Anyone who follows this blog knows that my two primary obsessions are movies and history. So, you can imagine my excitement whenever I encounter that rare intersection of these two interests: a well-written film history book. And, still further within this category, there is the vaunted production-of-a-classic-movie book, which is a special favorite.
The supreme example of this sub-sub-sub-genre is Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, which recounts the making of not one film but four, all of which marked the changing nature of Hollywood—and America—at a specific moment in time, 1967. But if Harris’s book is the touchstone of this subject, then Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood is a very close second. Put simply, I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Where Harris’s book describes the making of four movies, Wasson’s reveals the making of four men, the principal creators of Chinatown. These were the producer (Robert Evans), the screenwriter (Robert Towne), the director (Roman Polanski), and the star (Jack Nicholson).
As Wasson explains in this beautifully written and intelligent book, all four had bet everything on Chinatown. For Evans, it was his chance to make a great American film that was his own baby (he had previously been a rescuer of other men’s projects, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather) and to prove his legitimacy as bona fide movie mogul. Similarly, Towne saw the film—his original idea—as a chance to move out of the “brilliant script doctor” role and come into his own as a major screenwriter. For Polanski, the film was a chance to return to Hollywood and expel the demons that had haunted him since the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson family. And finally, Chinatown was Jack Nicolson’s chance to become a big-time Hollywood leading man. (If it failed, he would be back to making cool, art-house flicks that he had made his name in, like Five Easy Pieces and The Last Detail.)
Inevitably, when a historian concerns himself with a group of major figures, a sub-set of these will get a majority of the focus. Here, Wasson seems primarily concerned with Towne and Polanski, perhaps because both men were writers (Polanski re-wrote much of the Chinatown script, as Wasson reveals) and also deep intellectuals. As a result, the reader sees much of the book through the points-of-view of the screenwriter and the director—the artisans of the project. Take this wonderful passage where Wasson describes the awe Towne felt in the presence of Nicholson, the actor:
[Towne learned] “that what an actor says is not nearly as important as what’s behind what he says, the subtext.” Towne literally studied Nicholson. Amazed by his staggering ability to draw out the shortest line of dialogue, to make a long meal of crumbs, he realized that Nicholson’s innate mastery of suspense, of making the audience wait and wait for him to reach the end of a line, added drama to the most commonplace speech, and Nicholson’s monotone, rather than bore the listener, inflected the mundane with an ironic tilt.
But one quality all four men shared was that each, in turn, fell in love with Chinatown, both as a project and as an idea. “Chinatown is a state-of-mind,” Towne repeatedly told people who were puzzled by the title. And indeed, almost five decades years later, the movie has come to symbolize the themes of a lost world—Los Angeles, in 1937—with its lost ideals and promise.
Towne was the primary source of this theme, having fallen in love with idea of pre-war L.A. as he researched the topic. As Wasson explains, his obsession was surely tied-up with the memories of his own childhood, growing up in California:
This feeling, such a twisty admixture of euphoria and demise, where did it come from? Maybe it was being a child, living closer to the ground, source of aroma, that had preserved those smells so completely. Maybe it was the city then, before cars and smog and freeways stained the air gray. Maybe it was just Robert Towne, the romance he fused with irrevocable loss. “Memories swell [like a bee sting],” he wrote. “When we first feel them in our skin there’s that breathcatching moment before knowing whether we’ll feel grief or joy.”
But if Towne was trying to create a detective story about corruption in old L.A., Polanski was bent on creating something deeper—an existential tragedy about the inescapability of evil. One the great revelations of Wasson’s book was that Towne originally wanted Chinatown to have a happy ending, but Polanski insisted on a denouement in which literally everything is lost: the heroine is killed and the detective rendered helpless.
This insistence reflected, surely, Polanski’s own personal experiences with violence—first, the murder of his mother in the Holocaust, and second, that of his wife and unborn child. Polanski was not only traumatized by this latter tragedy but, as Wasson reveals, driven quite insane by it. Before the Manson family was captured and identified as the killers, Polanski took it upon himself to solve the crime, ala the detective from one of Towne’s beloved noir mysteries. Wasson writes…
Roman Polanski knew what it was to be a detective, to fix all of one’s purpose on a solution, studying friends’ prescription glasses, stealing into their parked cars and dusting them for blood, finding something, maybe a clue, and holding its image under developing fluid, watching it lose its hoped-for meaning and turn to nothing.
As Wasson convincingly argues, Chinatown became Polanski’s means of processing the tragedy of Tate’s murder; for him, Charles Manson became Noah Cross, and Sharon Tate became Evelyn Mulray.
But perhaps the greatest strength of Wasson’s book is the parallel he draws between the lost world of pre-war Los Angeles and that of a rapidly vanishing American dream in 1974. The year in which Chinatown was made also marked the end of an era, or perhaps several eras. The fall of American political innocence in Watergate and the evaporation of American military might in Vietnam. More to the point, the age of auteur cinema that nurtured all four men—and in whose creation Evans played a central part—was quickly being supplanted by that of numbers-driven corporate mega-studios, drunk on the profits of big-budget summer flicks like Jaws (which came out the following year) and Star Wars (three years later).
And so, all four men eventually found themselves playing the role of Jake Gittes, the world-weary and tragic detective at the heart of Chinatown. Evans, in particular, seems a lamentable figure, with his best years already behind him. In the Wasson’s telling…
It was what he had been searching for, not just for Chinatown, his love story in need of love, but for those long Woodland nights he waited out alone in bed, flipping through old photograph albums, the pictures of Ali, whom he had let go, pictures of Ali and his son Josh, the family he had traded, one night at a time, for The Godfather. He knew he had fucked up.
Powerful stuff. Check it out.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 