Babylon by Damien Chazelle is having a difficult week. In stark contrast to its $80 million budget, the movie, which stars Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Jean Smart, and Tobey Maguire, bombed at the box office over the weekend, taking in just $3.6 million. To make matters worse, the reaction from the public and the critics has not been great. Paul Schrader, a well-known screenwriter, director, and frequent Martin Scorsese associate, questioned the historical veracity of the movie on Facebook on Saturday.
“Many things make up Babylon, but thorough research is not one of them. I was baffled after reading a lot of articles that were fabricated about the filmmaker’s extensive “research.” “Schader penned. Does any film historian concur that the movie claims to be historically accurate?
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month, director Damien Chazelle claimed that making Babylon was a “daunting endeavour,” mostly because of the quantity of research that was required. Chazelle intended to offer “an honest, unvarnished look at the positive and the ugly of a very seismic shift,” even if the movie follows fictional characters in 1920s Hollywood as they negotiate the switch from silent to sound movies. He viewed movies set during the transition, looked at images of Southern California in the 1920s, and combined the personalities of many real-life stars of the era to create the characters for the movie. Babylon took a long time to complete, but Chazelle said to the publication:
