Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1492834
33 S P R I N G Q 1 I S S U E C O V E R S T O R Y Andy Nelson. P H OT O : M A R K E D WA R D S other words: is Nellie rushing, or dragging, so to speak? "The idea was to play around with the audience's expectations and create suspense that way," Cross said. "Each time we cut to this preamble, we cut it faster. You're trying to create momentum and you're trying to create a rhythm, and the hope is that by the time you get to the end of the sequence, you have synchronized the audience's heartbeat with the rhythm of the cutting. The hope is that the audience will feel in their gut that there is a kind of mechanical march toward doom." A mechanical march toward doom — it's not a bad description of the trajectory of most of the characters in "Babylon," each of whom is compromised, in ways big and small, by the industry they so desperately wish to be part of. "All the characters get transformed by Hollywood in their own way," Cross said. Yet, for a film as long and purposely ungainly this one, "Babylon" did not get transformed in fundamental ways during post-production. The first assembly, clock- ing in at 2 hours and 56 minutes, was about 15 minutes shorter than the release version. "We actually worked really hard to try to bring the time down just as an exercise to see how fast we could make it," Cross said. But that cut was just too fast. Cross's next cut was far more loose-limbed at about 3 hours and 30 minutes. Then the movie was pared down first to 3 hours and 15 minutes and, finally, to the present length. "We found that the movie ended up really where it wanted to be," Cross said. The glue that helped hold the movie together, Cross said, was the score by Justin Hurwitz. Because the composer fashions melodies and score ideas in advance, Cross had the luxury of working with the score as he was cutting. "By the time I start getting dailies, Justin has already mapped out rough demos of what the score will be," Cross said. "I'm never cutting with any other temp music; I'm always using Justin's score, and I'm cutting directly to his score." Nelson also credits the score with adding much to the movie, sometimes almost im- perceptibly. "Justin's score is extraordinary because it is repeating things, it's using themes that he creates, but often in a very different way, a completely different tempo, stripped down, very simple at times." Jason Ruder was the supervising music editor and Lena Glikson the music editor. Bookending the party with which the film opens was an equally shocking scene in the final stretch: In trying to settle a debt incurred by the increasingly reckless Nellie, Manny pays a visit to the vast compound of movie-bewitched mobster James McKay (Tobey Maguire). There, Manny and a col- league are invited to a kind of underground lair full of unsettling sights and sounds. "It is a descent into hell," Cross said, but a hell that is experienced impressionistically. "The goal was to get glimpses of the crazy stuff that was going on down there, but also have that glued together by the music you're hearing and the sonic landscape that sound department gave us," he said. Indeed, the scene disturbs partly for what is glimpsed — spoiler alert: a rat is consumed — but, just as much, for what we think we hear. "The first time I read it in the script, I thought, 'That's like a whole other palette of sounds that we need for the film,'" Lee said. "Damien wanted it to feel like, for each level as we go, we need to create that anticipation and fear of the danger as we're going further and further down. All the crowd, the chanting, they just need to sound more menacing in order to feel like we are really stuck in close space with them and there's no way out." Yet "Babylon" concludes on a strangely hopeful note: In 1952, Manny, having left Hollywood and seemingly adjusted to life away from the business, checks out his old studio. Then he buys a ticket to a showing of one of that year's great hits, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's masterpiece "Singin' in the Rain." This prompts flashbacks from "Babylon" itself as well as a kind of grand s u m m a r y o f f i l m h i s to r y. A s i f M a n ny has absorbed all of film history to that point — as well as film history yet to come — Chazelle and Cross offer a nearly psy- chedelic montage of memorable snippets from a huge variety of movies. "One of our big inspirations for that sequence was the Stargate sequence in [Stanley Kubrick's] '2001,'" Cross said. "The emotion was al- ways there in Damien's script, but that was a sequence that Damien and I created in the editing room. Damien really wanted to end on something much more experiential than what we originally had." So what's the takeaway? The film sug- gests that Hollywood was always a vicious, cruel, immoral place — but it also birthed a great art form. As Cross sees it, the movie's message is a bit humbling. As the editor was reading about the silent era, he was struck by how many of the era's big stars or blockbusters were unknown to him. "It reminded me that there may come a time when people simply d o n o t re m e m b e r a m ov i e t h at yo u' ve worked on, or may not remember a big movie star who was in it," he said. "I'm just another editor, and I'm just another person whose name is sitting in a crawl." Even so, the impressive post-production achievement on "Babylon" assures that Cross and his colleagues won't be forgotten any time soon. ■