I thought I’d never do a crazier film than The Wolf of Wall Street – then I filmed Babylon, says Margot Robbie
MARGOT ROBBIE’S new movie begins with an elephant being pushed to a sex-crazed party where cocaine is snorted off naked bodies, a chicken gets high and there’s a fight with a snake.
Such animalistic abandon might sound far-fetched, but it’s not far from the truth of the hedonistic early days of Hollywood.
Babylon, which also stars Brad Pitt, Olivia Wilde and Tobey Maguire, depicts the extreme excesses of the film industry just before the old Hays Code banned on-screen nudity and drug taking.
Robbie’s starlet Nellie is inspired by troubled Clara Bow, the original It Girl who scandalised the United States by being open about her sexual desires.
She bathed in champagne at lavish parties at a time when alcohol was outlawed in the US and slept with her co-stars.
Brad plays silent movie idol Jack Conrad, who gets too big for his boots then sees his career plummet when talkies are introduced.
Margot, 32, thinks Babylon is even wilder than Martin Scorsese’s 2013 movie The Wolf Of Wall Street, where she made her name in movies with a naked first scene.
The Australian said: “I remember being on set and thinking, ‘I’ll never be in a film as crazy as this ever again’. And then I made Babylon.
“There’s a dizzying amount of debauchery. One of the most disturbing, chaotic scenes I’ve ever witnessed is in this film, and it involves a fight with a snake.
“I won’t tell you who wins or loses that fight but, trust me, it’s insane.”
In the trailer, fans of Brad and Margot get a glimpse of that moment.
Clearly inebriated, her bedraggled character shouts to party-goers gathered around an outdoor swimming pool: “Listen up, all you big d*** mister men. Who wants to see me fight a f***ing snake?” before Brad’s character replies . . . “Yeah!”
Babylon is directed by Damien Chazelle, who made the award-winning Whiplash in 2014 and La La Land in 2016.
When the filmmaker heard about Hollywood’s dark and decadent history he wanted to get it all on screen.
He does that by creating a movie three hours and eight minutes long.
The director said: “Hollywood back then was a place where, from the most depraved animalistic behaviour, emerged these works of art that were so beautiful and alluring.
“1920s Hollywood really was a cesspool of vice, hubris and excess. We tried to put that on screen. All of it.”
It was scandals such as the death of silent actress Virginia Rappe following a rape at a party in 1921, and the cold-blooded murder of director William Taylor a year later, that led to the Hays Code being introduced in 1930.
William Hays, the Chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, brought in the guiding principle that no film “will lower the moral standards of those who see it”.
Damien said: “Towards the end of the 1920s there was this sort of rash of suicides, deaths, drug overdoses, and I found it coincided with the transition from silent to sound.
“I started looking at the kind of extreme living, the passion, ambition and recklessness of all stripes that characterised Hollywood at that time, and it got my brain going.”
Wild child Clara Bow was never going to adapt easily to the puritanical code.
The New Yorker rose from destitution to become Hollywood’s No1 box office star, making more than 50 movies in 11 years.
1920s Hollywood really was a cesspool of vice, hubris and excess. We tried to put that on screen. All of it.
Damien Chazelle
Robbie says Clara “had probably the most horrific childhood I can imagine for anyone”.
Brought up in a one-room flat in Brooklyn, her dad Robert beat her and her schizophrenic mum Sarah tried to slit Clara’s throat when she talked of becoming an actress.
Clara once said of her acting talents: “It was easy for me to cry. All I had to do was think of home.”
The characters she played were working-class women who drank, smoked and flirted, which made her popular with the masses. At her peak she received 45,000 fan letters a month.
The 1927 movie It popularised the term It Girl and in the same year she bathed naked in the film Hula.
It was shocking at the time, because Victorian attitudes of covering up all flesh still dominated much of society.
Clara later said: “I don’t want to be remembered as some- body who couldn’t do nothing but take her clothes off.”
Margot has also had to shrug off the association with stripping off that came following her appearance in The Wolf Of Wall Street.
But she says that displaying wild abandon in Babylon doesn’t bother her because it is in keeping with the character. “I’d feel embarrassed if it was me, but it’s all her,” she says.
In the script, Margot’s character kisses both men and women.
Off screen, Clara insisted there were no moral clauses in her studio contracts because she wanted to bed men without getting in trouble.
Romantically linked to her co-stars the movie idols Gary Cooper and Bela Lugosi, she was also named in numerous divorce proceedings for allegedly stealing women’s husbands.
Gary Cooper became one of Tinseltown’s biggest names, starring in the likes of High Noon, but it was Clara who helped him get his first break.
She got him a role alongside her in 1927 First World War epic Wings, the first movie to win a Best Picture Oscar.
Tragically, Clara developed mental health issues similar to her mum that resulted in her attempting suicide.
She was given shock therapy, before retiring to live on a farm with actor husband Rex Bell and bringing up their two sons Rex Jr and George.
Clara made her final movie in 1933 and died in 1965 at the age of 60 from heart disease.
Undoubtedly she was an early example of an incredible talent being used up and discarded by the unforgiving movie business.
Many believe the stress of making so many films in such a short time contributed to her breakdown.
Brad’s character is said to be based on Douglas Fairbanks, a swashbuckling screen idol who put down Hollywood’s foundations.
I remember being on set and thinking, ‘I’ll never be in a film as crazy as this ever again’. And then I made Babylon.
Margot Robbie
He was behind the Motion Picture Academy and hosted the first Oscar ceremony.
In Babylon, Brad plays an actor with big ambitions that are cut down when he overstretches himself.
Douglas Fairbanks had been a man who got whatever he demanded.
He had an underground running track built so that he could jog naked from the studio to a gym close to Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Silent movies such as The Mark Of Zorro in 1920 and The Thief Of Bagdad four years later made him a huge star.
But the arrival of sound brought his glittering career to an end in 1934.
Three-times wed Douglas also had an eye for the ladies like Brad’s character.
He was hitched to the daughter of a wealthy industrialist when he began an affair with “America’s Sweetheart”, actress Mary Pickford in 1916. Like many of his era, he got away with behaviour that would prove a scandal at any time.
Brad joked in one interview that it was “sadly true” that there are less drugs in showbusiness now than there were in the 1920s.
If that’s true, the Roaring Twenties really were the height of debauched behaviour.
- Babylon is in cinemas from January 20.
