The True History

“Writing the screenplay was a cobbling together of all my favorite little nuggets from these memoirs or these books or these interviews and whatnot,” filmmaker Chazelle said in a recent interview. The “whatnot” hews to the spirit of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, the controversial, disputed and largely debunked classic of the industry’s seedy underbelly, but more to the letter of film historian Kevin Brownlow’s meticulously-researched 1968 book The Parade’s Gone By… (a definitive source on the silent film era), his 1980 mini-series Hollywood, and The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, screenwriter Freddie Maas’s memoir of early Hollywood.

As with La La Land, the movie abounds with references, homages, and Easter eggs.

The fictional studio Kinoscope is, like many of the early days, not so much a studio as a chaotic series of makeshift outdoor sets scattered in the barren desert. Its name is painted on a shingle nailed to a few beams of wood and it’s here that Nellie (in a provocative bit part) steals the movie out from under goody two-shoes leading lady Constance Moore (Samara Weaving) — a Mary Pickford-type who not only acts in, but produces, her own pictures. A star is born.

Brad Pitt Races Toward Redemption in Fast-Paced 'F1' Trailer

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 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.

Tinseltown Plays Itself: A Cheat Sheet to the Early Hollywood of ‘Babylon’

Set against the backdrop of a transformative time in Hollywood, Babylon’s 189 minutes follow the overlapping stories of rising and established talents from the mid-1920s to 1932, during the film industry’s transition to sound.

Everything We Know About ‘Babylon,’ Damien Chazelle’s Next Film

Six years after winning an Oscar for “La La Land,” writer-director Damien Chazelle is gearing up for a return to Tinseltown with his next feature film “Babylon.” This time, he’s taking it back to the Golden Age of Hollywood, when silent films transitioned to talkies.

In a recent interview, Chazelle said he first came up with the idea for “a big, epic, multicharacter 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,” about 15 years ago. It was only after completing 2018’s “First Man” that he got to work on the script for the “massive” movie.

Like any Hollywood movie about Hollywood, the cast of “Babylon” is as star-studded as they come, playing a mixture of fictional and historical characters. Among them: Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt (reuniting onscreen for the first time since “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” another self-dedicated love letter); Olivia Wilde, Samara Weaving, Tobey Maguire, Jean Smart, Spike Jonze, Chloe Fineman and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. (The film is not to be confused with “Amsterdam,” David O. Russell’s 1930s caper with a similarly star-stuffed cast led by Margot Robbie, also releasing at the end of the year.)

What can we expect from the “Whiplash” filmmaker’s upcoming flick? Here, TheWrap takes a look at everything we know about “Babylon” so far – the cast, the plot and other details.