Fairbanks and Gilbert are commonly cited as great silent leading men whose popularity petered out with sound, but there are sound movies in which they appear perfectly comfortable. Valentino exists in “Babylon” (his death in 1926 is mentioned), and unlike Jack, who sometimes pretends to be Italian, Valentino was born in Italy. Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and Rudolph Valentinoīrad Pitt has said he modeled his character, Jack Conrad, on Fairbanks, Gilbert and Valentino. And her exploitative father took it upon himself to be her business manager. Doctors thought her mother, who died just as Bow was getting her start, suffered from a nervous disorder (which was in fact epilepsy). She was said to be unusually good at crying on command. David Stenn’s well-regarded biography “Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild” suggests many similarities: Bow’s humble origins were a source of insecurity. Chazelle told The New York Times in November that much of Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), the live wire who shoots to stardom in “Babylon” only to flame out in the sound era, was inspired by Bow. When you hear that a movie star has “it” - whatever that means - you can thank Brooklyn’s own Clara Bow, advertised as “the ‘It’ Girl” for, well, “It,” a smash 1927 adaptation of a novel by Elinor Glyn. Here are some of the underpinnings of Chazelle’s three-hour opus. Crossing “Singin’ in the Rain” with “Boogie Nights,” Damien Chazelle’s fictional “Babylon” draws on just enough real film history to flatter cinephiles and to risk their ire.
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