The official roster of the 2019 Venice International Film Festival will be announced on Thursday, 7.25. The festival will happen between Wednesday, 8.28 and Saturday, 9.7. Many of the Venice titles will presumably play Telluride, of course.

World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has been a fount of information on this. Here’s his most recent post on Venice. I don’t know this for a fact, but Cedric Succivalli is somehow connected to the Venice ’19 selection committee. Ruimy informs that Succivalli tweeted the 21 directors who have been selected for the Venice competition. Then he deleted the tweet. A.A. Dowd captured the tweet and posted it.

Here’s the Succivalli list:

An Officer and A Spy (Roman Polanski)
Ad Astra (James Gray)
The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
Against All Enemies (Benedict Andrews)
Ema (Pablo Larrain)
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)
Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waitti)
The Pope (Fernando Mereilles)
The Truth (Hirokazu kore-eda)
About Endlessness (Roy Andersson)
The Goldfinch (John Crowley)
Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)
Gloria Mundi (Robert Guédiguian)
Qui Ridio io (Mario Martone)
The Salt of Tears (Philippe Garrel)
Cherry Lane (Yonfan)
The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul)
La mafia non è più quella di una volta (Franco Maresco)

Also allegedly screening out of competition will be an extended version of Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo. No, this isn’t a joke.

HE: “An extended version of Mektoub/Intermezzo? That sounds absurd.” Ruimy: “Oh, I know. You could be forgiven for interpreting this roster as a message being sent by Venice to PC culture. Polanski in competition. Only one or two female directors in competition. Mektoub: Extended Cut. Woody Allen‘s potentially premiering A Rainy Day in New York there.”

A friend has slipped me a May 2019 draft of Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon, his theatrical follow-up to First Man. (Chazelle is currently working on The Eddy, an eight-episode Netflix series set in Paris.) Babylon is a late 1920s Hollywood tale about a huge sea-change in the nascent film industry (i.e., the advent of sound and the up-and-down fortunes that resulted) and about who got hurt and who didn’t.

A la Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Babylon (which may or may not be distributed by Paramount or Lionsgate) offers a blend of made-up characters and a few real-life Hollywood names of the time — Clara Bow, Anna May Wong. Paul Bern and an “obese” industry fellow who represents Fatty Arbuckle. (I’m presuming there are others.) I’ve only read about 40% of it, and I’m certainly not going to describe except in the most general of terms. It runs 184 pages, and that ain’t hay.

Most of Chazelle’s story (or the portion that I’ve read) is amusingly cynical and snappy, at other times mellow and humanist, and other times not so much. It takes place in the golden, gilded realms of Los Angeles during this convulsive, four or five-year period (roughly 1926 to 1931, maybe ’32) when movie dialogue tipped the scales and re-ordered the power structure. Everyone above the level of food catering had to re-assess, re-think, change their game.

It starts out with a long, bravura sequence that will probably impress critics and audiences in the same way La-La Land‘s opening freeway dance number did. Except Babylon is darker, raunchier. The first 26 or 27 pages acquaint us with the main characters (one of whom may be played by Emma Stone) while diving into the most bacchanalian Hollywood party you’ve ever attended or read about. Cocaine, booze, exhibitionist sex, an elephant, the singing of a lesbian torch song, heroin, blowjobs, and a certain inanimate…forget it.

Unless Chazelle embarks on a serious rewrite, the 27-minute opening of Babylon is going to seem like quite the envelope pusher. It’s basically Fellini Satyricon meets Day of the Locust meets the secret orgy sequence in Eyes Wide Shot meets the Copacabana entrance scene in Goodfellas. Plus Baz Luhrmann‘s The Great Gatsby meets The Bad and the Beautiful meets Singin’ in the Rain meets The Big Knife…that’ll do for openers.

It seems to me that Chazelle wrote Babylon with a jaded, somewhat angry attitude. When a couple of scenes tip into near-porn you say to yourself, “Yeah, I get it — he’s showing this stuff in quotes…as commentary.” Laugh if you want but the audience will be attending this party in the company of a lot of self-obsessed, deluded or ruthless types. Anyway, that’s all.