign that didn't really explain what the film was about, a decline of interest in prestige films and Oscar Bait, a severe flu season, and the nationwide impact of a winter storm that crippled the movie's chance of doing well.
• California Doubling: Yes, really. California doubled for itself: to get the look and feel of 1920s Los Angeles, much of the film was shot in the historic farming town of Piru in Ventura County. (Piru itself was a popular filming location for silent movies and Westerns, making this a strange example of a Casting Gag for a location)
• Channel Hop: Lionsgate was originally going to distribute the film, but instead Paramount Pictures acquired the film distribution.
• Content Leak: In June 2021, a 2019 script draft of Babylon was leaked way before the film was even released.
• Descended Creator: Executive producer Tobey Maguire plays a small part as James McKay, while producer Olivia Hamilton plays as Ruth Adler.
• Fake American: Australian Margot Robbie once again puts on an American accent. Her fellow Aussies Samara Weaving and Phoebe Tonkin also play play Americans.
• Friendship on the Set: Most of the main cast developed a strong friendship, which came from the need to mutually support each other while filming the extensive and often exhausting opening thirty-minute party sequence. Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in particular became close friends, with her helping guide him through the attention he received during the film's press tour, as this was his first role in a major Hollywood production, and Calva even lived with Robbie and her husband for a few months during filming. Calva would later go on to describe Robbie as being like a supportive older sister to him.
• Method Acting: Diego Calva pretended to be a production assistant on the set of a commercial that Damien Chazelle was directing at Chazelle's behest (the commercial also incidentally starred Brad Pitt) so that he could get a sense of how to play one; Chazelle originally intended to keep it a secret, but the commercial's costume designer, who was also going to be working on Babylon, introduced Calva to Pitt, who was initially very confused but took it in stride.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The first trailer had a scene where Jack Conrad does a little dance before falling off his rooftop which is missing from the final film. Additionally, Jack showcasing some Reckless Gun Usage and a scene of Nellie stepping out in only a white shirt both seem to be missing.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: Diego Calva dubbed the role of Manny in the Latin American Spanish dub in addition to playing him in the original English version.
• Playing Against Type: James McKay is one of Tobey Maguire’s very few villainous roles.^note Tobey Maguire first played as a villain in the 2006 film The Good German.
• Production Posse: Babylon marks the third collaboration between Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie following The Big Short and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, though their characters never directly interacted in either.
• Real-Life Relative: Director Damien Chazelle's wife Olivia Hamilton plays the fictional director Ruth Adler.
• Release Date Change: Three different times. It was originally scheduled for a limited release on December 25th, 2021 and a wide release on January 7th, 2022 but the COVID-19 Pandemic shifted those dates to December 25th, 2022 and January 6th, 2023. Babylon later released on December 23rd, 2022.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The 2019 script contains many differences to the movie:
    • It originally named some real life 1920s celebrities, such as Clara Bow, Anna May Wong, Erich von Stroheim, Elinor Glyn and Colleen Moore. In the final film, most of the roles are fictionalized (albeit, still inspired by some celebrities) and the only real people portrayed in the film are Irving Thalberg, Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst.
    • It was going to explore Clara Bow's abusive relationship with her father. In the final movie, while Nellie LaRoy (the character the Clara Bow role was changed to) has a few scenes with her dad, the abusive aspect of the relationship is almost entirely dropped.
    • The script manages to contain even more graphic content than in the final product, including a scene where Manny gets high on mescaline, has sex with Clara in a bathroom, and hallucinates hundreds of chickens fornicating alongside them as well. Before going to the bathroom, he also hallucinates seeing two statues jerking each other off.
    • Sidney has slightly more screentime and a love interest of his own, a novelist named Zora, who he eventually marries and has a son with.
    • Elinor is much more abrasive and rude in the script and is also shown to be casually racist, something that's excised in the final product. Her speech to Jack about the nature of Hollywood doesn't include the part where she reassures him that he'll be immortalized through his movies, making it come across as much harsher.
    • Ruth’s surname was originally Arzner instead of Adler.
    • Sidney and Anna have a few interactions where it's shown that they have a friendship, unlike the film where Sidney and Fay never directly interact. Anna also ends up pulling a few strings to get him a job at Kinoscope after he gets fired from his band for walking off during a performance to talk to Zora.
    • Anna is shown taking Clara to the hospital after she gets bitten by a snake, which is where they share their kiss instead of immediately after Anna sucks the venom out of her. The script also implies that their dance earlier at the party served as an LGBT Awakening for Clara. Anna also ends up driving Clara to the Kinoscope lot the next day, where they find out from a stagehand that the studio is converting all of their sets to soundstages, since they're going to just be making talkies from now on.
    • The scene of the disastrous production of Clara's very first sound film is set after the hotel party instead of before, so the context of the party is to celebrate the opening of the hotel rather than to celebrate the advent of sound films.
    • Manny and Clara's relationship is more overt than the slow-burn Will They or Won't They? romance that Manny and Nellie have in the actual movie. They have sex twice, once offscreen during the opening party sequence and once onscreen in the bathroom of the fancy upper-class party he takes her to try to rehabilitate her image, he unsuccessfully attempts to ask her out on a date at one point, and they have their Relationship Upgrade after she comes to his house asking for help to pay off her gambling debts. Because they become a couple earlier, they instead just share a slow dance before they leave for Mexico instead of him confessing that he loves her and begging her to run away with him.
    • Ruth is revealed to have been one of the many creatives who committed suicide after they found themselves becoming obsolete as the silent era ended.
    • James McKay and Clara Bow originally had a scene where Clara would gamble at James’ casino after her argument with Manny and James would confront Clara about her gambling debt before taking her to a room and threatening to pour acid on her if she doesn’t pay it all. In the final film, James and Nellie don’t interact onscreen, though she does mention to Manny that James threatened to pour acid on her genitals.
    • Manny visits his family before he plans to leave to Mexico to get the address of a family member who still lives there. His parents are understandably angry at him since he hasn't seen them in years, while his siblings are more preoccupied at seeing Clara Bow at their house and ask for her autograph, which she signs. He also goes to Clara's house to get her passport and some belongings, where her father asks him to tell her that he's sorry.
    • Manny does not have a wife and daughter in the 1952 epilogue, instead going back to Los Angeles alone, and he runs a car shop instead of a radio store. He also stops by Clara's old house before going to the theater.
    • Some of the supporting and minor characters have different names in the script: George Munn is Paul Bern, Don Wallach is Don Brady, Jack's Hungarian wife Olga Putti is Vilma Banky, the sound technician on the college shoot is Roy instead of Lloyd, and Ruth's assistant director Max is never named in the script.
  • Emma Stone was originally cast as Clara Bow but dropped out in 2020. Margot Robbie was cast in her place and the role became fictionalized.
  • According to an article from fullcirclecinema, Michael B. Jordan and Meryl Streep were eyed to play Sidney Palmer and Elinor Glyn respectively, while Tobey Maguire apparently was first eyed to play Irving Thalberg.

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