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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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      ‘Babylon’ Review: Boozing. Snorting. That’s Entertainment!?

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      Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.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.Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed.” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.BabylonRated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Inside the Oscars’ Best-Actress Battle Royale

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      Forget the men: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Clockwise from top left, Margot Robbie in “Babylon”; Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; Danielle Deadwyler in “Till”; Cate Blanchett in “Tár”; Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans”; and Viola Davis in “The Woman King.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures; A24; Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures; Focus Features; Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures, via Amblin Entertainment; Sony PicturesBy their very nature, awards shows are designed to exclude, barring all but a few from the glory of earning a nomination.Still, this year’s race for the best-actress Oscar is so stacked with contenders that I’m ready to comb the academy bylaws for a workaround. Are five slots really enough to honor a field this formidable? Couldn’t we swipe a few more from the wan best-actor category, at least?The truth is, even 10 slots would barely scratch the surface of what the best-actress race has to offer. Many of the season’s most acclaimed films, like “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” have given career-best signature roles to their leading ladies, though only one woman can collect the Oscar. Meanwhile, a vast array of up-and-comers, actresses playing against type and underdogs worth a second look will be vying simply to make the final five. Here are the women contending in this season’s most exciting category.The Front-runnersIn the fictional world of “Tár,” the conniving conductor played by Cate Blanchett has been showered with an absurd amount of awards. By the end of this season, Blanchett herself may keep pace with her character.The two-time Oscar winner’s bravura performance — she learned German, orchestra conducting and piano for the role — has netted the most notable prizes so far: In addition to nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards, Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival and a pair of leading trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The last time Blanchett triumphed with the critics groups on both coasts, she was well on her way to winning her second Oscar, for “Blue Jasmine.”If she wins her third, the 53-year-old would be the youngest woman ever to reach that milestone. (Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand and Ingrid Bergman are the only other actresses to have won three Oscars each for their performances, while Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four.) But those laurels could also count against Blanchett in a race where her strongest competitor has never even been nominated and is angling for a historic win.Michelle Yeoh came close to snagging a supporting-actress nomination for “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), but this time, she’s undeniable: The 60-year-old’s leading role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” as an ordinary woman who becomes the multiverse’s last hope, should earn Yeoh her first Oscar nod.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.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.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.The role shows off everything Yeoh is capable of — including her athleticism, precise character work and sense of humor — and she has teared up in interviews while discussing how rarely a movie like that is offered to an Asian actress. In a recent awards round table, Yeoh told the other actresses, “I honestly look at all of you with such envy because you get an opportunity to try all the different roles, but we only get that opportunity maybe once in a long, long time.” Indeed, no Asian woman has ever won best actress, and after 94 ceremonies, the only winner of color in the category remains Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”Can Yeoh pull off a landmark victory? It may help that she has a more sympathetic character arc: While Blanchett’s Lydia Tár compels and confounds in equal measure, Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang learns to drop her guard and let love in. But the competition in this category is fierce, and Blanchett isn’t the only heavyweight she’ll be contending with.For playing a character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans,” Michelle Williams is likely to score her fifth Oscar nomination, which puts her behind Glenn Close and Amy Adams as the three living actresses who’ve been nominated the most times without having won. That gives Williams a potent “she’s due” narrative that could siphon votes from both Blanchett and Yeoh; it helps, too, that she gives her all to the part, playing a vivacious woman whose spirit couldn’t be contained by her marriage.The “Till” star Danielle Deadwyler won the first lead-performance trophy of the season at last month’s Gotham Awards, and she’ll need that momentum to overcome striking snubs from the Independent Spirits and Golden Globes. Still, her emotionally precise performance as the mother of Emmett Till has Oscar-friendly heft, since voters often gravitate toward an actor playing a historical figure.It’s rarer that Oscar voters make room for an action heroine in the best-actress category: Though Sigourney Weaver earned a nomination for “Aliens,” Charlize Theron found no traction for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But there’s more to what Viola Davis does in “The Woman King” than just wielding a spear. Her fierce warrior is weary and her battle yells pack a cathartic punch. If the movie can make it into the best-picture lineup, Davis should be swept in.Damien Chazelle’s debauched Hollywood dramedy “Babylon” has earned wildly mixed reviews, but the director helmed two Oscar-winning performances — Emma Stone in “La La Land” and J.K. Simmons in “Whiplash” — and that pedigree has pushed Margot Robbie into contention for her role as a fledgling actress convinced of her own star quality. Nominations for “I, Tonya” and “Bombshell” prove that voters like Robbie in ambitious-striver mode, though the movie is stuffed so full of characters that she can’t quite dominate the proceedings like some of her best-actress competition.Oscar voters might consider an ingénue like Ana de Armas for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” NetflixThe Women Waiting in the WingsCan two Oscar favorites overcome muted streaming launches in a year when theatrical contenders reign supreme? “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” hands Emma Thompson a sexually frank showcase role that had Oscar pundits buzzing at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but the film’s quiet June debut on Hulu drew fewer headlines. And despite a best-picture win this year for “CODA,” Apple TV+ still struggles to get all those “Ted Lasso” and “Severance” viewers to watch exclusive movies like “Causeway,” though the film features a strong, back-to-basics lead performance from Jennifer Lawrence.At least “Blonde” managed a streaming debut that got people talking, though the punishing Netflix drama about Marilyn Monroe had some awfully loud detractors. Can its star, Ana de Armas, rise above those pans? She managed a Golden Globe nomination, at least, and Oscar voters love to single out a rising ingénue, but the film will prove a tough sit in a year with plenty of better-received options.In the first hour of “Empire of Light,” Olivia Colman plays a movie-theater worker who opens herself up to an appealing romance, but in the second, the character goes off her meds and the movie goes off the rails. Even if those two halves don’t quite cohere, Colman definitely gets some big moments to play, and the actress has so quickly become an Oscar mainstay (over the last four years, she has been nominated three times and won once) that she should be considered a perennial option for the final five.Rooney Mara is spirited and sensitive in “Women Talking,” but the studio’s decision to campaign her as a lead actress is tenuous: In this ensemble drama about conflicted Mennonite women, Mara has scarcely more screen time than Claire Foy or Jessie Buckley, who are being positioned as supporting-actress contenders. Then again, Mara is no stranger to category high jinks: Six years ago, she was nominated as a supporting actress for “Carol,” even though she was clearly playing that film’s protagonist.Keke Palmer won a New York Film Critics Circle award for supporting actress for “Nope” even if it really was a lead performance. Universal PicturesThe Dark-Horse ContendersIf social media memes could be counted as accolades, Mia Goth would surely give Blanchett’s haul a run for her money: The young actress’s work in “Pearl,” in which she plays a farm girl who’d kill for stardom, has Twitter awash in Goth GIFs. Ti West’s technicolor horror drama isn’t the sort of thing that Oscar voters usually go for, but Goth is fearsomely committed, knocking out a tour de force, eight-minute monologue that’s topped only by a sustained closing shot of the actress smiling until she cries. At the very least, it’d make for one memorable Oscar clip.I hope that as the membership of the academy grows ever more international, more powerhouse performances will be recognized in languages other than English. In Park Chan-wook’s South Korean noir “Decision to Leave,” Tang Wei is a terrific femme fatale, while Léa Seydoux delivers her finest work as a single mother in the French drama “One Fine Morning.” And Oscar voters who regret snubbing Vicky Krieps for “Phantom Thread” could make it up to her by checking out the royal drama “Corsage,” in which she plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria with beguiling irreverence.Comedic actresses are too often undervalued by Oscar voters, but Aubrey Plaza spent 2022 proving she was capable of much more: Fans of her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus” should check out her dark, edgy work in the drama “Emily the Criminal,” which earned nominations from the Gothams and Indie Spirits. And “Nope,” which topped our critic A.O. Scott’s list of the best films of the year, boasts a charismatic star turn by Keke Palmer that recently earned a win from the New York Film Critics Circle, even if the group had to pretend she gave a supporting performance to get her out of the way of Blanchett’s leading win. Normally, I’d discourage that kind of category fraud, but in this crowded year, I sympathize with the desire to bend some rules. More

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      It’s Hollywood Barbie’s Moment (and She’s Bringing Her Friends)

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      For 62 years, Barbie has been the hardest-working woman in the toy aisle, using a dizzying array of outfits and accessories — and, lately, changing body shapes and skin tones — while gliding from one career to the next. Astrophysicist Barbie. Ballerina Barbie. Chicken Farmer Barbie. Firefighter Barbie.But she has never pulled off the ultimate transformation: Barbie, live-action movie star.Time and again, her corporate overlords at Mattel have teamed with Hollywood studios to make a big-budget film in hopes of forging a new revenue stream while giving Barbie new relevance. Time and again, nothing has emerged, in part because Mattel has tried to micromanage the creative process, alienating filmmakers. (You want Barbie to do what?) Financial turbulence and executive turnover at Mattel haven’t helped.A similar situation has played out with other Mattel brands, including Hot Wheels, American Girl and Masters of the Universe — a humiliation given the success that other toy companies have had in Hollywood, which loves nothing more than a movie concept with a built-in fan base.The inventive “Lego Movie” took in nearly $500 million at the global box office in 2014 for Warner Bros. and the Lego Group, resulting in a sequel and two spinoffs. Paramount Pictures and Hasbro have turned the Transformers action-figure line into a $5 billion big-screen franchise over the last 14 years; a seventh installment is on the way and will undoubtedly deliver the same halo for Hasbro as the previous films, driving up the company’s stock price and turbocharging demand for Transformers toys.With money like that on the line, Mattel has clung to its Hollywood dream. “There is ‘Fast and Furious 9’ and Hot Wheels zero,” said Ynon Kreiz, Mattel’s newish chief executive, referring to Universal’s hot-rod film franchise, which has taken in $6.3 billion worldwide since 2001. “That is going to change.”There are signals — 13 of them — that Mattel is not playing around this time.Margot Robbie will star in “Barbie,” a live-action movie directed by Greta Gerwig.Pool photo by Chris PizzelloUnder Mr. Kreiz, who has overseen a stunning financial turnaround at the company since becoming its fourth chief executive in four years in 2018, Mattel has moved to turn its toys into full-fledged entertainment brands. It now has 13 films in the works with various studio partners, including “Barbie,” a live-action adventure starring Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”) and directed by the Oscar-nominated Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”). Ms. Robbie, who is also one of the producers, described the big-budget film in an email as being “for both the fans and the skeptics,” a theatrical endeavor that will be “really entertaining but also completely surprising.”The script, by Ms. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story”), even pokes fun at Barbie and Ken, her plastic paramour.As in, what happened to their genitals?“I’m excited about this movie because it’s emotional and touches your heart and honors the legacy while reflecting our current society and culture — and doesn’t feel designed to sell toys,” said Toby Emmerich, chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, where “Barbie” is pointed toward a 2023 theatrical release.The dozen other films in Mattel’s pipeline include a live-action Hot Wheels spectacle; a horror film based on the fortunetelling Magic 8 Ball; a wide-audience Thomas the Tank Engine movie that combines animation and live action; and, in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment, a big-screen Masters of the Universe adventure about the cosmos that includes He-Man and his superheroic sister, She-Ra.Mattel also has 17 television series in production, including “Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” which arrives on Netflix on July 23.NetflixMattel, Universal and Vin Diesel are collaborating on a live-action movie based on Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, a tabletop game introduced in 1966. Lena Dunham (HBO’s “Girls”) is directing and writing a live-action family comedy based on Mattel’s Polly Pocket line of micro-dolls. Lily Collins (“Emily in Paris”) will play the title role and produce; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the distribution and financing partner.“Young women need smart, playful films that speak to them without condescension,” Ms. Dunham said.Mattel has also announced movies based on View-Master, American Girl and Uno, the ubiquitous card game. (If you think an Uno movie sounds like a satirical headline from The Onion, consider this: There are non-Mattel movies in development in Hollywood that are based on Play-Doh and Peeps, the Easter candy.)All or some or none of Mattel’s movie projects could connect with audiences — if they come to fruition at all. That is the nature of the Hollywood casino.“Familiarity with a toy or character is a start, but no movie makes it without clever character and story development,” said David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy.Toys have a surprisingly strong track record as film fodder. Other hits include the 2016 animated musical “Trolls,” based on the wild-haired dolls, and “Ouija,” which cost $5 million to make in 2014 and collected $104 million worldwide. (Pixar did not base “Toy Story” on a toy, but it has populated the franchise with classics, including Barbie.) But the genre has also had wipeouts, notably “Battleship,” which Universal and Hasbro based on the board game and cost more than $300 million to make and market. It arrived to $25 million in North American ticket sales in 2012.The head of Mattel Films, Robbie Brenner, right, with Mr. Kreiz and Richard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“UglyDolls,” adapted from a line of plush toys, was a smaller-scale box office disaster for STX Films in 2019. Mattel itself got bruised in 2016 when “Max Steel,” a modestly budgeted film based on an action figure, arrived to near-empty theaters. It received a zero percent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site.“Unless you can make something that feels really sticky and really interesting and really authentic, there’s no point in doing it,” said Robbie Brenner, who heads Mattel Films, which was created in 2018. (Mattel’s previous movie division, Playground Productions, was started in 2013 and folded in 2016.)Ms. Brenner said she had approached all of Mattel’s properties with the same question: “How do we flip it on its side a little bit while still respecting the integrity of the brand?”Mr. Kreiz said he was not interested in making thinly disguised toy commercials. In a shift from the Mattel of the past, “we want to give our filmmaking partners creative freedom and enable them to do things that are unconventional and exciting,” he said. “Focus on making great content and the rest will follow.”He added, however, that Mattel did not “sign a deal and disappear.”The message appears to be resonating in Hollywood, allowing Mattel to attract A-plus talent. The “Barbie” team is one example. Tom Hanks has agreed to star in and produce an adaptation of Major Matt Mason, an astronaut action figure introduced by Mattel in 1966; Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer of “A Beautiful Mind,” is working on the screenplay. Marc Forster (“World War Z”) is directing and producing that “Thomas & Friends” movie. And Daniel Kaluuya, who won an Oscar in April for his role in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” is involved with a Mattel film project based on Barney, the interminably perky purple dinosaur.Even Ms. Brenner has a sophisticated film pedigree. She produced the AIDS-medication drama “Dallas Buyers Club,” which received six Oscar nominations in 2014, including one for best picture. (It won three: actor, supporting actor, and makeup and hairstyling.) Before that, she was a senior executive at 20th Century Fox and Miramax.“Barbie DreamHouse Adventures” is already steaming on Netflix.MattelMattel’s momentum in Hollywood has resulted, in part, from a turnaround at the company as a whole. Mattel has fixed many of its core problems, making it less risk averse, according to Richard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer.“Five years ago, the foundations that our brands were sitting on were not strong enough,” Mr. Dickson said.When Mr. Kreiz arrived in April 2018, the toymaker was reeling from gut punches, some self-inflicted. It had lost Disney’s lucrative princesses toy license to Hasbro. A crucial retail partner, Toys “R” Us, had evaporated in a cloud of bankruptcy. Millennial parents had turned on Barbie, dismissing her as vapid and noninclusive. And some of Mattel’s other stars — American Girl, the glam Monster High crew — were adrift, unsure of how to compete for the attention of a generation of iPad-wielding children.Total revenue plunged to $4.5 billion in 2018, from $6.5 billion in 2013, and a profit of more than $900 million in 2013 became a loss of $533 million.Mr. Kreiz stabilized Mattel by restructuring its supply chain and reducing costs by $1 billion over three years, in part by closing factories and laying off more than 2,000 nonmanufacturing employees. At the same time, a long-gestating modernization plan for Barbie began to pay off in a major way. She now comes with roughly 150 different body shapes, skin tones and hairstyles; Wheelchair Barbie was such a runaway success last year that Wheelchair Ken recently arrived.In 2020, with parents looking for ways to entertain children at home during the pandemic, Mattel sold more than 100 Barbie dolls a minute, Mr. Dickson said. (Juli Lennett, toy industry adviser for NPD Group, backed him up.)Revenue totaled $4.6 billion last year, and Mattel posted a profit of $127 million. In the first quarter of 2021, sales increased 47 percent from a year earlier, the company’s highest growth rate in at least 25 years. Mattel’s stock price has climbed 52 percent since Mr. Kreiz took over.Mattel, based in El Segundo, Calif., is now turning to the next phase of Mr. Kreiz’s growth plan. With a vast catalog of intellectual property, Mattel wants to become more like Marvel, which started as a comics company and transformed into a Hollywood superpower.“In the mid- to long term, we must become a player in film, television, digital gaming, live events, consumer products, music and digital media,” Mr. Kreiz said.And by player he means player. Mattel has a long history in direct-to-DVD animated movies, for instance, but its television division, run by Fred Soulie, is working to capitalize on the streaming boom. The company has a long-term deal to make one or two Barbie cartoons for Netflix annually. “Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” an animated series from the filmmaker Kevin Smith (“Clerks”), arrives on Netflix on July 23.In total, Mr. Soulie has 18 shows in production, including a revamped “Thomas & Friends” and a new incarnation of “Monster High.” An additional 24 are in development.“We’ve been planting a lot of seeds,” Mr. Soulie said, “and we’re about to see the results.” More