BREAKING: Paramount has acquired world rights for Babylon, a script that Damien Chazelle has written to direct as his next film. His La La Land star Emma Stone is circling to star with Brad Pitt. The actor deals aren’t yet done, but the plan is for them to team in an original R-rated drama that is set in a shifting moment in Hollywood, when the business was turning from silent films to talkies. Studio has dated it for Xmas Day, 2021 for limited release, broadening January 7. That is an Oscar-bait slot so the aspirations are large here.

The film will be produced by Olivia Hamilton, Matt Plouffe, Marc Platt and Tobey Maguire.

The project was first shopped in July, when Pitt was about to open opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, and before Stone was readying the Ruben Fleischer-directed Zombieland: Double Tap with Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson, and filming the title role in Disney’s Cruella. It was described then as a bold auteur piece with a significant budget, and Paramount established itself as the frontrunner early. The rebounding studio has been aggressive in committing to ambitious films, most recently a film Deadline broke on The Bee Gees with Sister, GK Films and Amblin, with The Two Popes and Bohemian Rhapsody scribe Anthony McCarten scripting. Deadline broke the McCarten news last week.

The budget and period setting makes it a bold play by Paramount, but recent lackluster openings of established franchises indicates that fresh IP is not a bad way to go. Chazelle most recently directed First Man with Stone’s La La Land co-star Ryan Gosling.

EXCLUSIVE: In a major development on Babylon, Emma Stone won’t be reuniting after all with La La Land director Damien Chazelle. But the picture remains on strong footing: Margot Robbie is in early talks to have a re-team in this film with Brad Pitt, her Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood costar.

Sources said that Stone is exiting the film for scheduling reasons, and that Paramount Pictures and Chazelle are right now in early discussions with Robbie to take the female lead role.

The film is a period R rated drama, set in the shifting moment in Hollywood when the industry turned from silent film to talkies. When Paramount acquired the picture in late 2019, it set a Christmas Day 2021 awards qualifying release, with a wide berth January 7. This was before the pandemic and obviously subject to change because the expectation is it will shoot at least in part in Los Angeles. The film will be produced by Olivia Hamilton, Matt Plouffe, Marc Platt and Tobey Maguire.

Max Minghella, Flea, Samara Weaving Join Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie in ‘Babylon’

Damien Chazelle's 1920s Hollywood drama also adds Lukas Haas and P.J. Byrne, among a host of others.
June 2, 2021 2:00pm

Damien Chazelle’s ode to the golden age of Hollywood, Babylon, is filling out its sprawling cast as it heads into production later in June.

Max Minghella, Lukas Haas, Flea, Rory Scovel, Samara Weaving, Eric Roberts, P.J. Byrne and Damon Gupton have joined the Paramount period drama written by Chazelle, who will also direct.

The actors join Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, Diego Calva, Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Katherine Waterston.

Set in the late 1920s during the movie industry’s transition from silent films to talkies, Babylon explores the rise and fall of multiple characters. Around town, the project has been described as “The Great Gatsby on steroids.”

The story features both fictional and historical characters. While most of the new additions’ roles are being kept in the canister, it is believed that Minghella is playing Irving Thalberg, the famous producer who was MGM’s head of production in the 1920s and 1930s and after whom the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award, given by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, is named.

The picture will shoot in Los Angeles and Paramount is planning a platformed release, opening it limitedly Dec. 25, 2022, before going wide Jan. 6, 2023.

Olivia Hamilton, Matt Plouffe and Marc Platt are producing. Tobey Maguire, Helen Estabrook and Adam Siegel will executive produce.

Minghella is one of the stars of The Handmaid’s Tale, currently in the middle of its fourth season and in the Emmy conversation. The actor is also on the big screen in Chris Rock’s Saw reboot, Spiral.

Flea is the bassist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers who occasionally pops up in movies. In recent years he has appeared in Queen & Slim, Boy Erased and Baby Driver.

Weaving starred in horror breakout Ready or Not and portrays G.I. Joe character Scarlett in Paramount’s upcoming action thriller Snake Eyes, based on the Hasbro toy line. She is also shooting The Valet opposite Eugenio Derbez for Lionsgate.

Olivia Wilde, Spike Jonze, Phoebe Tonkin and Tobey Maguire have joined the call sheet of Babylon, the ode to the golden age of Hollywood that Damien Chazelle is directing for Paramount Pictures.

Margot Robbie, Brad Pitt, and Diego Calva along with Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Katherine Waterston lead the roll call the production that is slated to go before cameras next week.

Max Minghella, Lukas Haas, Flea, Rory Scovel, Samara Weaving, Eric Roberts, P.J. Byrne and Damon Gupton are also part of the sprawling cast.

Written by Chazelle and set in the late 1920s during the movie industry’s transition from silent films to talkies, Babylon explores the rise and fall of multiple characters. Around town, the project has been described as “The Great Gatsby on steroids.”

Damien Chazellle’s new movie stunned L.A. moviegoers last night. I’m hearing the word “masterpiece” being uttered a few times this morning.

Judging by some of the reactions gathered from last night’s screening of Chazelle’s “Babylon,” this is going to be the writer-director’s go-for-broke epic. Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” was mentioned more than a few times, ditto Fellini’s “Satyricon.”

The film, which clocks in at 185 minutes, is said to take place between 1925 and 1952, tackling Hollywood’s wobbly transition from the silent era to sound. Margot Robbie’s performance as Clara Bow is said to be the big takeaway & a likely Best Actress contender. Jean Smart also registered major points as a showbiz journalist who helps Bow learn to act with spoken words.

I won’t say more about the film, but that it does pull off the kind of surprising opening credits that would make Hamaguchi blush, not to mention its shades of “Eyes Wide Shut” orgy debauchery. I’m telling you, this is Chazelle swinging for the fences and trying to rile up the dead horse that is American cinema’s current state.

Director Damien Chazelle brought the ol’ razzle dazzle to CinemaCon, showcasing the first look at his next film “Babylon,” a star-studded homage to Hollywood’s golden era.

Attendees of CinemaCon, the annual gathering of movie theater owners that’s currently unfolding at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, were treated to never-before-seen footage of “Babylon,” which puts the spotlight on Brad Pitt as silent film star John Gilbert and Margot Robbie as Roaring Twenties icon Clara Bow.

Prior to Paramount’s presentation at CinemaCon, little had been revealed about “Babylon,” which is set in the late 1920s during the movie industry’s transition from silent films to talkies.

Based on the first-look footage of glamorous parties against a backdrop of an entertainment business in flux, “Babylon” looks like a mix between Baz Luhrmann’s “The Great Gatsby” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.”

“You know what we have to do… we have to redefine the form,” Pitt’s character. “When I first moved to Hollywood, the stars on all the doors said ‘No actors and no dogs allowed.'”

Robbie’s character is less worried about her place in showbiz. “You don’t become a star,” she says. “You either are one… or you ain’t.”

Tobey Maguire, who also serves as an executive producer, is portraying Charlie Chaplin, while Max Minghella is playing Irving Thalberg. The starry cast of “Babylon” also includes Spike Jonze, Jean Smart, Flea, Samara Weaving and Olivia Wilde.

Damien Chazelle has been working on the story for Babylon, at least in his head, ever since he first moved to Los Angeles around 15 years ago. “The basic idea was just to do a big, epic, multi-character movie, set in these early days of Los Angeles and Hollywood, when both of these things were coming into what we now think of them as,” he tells Vanity Fair in his first interview about the film, which is due out from Paramount this December.



The 1920s were a pivotal moment in Hollywood history. Los Angeles was transforming into a metropolis, and the movie industry—making the uncertain transition from silent films to the talkies—was bursting with people angling for fame, wealth, and power.A decade and a half ago, Chazelle had none of those things as an aspiring writer-director who had recently moved to LA. He had not yet had his breakout Sundance debut with Whiplash—which went on to win JK Simmons a best-supporting-actor Oscar for his turn as an explosive jazz instructor—nor had he become the youngest person to ever win the best-director Oscar, for La La Land. “I kept putting it off, because it was just a little too massive,” Chazelle says of the project. He finally tackled the screenplay after finishing his 2018 film First Man, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong.

Based on early footage and images, Babylon looks to be a lavish romp through Hollywood’s nascent Golden Age, starring a brash Brad Pitt, an uninhibited Margot Robbie, and newcomer Diego Calva. But beneath the glitz and glamour, Chazelle wanted Babylon to underscore the fact that the town’s rapid change and growth came at a price. “Everything is shifting underneath people’s feet,” he says, “and I became really fascinated by the human cost of disruption at that magnitude, at a time when there was no road map, when everything was just new and wild.”



Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.Casting two of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars in Babylon’s lead roles made sense thematically, as well as financially. Pitt and Robbie, who starred together in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, play actors at very different points in their careers, and Chazelle knew his stars would see echoes of their own lives in the parts. “Part of what was magical about working with them in these roles is that each of them felt like they were really able to make the performance the most personal thing they had done,” he says.

The majority of characters in Babylon are fictional, though Chazelle took inspiration from real-life Hollywood stars. Pitt’s character, Jack Conrad, is a hard-partying “über-movie star,” as Chazelle puts it, inspired by the likes of John Gilbert, Clark Gable, and Douglas Fairbanks: “He’s reaching a point in his life in his career where he’s starting to look back and starting to wonder what’s ahead.” (Pitt expressed a similar sentiment about his own work in a recent GQ cover story.)



As for Robbie, she’s playing Nellie LaRoy, a scrappy aspiring actress who’s an amalgam of early stars like Clara Bow, Jeanne Eagels, Joan Crawford, and Alma Rubens. Nellie is a new Hollywood transplant who’s suddenly in the spotlight, an experience that the Wolf of Wall Street’s breakout could relate to. “Margot as a person has this—it's a very Australian sort of thing—brash, bold, hungry kind of edge to her that she was really able to tap into and do a lot of really fun things with,” says Chazelle.

Calva, the cast’s newcomer, plays Manny Torres, a Mexican actor who, as an outsider in Hollywood, serves as the audience’s eyes in the world of Babylon. Says Chazelle, “In many ways, he was going through a very similar experience to the character he was playing as well, of just stumbling on a larger-than-life campus and going, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”





Babylon’s rich supporting cast —including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li, Jean Smart and Tobey Maguire—also play fictional characters (the only named real-life person in the main ensemble is producer Irving Thalberg, played by Max Minghella), whose dreams of fame and success rest on navigating a perilous town.

Chazelle brought together many of his past collaborators, including cinematographer Linus Sandgren and composer Justin Hurwitz, who both won Oscars for La La Land. He had in mind a movie packed with spectacle that reflected the extravagance and hedonism of the era: “I wanted to capture just how big and bold and brash and unapologetic that world was.”





But Chazelle wanted to plumb the lower depths too—to juxtapose La La Land’s gorgeous, Hollywood-glam set pieces and Whiplash’s darker examination of ambition’s toll. “It was really a wild West period for these people, this gallery of characters, as they rise and fall, rise, fall, rise again, fall again,” he says, adding that “the thing that they're building is springing back on them and chewing them up.”



Expect a story that explores the multiple levels of transformation, from the city itself to the industry, and the people hoping to make it big. Chazelle references the “headlong, heedless ambition” of that time as a central theme of his movie. And, not coincidentally, he says Babylon is his most ambitious work yet: “It was definitely the hardest thing I've done. Just the logistics of it, the number of characters, the scale of the set pieces, the span of time that the movie charts—it all conspired to make it particularly challenging, but it was a challenge that was pretty exciting to take on.”

Babylon will be released in theaters on Dec. 25 by Paramount.

BABYLON starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva. In select theatres December 25. Everywhere January 6.

From Damien Chazelle, Babylon is an original epic set in 1920s Los Angeles led by Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva, with an ensemble cast including Jovan Adepo, Li Jun Li and Jean Smart. A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Featuring the original music track “Voodoo Mama” from Academy Award-winning composer Justin Hurwitz.