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an elephant explosively evacuate its bowels on top of a dude's head

Even the final montage (which, to be honest, I don’t think fully works thanks to its absurdly cute film selection) embraces this philosophy by presenting the future-history of film in the terms of an exhausting drive towards modernization and high-tech proficiency. Our characters already have enough of a rough time adjusting their crafts to the addition of sound, so of course they cannot coherently understand the endless formal and technological innovations (color, widescreen, surround sound, digital and computer-aided filmmaking) that the next century of film will bring. “Be glad you were a part of this,” the final shots of the montage, lingering reverently on images of the long-dead Nellie LaRoy and Jack Conrad processing in a bath of chemicals, say to Manny: “be glad that you suffered so to bring this art about.” (The question of whether these works were morally made, or whether participation in the industry was “right,” is totally irrelevant to Chazelle’s perspective.) Manny’s final emotional reaction is an alchemic blend of a million responses to this message: the excitement of self-recognition, the bitterness of the loss of his first love, the joy of having created, revulsion at the fact that the world has moved on, and so on. I think he ultimately decides that it was all worth it for him (which is different than saying that all the mayhem was “worth it” in general; “it” cost many other characters their lives), and it is here that I think Chazelle feels the greatest amount of personal sympathy for Manny: at a moment of satisfaction, but also at an emotional low point and at a position of maximum distance between himself and the industry that empowered him. Again, what exactly is he telling on himself for?

Here are the major differences I noticed between the leaked script and the released film. The script is dated May 2019; my guess is that it was probably what Chazelle shopped to studios (its existence was first discussed by the press in July, with Lionsgate mentioned as a potential buyer, and Paramount was confirmed to have bought it in November).

Structurally, the film is mostly identical to the script; the two have all the same major sequences, begin and end in analogous ways, and share a similar pacing and tone. Some scenes and subplots have been added or dropped, and I’d say the majority of dialogue was rewritten between the two, but the experience of each one is pretty close to the other.

The most immediate difference is in the names of characters - something like a third of the central cast has their names changed between the script and the film, mostly to fictionalize identities. Those are as follows:

Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) was originally Clara Bow
Robert Roy (Eric Roberts) was originally Robert Bow
Elinor St. John (Jean Smart) was originally Elinor Glyn
Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) was originally Anna May Wong
George Munn (Lukas Haas) was originally Paul Bern
Ruth Adler (Olivia Hamilton) was originally Ruth Azner (an homage to Dorothy Azner, though she originally had a death scene that aligned with Hollywood Babylon’s depiction of Marie Prevost)
Otto von Strassberger (Spike Jonze) was originally Erich von Stroheim
Constance Moore (Samara Weaving) was originally Colleen Moore
Don Wallach (Jeff Garlin) was originally Don Brady; the reason for the name change is unclear, and the character is closest historically to Adolph Zukor
Orville Pickwick (Troy Metcalf) was originally not identified (though either way the character is supposed to be Fatty Arbuckle)
Olga Putti (Karolina Szymczak) was originally Vilma Bánky

None of the other characters had their names changed significantly (Thalberg, Hearst, Marion Davies, and James McKay are all identified by their real names in the film).

The most significant omission from the script comes in the form of the exclusion of a major character. Her name is Zora; she is a Black writer who becomes a love interest for Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo). They meet and flirt at a nightclub, then get together after the middle-of-film party sequence. She helps him kick a heroin addiction (he and Anna May Wong shoot up a few times over the course of the script), and they move into his house together. (He doesn’t get the car as a gift in the script.) She attends the Hearst party with him, visibly pregnant. The end of Sidney’s storyline in the script sees him as a featured musician in a nightclub jazz band. Rather than playing a low-tempo number for a speakeasy crowd, Palmer plays a faster number in his final scene that is supposed to suggest his love for his family, ending on a “final sustained high C” that carries through the transition to the 1950s. Palmer’s arc is a lot shorter in the finished film, and he doesn’t have much dialogue in it.

After that, the differences are mostly in added/deleted/heavily altered scenes and are best summarized chronologically. I think these are all of the important ones:

- The opening scene of Manny getting the elephant to the party is set during the day in the film, and most of his dialogue in the script with the truck driver is cut.
- The Obese Man runs into Lady Fay/Anna May Wong in the script; she slaps him for making an obscene gesture at her. Elinor’s introduction in the film is quicker; in the script, Manny finds her dog while Elinor expresses racist indignation at Manny. Manny goes outside (where he meets Nellie/Clara) to toss some dog poop.
- Sidney assaults the saxophonist in his first scene in the script, headbutting him as they solo.
- Jack’s introduction is a bit longer in the script; a crazed fan attacks him before he heads into the party.
- Manny and Nellie/Clara’s relationship is more explicitly sexual in the script; Manny’s feelings towards her are more of unrequited lust than love. They have sex (offscreen) before she starts dancing. The tone of the scene where they do cocaine is, accordingly, different - it’s fairly sexual (and much shorter) in the script, and they don’t hype each other up like they do in the film. The whole “it’s written in the stars”/“I always wanted to be part of something bigger” exchange isn’t in the script.
- “My Girl’s Pussy” is much shorter in the film.
- Sidney and Lady Fay/Anna May do heroin after her performance, and she offers some to Jack (who declines).
- After the first party ends, the script features a lengthy scene where Don Brady/Wallach invites Sidney to view a sound film demonstration. (It is of a Paul Whiteman recording, and it hews very closely to a similar scene in Singin’ in the Rain). Most of the other guests are unimpressed, Palmer thinks he has seen the future.
- Manny’s trip with Jack back to the latter’s mansion is shorter in the film. Jack grabs the steering wheel of the car, and Manny professes that he is a huge fan. His lengthy speech before he falls off the balcony strikes a different tone - in the script, it is about making “one truly great piece of art,” in the film, it’s about perfect audience identification.
- Most of Robert Roy/Bow’s scenes in the script have been cut. Early on, he makes breakfast for Clara before she heads to her first day on set, cruelly mocking her. He pitches Jack on an idea for a restaurant at the party in the middle, and shows him a picture with himself and an uncomfortable-looking Charlie Chaplin. At the end, when Manny tries to flee L.A. with Clara, Robert asks Manny to apologize to Clara for him.
- A bit more with Nellie/Clara before she starts shooting on the first day in the script. She finds a makeup room in the Kinoscope studio area after seeing some more debauchery. Some actresses refuse to help her, so she tries to do the makeup herself. Also, the shooting area is inside in the script, rather than outside.
- As Elinor writes her article about Nellie/Clara, in the script we see her pay a visit to the latter’s house. Nellie/Clara lives in a total state of disarray, juggling two boyfriends that eventually find out about each other. She eventually gets everyone in the house to start fighting with her.
- During his New York trip in the script, Manny meets with a company that is producing early sound shorts. He sees that the technology is not really ready yet.
- In the script, the “hurray for sound” party in the middle takes place before Kinoscope transitions to talkies (in the film it is after the “first day of sound shooting” scene). Several of their stars (including Clara) are seen recording a sound test of “Little Bo Peep.” Clara struggles with hers.
- This party is set in the script at the El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs, and is much larger and more explicit in who is present. Manny can’t get in until Jack waves him past a bouncer, morality protesters picket, and nude men and prostitutes wander around. Nellie/Clara says “Party time, bitches!” in the script rather than “Party time, sparkle cocks!”.
- In the script Lady Fay/Anna May sings “Orientally Yours” as she dances with Nellie/Clara.
- The film cuts a trip to the hospital following the snake fight, where Clara kisses Anna May. (They develop a more explicitly sexual relationship in the script later on, and film loses a brief sex scene between the two.) They return to the Kinoscope studio, where they are informed that the studio is shutting down to convert to sound feature production.
- Manny only directs the Sidney Palmer short and the “Duelling Cavalier” lookalike in the film. When he meets Nellie/Clara again in the film, their reunion is romantically rather than sexually charged.
- Manny takes a mescaline pill at the Hearst party in the script (he is by this point fully dependent on several drugs) and has hallucinations. He and Clara have sex again in the mansion bathroom; he hallucinates that they are swarmed by thousands of chickens as that happens (the chickens explode when he orgasms). Nellie only throws up on Hearst in the film, and her speech is much longer (and better-written) than in the script (to give you an idea, the script version of her tirade contains the word “virtue-signaling”).
- Thalberg pretty much immediately freezes Jack out once his interview with Elinor is published in the film, whereas in the script Jack meets more often with him. It’s mentioned that a role meant for him has been taken by Clark Gable. He gets assigned to lower-and-lower quality movies. The phone conversation he has with Thalberg, where Jack gets him to admit that the new movie is terrible, doesn’t happen in the script.
- A montage of silent-film-star deaths is cut from the final film (among them recreations of the deaths of Marie Prevost, Fatty Arbuckle, Lou Tellegren, and Gwili Andre). This is what leads into Manny’s firing of Lady Fay/Anna May, which is quicker in the script and instigated by Manny. We feel a bit more of Anna May’s pain in the script, which stays on her as she leaves the set.
- In the script, we see Clara storm off to the McKay casino on the California border. We see her lose badly at cards, we are introduced to McKay, and he threatens Clara.
- The blackface scene has very little dialogue in the script. Sidney puts on the makeup with little resistance, and the camera stays on him as he does a full take in the makeup.
- The final Elinor/Jack scene is longer in the film, and Elinor makes a more extensive version of her argument. In the script, she is quite offended when Jack calls her a “cockroach,” and only makes the connection between roaches and “the system” later.
- The movie Jack shoots on at the end is not implied to be a “piece of shit” in the script. Jack asks for acting pointers from its director in the script; in the film, he takes stock of the seediness of the production. The movie is only implied to be The Captain Hates The Sea in the film.
- The whole Manny/McKay sequence is a bit simpler in the film. In the script, they meet McKay’s henchman at another nightclub (the rowdy “Toad in the Hole”), after which they get redirected to the Garden of Allah (which is where the film begins the sequence). McKay also gives Manny more movie ideas in the script (stripper nuns, stripper gladiators - “Ben-Her,” and “dinosaurs,” though he retracts the last idea when Manny tells him a dinosaur movie has already been made, suggesting instead “christmas dinosaurs”). When McKay realizes that the money is fake, he acts betrayed in the film, whereas in the script he instantly moves to kill Manny and the Count.
- We see Jack kill himself in the script.
- In the script, Clara is only half-conscious for the attempted escape from L.A., and Manny takes her to see his family before they leave. The trip to the Mexican bar, their declaration of love, and their plan to get married only happen in the film.
- The transition from the 30s to the 50s is shorter in the film, and it adds the headlines discussing the deaths of Elinor and Nellie (she is never directly mentioned in the script after she disappears). We also see Anna May leaving for Europe in the script.
- Manny arrives back in L.A. alone in the script; he runs a car shop in the country and is unmarried. He visits In-N-Out Burger and Clara’s old house in addition to the studio gate.
- The script does not feature the collage-like montage at the end; it simply concludes with Manny getting lost in his memories/the movie; credits roll to “Singin’ In The Rain” playing quietly. In the script, the scene of the chemicals tinting the silent film prints is located much earlier, immediately following the “first day on set” sequence.

I, too, was not a big fan of the closing film history montage while Manny was in the movie theater, similarly to why I didn't care for the use of the Vertigo score near the end of The Artist. Both films had served their "love letter to cinema" purpose without those overemphasizing sequences. And I find both sequences somewhat distracting in otherwise powerful moments in the films. Babylon's montage also felt out of place to me because it merged Manny's flashback memories with multiple brief clips from movies that weren't yet made at the time the scene took place (1952), before cutting back to his teary-eyed face. We understand the films in the montage each represented an innovation that became ingrained in the art, and that Manny was one of thousands who were left behind after these changes came along. However, I feel that point had already been made through the reporter's monologue to Brad Pitt earlier in the film, which was also much more effective. I suppose the Jurassic Park and Avatar clips were nodding to more casual viewers who may not have picked up on Babylon's more obscure historical references (ex. Fatty Arbuckle), but I doubt those two seconds would improve anybody's opinion of this 3-hour gargantuan.

And I wonder if Manny's success later in the film as a director would have felt a little more earned if he had the been the victim of the elephant's 'accident' instead of the poor guy standing next to him (but really this isn't much of an issue).