Elinor St. John [played by Jean Smart]: “Marbled meadows metamorphose into the medieval plains of Iberia. Soldiers swarm the fields like flecks of paint from a madman's brush as your humble servant bears witness to the latest of the moving picture's magic tricks.—Oh, why do I bother? Look at these idiots! I knew Proust, you know.”—Babylon (2022), written and directed by Damien Chazelle
Here, Ms. Smart’s character—a composite of
entertainment journalist Adela Rogers St. John, novelist-scriptwriter Elinor
Glyn, and gossip columnist Louella Parsons—dictates a pretentious column on the
artistry of a silent movie, then gives up as she witnesses one error after
another on location.
This scene acts as a bookend to a later one that takes
place with the onset of sound, when Hollywood technicians still hadn’t solved
many problems that came with the new technology.
A century has nearly elapsed since the events depicted
in Babylon, but—this week’s Oscar nominations notwithstanding—I strongly
suspect that multiple issues still crop up on a movie set, though perhaps
different in kind from what plagued Brad Pitt’s actor-producer Jack Conrad.
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