"Los Angeles, 1965. Tempers have boiled over in the Watts neighborhood, sparked by the traffic stop of two Black motorists, the Frye brothers, by the Highway Patrol. Freelance crime photographer Harry Ingram is on the scene, capturing images of the cops as they unleash batons, dogs, and water hoses on the predominantly Black crowd. When he snaps proof of an unarmed man being shot down by the LAPD, he winds up in the hospital, beaten, his camera confiscated....

"In the summer of 1933, a man named Adolf Hitler is the new and powerful anti-Semitic chancellor of Germany. But in Los Angeles, no-nonsense secretary Liesl Weiss has concerns much closer to home. The Great Depression is tightening its grip and Liesl is the sole supporter of two children, an opinionated mother, and a troubled brother. Leon Lewis is a Jewish lawyer who has watched Adolf Hitler's rise to power--and the increase in anti-Semitism in America--with...

In Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, in 1942, after Sam's Japanese neighbor, Keiko, is sent to an internment camp with her family, he makes a special effort to send her a gesture of friendship.

Private eye Doc Sportello's ex-old lady shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a loony bin.

"Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California--bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges--seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world's iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles' meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer, designed the massive aqueduct that would make urban life here...

A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, Babylon traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.