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    ‘Babylon’ and the Case of the Missing Bob Haircut

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    Margot Robbie’s 1920s silent-screen star wears her locks long and frizzy — and that’s by design, as the director Damien Chazelle and hairstylist explain.At the start of the epic “Babylon,” Margot Robbie’s character, a rising silent-film star named Nellie LaRoy, quite literally crashes into a Hollywood bigwig’s party — her car hits a statue — and then proceeds to take over the dance floor, her voluminous hair whipping back and forth as she headbangs to a jazz score. In a sea of the kind of bobbed hairstyles usually associated with the 1920s, Nellie’s long frizzy mane stands out as Robbie wields it almost like another appendage.The hairstylist Jaime Leigh McIntosh was terrified. “I will be honest, it was freaking me out,” she said in a recent interview via video. “I was just like, I’m going to be stoned in the village square. My fellow hair stylists are going to be like, ‘That’s not period correct.’”But McIntosh and the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, also made sure that as anomalous and modern as Nellie’s hair might seem for the 1920s, there was historical precedent for it. What results is a look that evokes both Clara Bow and Janis Joplin with a bit of the Bible’s Samson thrown in. “I wanted it to be like someone just took her from the woods,” Chazelle said.The wild Nellie symbolizes the ethos of the sprawling movie, which takes the classic narrative of a starry-eyed ingénue and adds a layer of excess and scatological humor. Chazelle was intent on creating a portrait of the 1920s that didn’t look like the one audiences knew from, say, “Great Gatsby” adaptations. “He was just like, ‘There’s got to be another ’20s out there,’” McIntosh recalled. “‘We just keep kind of regurgitating the same looks and the same fashion, and there must have been other things happening.’”In the months before shooting began, she and Chazelle sent reference photos back and forth. He gave her a list of films and documentaries to watch, but the production team was also on a hunt for images of people not filtered through a movie lens. She and the makeup artist Heba Thorisdottir leafed through the book “Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots” for examples of what unvarnished people of the era might look like. Chazelle in particular was drawn to images from portrait studios. “Like Man Ray portraits, but less famous than that,” he said.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.“There’s only so much of what you would call documentary photography, candid camera stuff, but there’s a lot of really out-there, wild, transgressive studio photography that wound up inspiring a lot of the costumes, too, where people would put on crazy, crazy stuff that even the pre-Code movies of the time would never allow you to put on,” Chazelle said, referring to the Hays Code, which imposed morality restrictions on film starting in the 1930s. It was not just the hairstyles that caught his eye, he added, but also the “risqué-ness that was accepted in the wardrobe both of men and women at the time.”Anything that bucked conventional wisdom about the time sparked inspiration. McIntosh cited footage she found of women at a long hair competition and an image of Miss Philadelphia 1924, her hair a mess of frizz around her face before falling into long ringlets. Chazelle looked to the silent film star Clara Bow — “Margot and I both loved just how bird’s nest-y Clara Bow’s hair could get,” he said — but also the less well known Lili Damita, who sometimes appeared with a big curly mop. “I just kept coming back to photos I would find of women of the time with long hair, with wild long hair,” Chazelle said. “I just couldn’t get over those photos because of how un-1920s they felt. They felt so counter to expectations.”As Chazelle and McIntosh found — and as Rachael Gibson, who bills herself as the Hair Historian — confirmed, it was a misconception to think that all women in the 1920s wore their hair short. “We just kind of think, ‘Oh everyone had this hair,’” Gibson said. “But that’s not the reality.”Still, the images Gibson has seen of Nellie struck her as incongruous. (At the time of the interview, she had not yet seen the movie.) “It’s not superlong and it’s kind of got this natural wave to it, and it’s really unlike anything else that we associate with that era,” she said.That too was the point. One of the words Chazelle kept using, McIntosh said, was “timeless.” As he identified Nellie’s historical counterparts, Chazelle also kept in mind “spirits” he wanted her to evoke. Those included the musicians Joplin and Courtney Love and the actresses Jean Harlow and Julie Christie. Chazelle felt Nellie needed to “always have a foot in a different era as though she sort of came from the future,” and used ’80s punk culture as a reference, too.To determine the specific length and style, McIntosh and Chazelle went through multiple rounds of tests, putting Robbie in various wigs to see not just how they looked but eventually how they moved as she walked and danced. “I never expected it to be as complicated as it wound up being,” Chazelle said. “We locked it down right in the nick of time.”Once they settled on her long locks, Robert Pickens built a wig that could both withstand Nellie’s thrashing and convey the “grittiness” of the era. Without air conditioning, Pickens said, “people are sweating. To communicate all that through hair we went with a really fine texture.”Going into filming, McIntosh was still nervous. It wasn’t until she saw Robbie shoot the opening dance number that she suddenly realized, “‘It all makes complete sense. This is genius.’ It took me a while. I was a little stubborn but I got there.”Later in the film, Nellie’s hair is cut into a more recognizably period finger-wave bob as she tries to rehabilitate her flailing career by fitting in with high society. It looks awkward. Her power has been sapped from her, almost like Samson’s when his hair was cut.“I was just like, ‘Oh, my God, what have we done to her?’” McIntosh said. “Which is so funny because normally you’d be like, ‘Oh, wow, look at this beautiful finger wave,’ but because it was on Nellie it was so wrong.” More

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      A Guide to the ‘Babylon’ Cast and Their Real-Life Counterparts

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      The Damien Chazelle epic is set in 1920s Hollywood and draws on figures from that time, including “the ‘It’ Girl,” Clara Bow.Crossing “Singin’ in the Rain” with “Boogie Nights,” Damien Chazelle’s fictional “Babylon” draws on just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire. Here are some of the underpinnings of Chazelle’s three-hour opus.Clara BowWhen you hear that a movie star has “it” — whatever that means — you can thank Brooklyn’s own Clara Bow, advertised as “the ‘It’ Girl” for, well, “It,” a smash 1927 adaptation of a novel by Elinor Glyn. Chazelle told The New York Times in November that much of Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the live wire who shoots to stardom in “Babylon” only to flame out in the sound era, was inspired by Bow. David Stenn’s well-regarded biography “Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild” suggests many similarities: Bow’s humble origins were a source of insecurity. She was said to be unusually good at crying on command. Doctors thought her mother, who died just as Bow was getting her start, suffered from a nervous disorder (which was in fact epilepsy). And her exploitative father took it upon himself to be her business manager.Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and Rudolph ValentinoBrad Pitt has said he modeled his character, Jack Conrad, on Fairbanks, Gilbert and Valentino. Valentino exists in “Babylon” (his death in 1926 is mentioned), and unlike Jack, who sometimes pretends to be Italian, Valentino was born in Italy. Fairbanks and Gilbert are commonly cited as great silent leading men whose popularity petered out with sound, but there are sound movies in which they appear perfectly comfortable. (When Gilbert played opposite Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina” in 1933, the New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall praised him as “far more restrained” than in silents.) Both men died young, although their fates differed from Jack’s.Anna May WongThere’s no mistaking the inspiration for Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). It’s Anna May Wong, the groundbreaking Asian American actress and daughter of a laundryman who for a time moved to Europe, though a little earlier than Fay does. The film groups Wong, who, like Fay, was rumored to be a lesbian, with casualties of the advent of sound. Wong’s best-known movie from Europe — the extravagant, London-set “Piccadilly” (1929) — was silent. By 1932, Wong was back in Hollywood appearing in Josef von Sternberg’s “Shanghai Express” with Marlene Dietrich.But Wong did lose work because her image didn’t fit with the times, as “Babylon” suggests, understating the role that racism played. Often typecast in supporting roles, Wong was considered a possibility for the lead in “The Good Earth” (1937), but there were concerns that casting her opposite the white actor Paul Muni would suggest miscegenation. The film was one of the last made by the producer Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), one of a handful of figures in “Babylon” to use real names.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.The Transition to Sound“Babylon” alludes to the piecemeal nature of the transition to sound. Informed that the new Al Jolson sound picture at Warner Bros. is going to be big, Jack asks if it’s “like ‘Don Juan’”— a 1926 film that had synchronized music but no talking. In fact, the Jolson film is “The Jazz Singer” (1927), which, contrary to its popular reputation, was not the first sound film or even a full-fledged sound film. (Long stretches are silent.) But it was financially successful enough to indicate that talkies had a future.Bow in “The Wild Party,” an inspiration for a fictional film in “Babylon.”via The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchiveClara Bow and Sound“The Dame and the Dean,” Nellie’s first sound film in “Babylon,” directed by Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton), is quite clearly inspired by Bow’s first sound film, “The Wild Party” (1929), directed by Dorothy Arzner. Nellie’s problems with sound begin with her entrance, when she declares, “Hello, college!,” and a technician cries that “she blew the valves.” A similar anecdote appears in Kenneth Anger’s dubious book “Hollywood Babylon.” Nevertheless, the movie fairly captures the restrictions of the early sound era, like the need to encase the noise-making camera in a booth.Though Nellie’s Jersey-accented tones are likened to a dying pig’s, Bow’s Brooklyn delivery played well enough. “Miss Bow’s voice is better than the narrative,” Hall wrote of “The Wild Party” in 1929. Seen today, it is a fun romp with an undercurrent of seriousness, and Bow is the best thing in it.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 GreatsDuring 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.”Latino Success in 1920s HollywoodChazelle has cited multiple models for Manny, who eventually becomes an influential player in the early sound era. Those semi-analogues include René Cardona, a Cuban-born director with more than 100 credits, and the cinematographer Enrique Juan Vallejo. But his most interesting choice of model may be Joselito and Roberto Rodríguez, Mexican brothers who went to Hollywood and developed a sound recording system. Manny gets invited to become a studio’s head of sound, and like Joselito, he is an electronics expert. More

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      These Talkies Star Complicated Women You Might Well Recognize

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      A MoMA series puts the spotlight on a Hollywood era when actresses broke free of stereotypes that would later dominate movies for decades.In that all-too-brief period in Hollywood between the silent era and the summer of 1934, when the puritanical Production Code Administration began to put a stranglehold on the industry, the women of the silver screen came into their own.Sure, this was the stretch of time that saw the rise of legendary leading ladies like Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer and Marlene Dietrich. But female star power in pre-Code Hollywood went far beyond these big names.Take it from “Dames, Janes, Dolls and Canaries,” a fine series starting Tuesday at the Museum of Modern Art that offers a small but rich sampling of pre-Code titles, several rarely screened. This selection, programmed by the writer and film historian Farran Smith Nehme, showcases the abundance of actresses whose singular presences helped stake out complex understandings of womanhood in unexpectedly modern ways.Pre-Code films have a reputation for being salacious. That was not exactly a product of progressive ideals but a business tactic meant to draw in Depression-era audiences with sheer titillation.Hobart Henley’s mesmerizing 1932 ensemble film, “Night World,” is filled with leggy chorus girls, broom-closet makeouts, scandal and murder, while King Vidor’s “Bird of Paradise” from the same year, an adventure romance with a deliriously racist understanding of Pacific native culture, features an extended underwater scene in which a nude Dolores del Río swims away from her white beau.Yet in “Night World,” Mae Clarke, who plays a dancer with a knack for nursing drunkards back to health, cuts through the hedonism and anarchy with her grounded intelligence and low-key charm. And del Río — a Mexican actress regularly handed the role of forcefully sexual foreigner during her time in Hollywood — brings to her island princess a vibrancy and solemn romanticism that deepens an otherwise two-dimensional part.Dolores del Río with Joel McCrea in “Night World.”via The Museum of Modern Art Film Stills ArchivePre-Code actresses no longer played merely vamps or ingénues, those twin feminine archetypes that dominated the silent era. And without the kind of Production Code meddling that would eventually regulate and censor, among other things, the expression of female desire and sexuality, their characters were often ahead of their time, undermining the notion that American movies have gotten progressively more open-minded since then. The women of pre-Code Hollywood were not only more sexually liberated than their Code-bound successors, they were also unapologetically independent and skeptical or outright dismissive of norms and institutions like marriage in ways that went unpunished.Frank Borzage’s 1931 drama “Bad Girl,” for instance, opens with a bait and switch. We see Dorothy (Sally Eilers) in a white gown, nervously clutching a bouquet as a wedding march swells in the distance. But as the procession makes its way through a bustling dining room, we realize Dorothy’s not a jittery bride but a first-time model selling the fantasy of matrimony to an audience of starry-eyed gals and leering bachelors.“The law makes us a bunch of puppets on strings, like Punch and Judy,” says Ruth (Mae Clarke again) in James Whale’s 1932 “The Impatient Maiden.” Ruth is an assistant to a divorce lawyer who regularly witnesses marriages fraught with abuse, abandonment and betrayal. (This is in no small part because of the country’s economic precarity, a reality that factors into a number of films in this series.)A practical gal nevertheless filled with quiet yearning, Ruth suggests a reasonable course of action when she falls for Lew Ayres’s Dr. Brown: wait to tie the knot until his medical practice takes off. Scandal and hardship ensue when Dr. Brown rejects Ruth’s proposition, yet we sense that the root of the lovers’ problems lies not in a woman’s apprehension about marriage, but in the inert ideals that cloud the minds of men.Other films in the series take marriage lightly, to self-affirming and playfully joyous effect.In “One Hour With You” (1932), a musical comedy directed by Ernst Lubitsch with the assistance of George Cukor, the stars Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald play a married couple, Andre and Colette, who are first seen canoodling in a park — a place regularly reserved for illicit lovers. Colette’s bestie, a bona fide homewrecker named Mitzi (a delightfully lusty Genevieve Tobin), takes a liking to Andre, prompting a night of infidelity from both sides that is conclusively brushed under the rug when the couple decide they love each other too much to let such trivial pursuits ruin them. As for Mitzi, she responds to her own husband’s divorce request with suave nonchalance, driving off with a risqué self-portrait in tow.Particularly touching are the moments in these films when women stand up for each other in the face of gendered moralizing.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More