Hollywood in its early years is best understood as a pirate city-state, a latter-day Port Royal, rather than as a company town, or, absurdly, an artists' colony. Seeking refuge from the long arm of Edison and his patent enforcers, the exodus of East Coast above- and below-the-line “players” found it where we ran out of continent, and what began as a modest frontier outpost for these players errant soon encrusted into a glittering stratosphere of movie palaces, vulgar mansions, and vast artificial worlds within soundstages. By 1925, MGM, the dominant studio of the era, boasted that they had more stars than there were in heaven. But many disputed the paradisiacal association, arguing instead that Hollywood was a contemporary Sodom and Gomorrah, or Babylon, a new “wickedest city on Earth.” After all, even the studios' finest signed away their souls for ironclad contracts.
Hollywood from the beginning seemed to understand this wickedness about itself, or if not its wickedness, then the gap between the fairy-tale fantasy version it presented and the reality on the ground. Films like What Price Hollywood? (inspiration for the more successful and repeatable A Star Is Born), Souls For Sale, and The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra depict constellations of stars, yes, but also the black voids in between them–backlots, studio offices, and casting couches teeming with predators looking for that tiny speck on the horizon that could become the Next Big Thing before collapsing into a supernova. As above, so below.
This Thanksgiving weekend, as awards season begins, join us for a tawdry trawl through the tunnels and traps of Tinseltown. Join us for
BABYLON CONFIDENTIAL
Thankfully, we’re not alone as we navigate this ecosystem and explore the toxic runoff of the dream factory. Our guest editor is Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, author of Poltergeist (via us) and professor and director of film studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her novel is a phantasmagorical narrative set in a world following an ecological catastrophe. So too, then, is ours, the world of Babylon.
Please send submissions to contact@apocalypse-confidential.com as a Word or Google doc for written submissions and .jpgs or .pngs for visual submissions, with how you’d like to be credited, a short bio in third person, and any links for promotion (blog, portfolio, etc.). Include your Twitter handle if you wish to be tagged. Please limit fiction submissions to around 4k words. This special presentation is open in all categories. Due to our submission window and review period, simultaneous submissions are strongly discouraged. Please include “BABYLON CONFIDENTIAL” in the subject line of your email.
Deadline: November 14.
Publication date: November 28.
Artwork by Robert Voyvodic.
