Big Goodbye

by Sam Wasson

Here for the first time is the incredible true story of the making of Chinatown ―the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema.

IN Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye , the story of Chinatown becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history.

Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, as compelling a movie star as there has ever been, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage death of his wife, returning to Los Angeles, the scene of the crime, where the seeds of his own self-destruction are quickly planted. Here is the fevered dealmaking of “The Kid” Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. Here too is Robert Towne’s fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written.

Wasson for the first time peels off layers of myth to provide the unvarnished account of its creation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film, History, Media Tie In, Cultural, Audiobook, Biography

416 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2020

About the author

SAM WASSON is the author of the New York Times bestseller Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M .: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman and two works of film criticism. He is a visiting professor of film at Wesleyan University.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind. Not just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a condition of total awareness almost indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark--that’s Chinatown. Thinking you’ve got it figured out and realizing you’re dead--that’s Chinatown. This is a book about Chinatowns: Roman Polanski’s, Robert Towne’s, Robert Evans’s, Jack Nicholson’s, the ones they made and the ones they inherited, their guilt and their innocence, what they did right, what they did wrong--and what they could do nothing to stop.”

I have a lot of nostalgia for the movie Chinatown. It came out in 1974, but it could have just as easily come out in 1944. It has that timeless quality, an old setting mixed with modern concepts. It has a more cynical understanding about the insidiousness of human behavior that remains hidden under a veneer of respectability or buried under a mound of money. The sun shines so brilliantly in Los Angeles that it illuminates the shadows if one takes the blinders off and bothers to look. Jake Gittis is the type of guy who is hired to sift through the shadows and poke his nose in where no one wants it to be.

It’s amazing that Chinatown ever made the transition from a concept in Robert Towne’s mind to the big screen. According to Sam Wasson, Towne had nothing but a muddled script that made so little sense that when Faye Dunaway read it she couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. Towne’s friend Edward Taylor, a prodigious reader of mystery novels, gave a lot of effort to the script without receiving any credit. Once the director Roman Polanski got the script, he rewrote large pieces of it as well. So the question remains, how much of Chinatown is Towne? The bulk of his reputation as a brilliant screenwriter rests on this script. There are people who disagree with Wasson’s assessment of the situation, but as I was reading this, the evidence seems pretty clear that Towne had a lot of help. Sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen can ruin the sauce, but that wasn’t the case with Chinatown.

Chinatown, after all, is a state of mind.

I loved this description of Jack Nicholson’s acting skills. ”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 the line, added drama to the most commonplace speech, and Nicholson’s monotone, rather than bore the listener, inflected the mundane with an ironic tilt.” This reminds me of the time when I was watching someone discussing Billie Holiday, and he said that part of her brilliance was the way she sang slightly behind the beat. I love those moments when I hear something that crystalizes a thought that I’ve been having a hard time expressing. Both those observations explain perfectly why Nicholson and Holiday had that extra special something that made them legends.

For a man of such small stature himself, Nicholson liked to call Roman Polanski the midget. Polanski cast a long, dark shadow over the movie set. He was back in Hollywood, after a long absence, to film Chinatown. He was back where it all happened. Where Charlie Manson and his miscreants intersected with Polanski’s life. The brutal murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, took away the last blossom of innocence, not only from Hollywood but from the whole country. People’s worst fears were realized. I think maybe Joan Didion said it best. “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

Polanski often made the comment, I need to do _____ today because tomorrow I might be dead. It makes me wonder if he was able to convince himself that whatever he desired was justifiable. He’d been touched by a public tragedy that, fortunately, most of us will never experience. Something essential was shattered in him that never healed. As someone said on the film set, it became obvious as the script came together that the blonde (Faye Dunaway) had to die in the end. There is a poignancy wrapped around that thought.

We can all have sympathy for what happened to him, but still condemn him for the very bad decisions he has made. There are people who boycott this movie because of Polanski’s sexual assault of a minor or for the spectre of incest that becomes a key part of the plot. I understand these feelings, but I can’t do it. The movie loomed large in my imagination before I knew anything about Polanski. I also really like his movie Ninth Gate. I can condemn the man without condemning the director, but it isn’t easy.

There is this fabulous fight scene between Nicholson and Polanski that is described in the book involving a basketball game and double overtime. Don’t mess with Jack’s Lakers. Despite what we would expect from Jack, with that wicked grin of his, he was reportedly an easy actor to work with on the set, so this battle between these two oversized personalities was even more funny than if it had been a different actor involved.

I was also fascinated to read about how much Dunaway struggled with the role, even after they did finally hand her a script that made some sense. She was unsure of herself, and as I rewatched the movie after reading this book, I could see it. Her insecurities with playing Evelyn Cross Mulwray were evident in the quaver in her voice, her mannerisms, and the anxiety bubbling behind her mask of refined beauty. Some consider it one of her finest acting performances.

Sam Wasson brought to life the people who came together, like moths drawn to the flame of an idea, to make this film. Their friendships with one another and their desires to take a muddled mess of a script and turn it into one of the greatest movies ever made is inspiring. I do enjoy books about old Hollywood, and this one provided me with some fascinating details that helped me enjoy a film I’ve always loved even more.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/

[David Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only need two words to describe this book; Fantastic Read. The book depicts the making of the movie China Town with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. I have always been a fan of the movie with it’s a classic noir story. The book is a deep-dive into how the movie came about. It reads like a lengthy movie treatment with lots of added details. The city of Los Angeles in this case carries the same weight as the characters. The descriptions and history are wonderful. The genesis of the story and screenplay is like pulling back a curtain on how a creative mind works. The author also goes into the background of everyone involved. If you like historical nonfiction combined with the making of a wonderful movie this book is for you.
David Putnam the author of The Bruno Johnson series.

[Still · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book about movies that I've ever read.

Damned book about broke my heart a half dozen times.
I mean ...I almost shed real tears in parts of this... Nicholson finds out who his real mother is early on during the filming of Chinatown.
Shattering.

There's a part where Jack's with his girlfriend (the stunning Anjelica Huston) during the filming of the movie and meets her legendary father.
John Huston sucker punches Jack with a line Huston has as a character in the film.
Unforgettable sequence.

Nicholson's philandering will cost him the love of Anjelica... it's inexplicable the way Jack's behavior was towards the ones who loved him.
But the grinning foppish bastard was always tops to his pals...he never let a half good pal go down without a lifeline thrown out to him.

This is a chronicle that reads like a novel about the origins and realizations of and rationalizations for what follow in the aftermath of the filming of a movie titled Chinatown.
Started by three Hollywood Bros: Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Robert Evans and eventually realized in total by the widow of Sharon Tate -Roman Polanski.

The aftermath of the film -which will go on to earn a dozen or more Oscar nominations yet be denied all but one Oscar win - is the ultimate shattering of every other relationship the trio plus one hold dear.

Robert Towne did not write the screenplay on his own. Towne first conceived the convoluted narrative (missing a definitive ending) on his own, afterwards seeking counsel from a close friend, Edward Taylor -a consumer of pop-cult mysteries and paperback originals.
Taylor was Towne's re-write man.
Taylor loved Towne ...they were inseparable pals and Towne loved Taylor. But Towne graciously took from Taylor without credit.
What I mean to say here is that Taylor got jack-shit.
Zero.
Later, Towne would earn more money for lesser films. After he'd earned millions for those lesser films he'd become more generous with his writing partner yet he'd never share screen credits with Taylor.


The original screenplay turned out screwier than the Chandler/Brackett/Faulkner/Jules Furthman screenplay for The Big Sleep.
Chinatown had no resolution.
Enter Polanski... a driven artist haunted by the ghost of Sharon Tate.

Look - I can go on and on about this epic but I'll only come up spoilers. This is as intense as any Hollywood based thriller.
Everyone discussed in this account has goals in mind but when mixed with cocaine and gambling for positions of power within the studio orbit it becomes a pathological descent into total and complete personal disaster.

This turns out to be part history, part accounting of betrayals that leaves the reader adrift in an ocean of inscrutability... why, when it's all going so well... why the betrayals?
Is it the studio dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed ethos?
Is it fear of the loss of one's talent?
It’s Chinatown, Jake.

February 14, 2020 – page 77
"Amazing book. In a novel about the creation of the classic neo-noir CHINATOWN we get the background on historic Los Angeles and biographical information on Raymond Chandler and the creation of hardboiled fiction in general."

February 14, 2020 "Next few pages, Robert Towne begins writing the dialogue for CHINATOWN .... did anyone know Towne's first big L. A. love was Barrie Chase?
"Diane Taylor" in the Robert Mitchum version of CAPE FEAR?
Mitchum's psychotic "Max Cady" beats the sultry out of her then leaves her terrified and scarred?"

February 15, 2020 – page 145
"My favorite character in this historical piece?
Robert Towne, easily.
Polanski is easily and at best an evil, Polish dwarf with a tragic back-story.
I've been reading this since 3:00pm stopping only to watch a couple of reruns of WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE (1st episode, 1st season with Nick Adams & Michael Landon) while my wife made dinner.
There's real drama in this epic of Hollywood."

February 16, 2020 – page 170
"Well, that "nasty little dwarf" winds up saving Robert Towne's screenplay by streamlining it, taking Towne's penchant for complicating the plot with unnecessary plot additives and eventually finding an ending for the film.
Not only does Polanski pull the plot strands together but winds up giving Robert Towne sole credit for all writing.

February 20, 2020 – page 287
"Now the tragedies that follow the success of CHINATOWN.
The invasion of Barry Diller and his troglodytes “the television people” like Michael Ovitz & his ilk.
Robert Evans - cast off on an ice floe of perfect taste & cocaine."

February 21, 2020 –
"Goddamn. This book has made me weep too many times. This is the most beautiful Hollywood history ever written. More later... hell, it’s finished."



Highest Possible Recommendation.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

"[Screenwriter] Robert Towne once said that 'Chinatown' is a state of mind. Not just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a condition of total awareness almost indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you're in paradise and waking up in the dark - that's Chinatown. Thinking you've got it figured out and realizing you're dead - that's Chinatown." -- the author, on page 2

'Lightning in a bottle' is a descriptively great - if sometimes overused - phrase that I think fits for explaining how certain collaborative-based forms of entertainment (albums, television shows, and movies) once in awhile can result in the rarity of perfection. It can be argued that the 1974 film Chinatown - a hardboiled private eye story set in the 1930's, but yet eerily contemporary in using a corruption angle - is on that relatively short list, and Wasson's The Big Goodbye peels back the layers of the four alpha-male personalities largely responsible for ultimately bringing it to the silver screen - European-born director Roman Polanski (in one of his few American productions), wunderkind studio exec / producer Robert Evans (credited with turning Paramount Studios into a virtual hit factory in the 60's and 70's), screenwriter Robert Towne (who established his career with this film), and actor Jack Nicholson (who, at the time, had only recently become a successful leading man after toiling for several years in 'B' movies and/or attention-grabbing supporting roles like in Easy Rider).

To be clear, the author (refreshingly) doesn't just stick on halos when discussing said line-up - the drug use/abuse, womanizing, and other less savory aspects are presented in full living color. Not to make a bad joke, but for all their talents you wouldn't want some of these guys babysitting your kids.

However, as an examination of a distinct place and time - both the city of Los Angeles and the then-changing U.S. movie studio system, as the 60's literally bled (thanks, Manson family) into the 70's - it was provocatively fascinating. For a time in the 70's it was felt that Hollywood movies were finally experiencing a second Golden Age (just before the blockbuster / summer season / opening weekend mentality took hold and became etched in stone), and there is no doubt that the excellent Chinatown is one of those films. The Big Goodbye also benefits from author Wasson's research and interviews, because I can tell he simply didn't just rely on IMDb or Wikipedia entries to flesh out this book. I loved the anecdotes and details that came from speaking first-hand with those involved in the film or in some way connected with the four men listed above. An example: one day in early '74, on the Paramount studio lot, the production of the films Chinatown, The Day of the Locust, and Godfather, Part II all took a lunch break at the same time. Chinatown's rookie assistant director Howard Koch, Jr. recalled seeing many household-name performers walking to the commissary and giddily thinking "Wow, I'm in Hollywood." Now, what fan of movies doesn't love hearing something like that?

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know what you're thinking. A book about the making of Chinatown must only be for people who really love Chinatown...but sometimes you come across a book that in its narrow focus on a particular time and place explores universal themes. That being said, you should probably have at least seen Chinatown before you read the book, or any more of this review for that matter, in part because I'm going to talk, a few paragraphs down, about what the book's synopsis calls "the most notorious [twist-ending] in American film." For my part, I first watched Chinatown about ten years ago, towards the end of college, and had ambivalent feelings. I thought that notorious twist was shocking and memorable, sure, but it also seemed to come out of left-field- I didn't see what it had to do with anything that had come before. I was therefore a bit surprised a few years ago when a friend of mine, a real cinephile, told me that Robert Towne's script is taught in screenwriting classes, and widely regarded as the Platonic ideal. Eventually I got around to re-watching the movie, twice now (once after I finished the book), and suffice to say that I like it a lot better than I did, and that the ending makes more thematic sense to me.

Chinatown came out in May of '74, in a world that no longer existed at the beginning of 2020, and definitely doesn't exist now. To see it you had to go out to a theater, maybe stand in line, share the experience with other human beings- no face mask was required in those days- and then most likely you talked about it with some of them afterwards. Home video wasn't a thing yet, so if you wanted to see it again without going back to the theater, well, maybe you'd get lucky and find it on TV at some point. This was the last spring of the Nixon presidency, and also the middle of the era known as the New Hollywood, which it's generally agreed began in the late 60s (Paul Schrader says '68), brought about in part by the studio executives' gradual understanding- through loss of revenue- that they didn't know how to speak to the younger generation. For a brief moment, as Schrader put it, "a door opened" for riskier and less conventional material. Robert Evans, head of Paramount at the time, strikes me as a contradictory character- patron of countercultural Hollywood and friend of Henry Kissinger- but maybe it's indicative of the time that he was a lot more blase than I would have expected the head of a film studio to be about the fact that, as he apparently laughed to a friend, "no one can understand the script" [for Chinatown], and that a movie called Chinatown apparently wasn't literal-minded enough to call for a single scene set in Chinatown.

Of course it didn't hurt that screenwriter Robert Towne was friends with Jack Nicholson, who would be nominated for best actor in '73's Towne-scripted The Last Detail. Towne remembered that watching Nicholson act taught him to be a better writer:

Watching Nicholson, Towne learned "that what an actor says is not nearly as important as what's behind what he says, the subtext." Amazed by [Jack's] ability to draw out the shortest line of dialogue, he realized that Nicholson's innate mastery of suspense, of making the audience wait for him to reach the end of a line, added drama to the most commonplace speech...with a great actor like his friend Jack, Towne realized a writer didn't have to force depth and emotion into his dialogue. In fact, movie dialogue itself, "in a certain sense, is insignificant", Towne concluded.

Jack was in Five Easy Pieces (1970) as well, another movie that I first watched about ten years ago and shrugged at, but which I recently re-watched and thought was beautiful. Towne didn't write it, but one thing I think it has in common with The Last Detail and Chinatown is that it's illustrative of Towne's notion of the insignificance of dialogue, especially in those incredible final few minutes at the rest stop, in which silence conveys much more than verbiage might have.

And one of the things about this book that really spoke to me was Wasson's painstaking reconstruction of Towne's writing process- this daily effort to drown out the noise and synthesize influences historical, political, personal, conscious, unconscious- to just think clearly, express a full idea. I also found it encouraging to read that Towne was generally just as screwed up as I am when I try to write something, the clearest expression of his ideas just as elusive, not to mention that he was consistently broke (which always helps me to identify with someone), and that if you had sat him down in the early 70s and asked him what Chinatown was actually about, he might have had a different reply for every night that you asked him. That being said, it's clear that he'd been reading about the California water wars of the early twentieth century and drawing parallels with the corruption he observed in LA in the early 70s; and that his mental landscape now included the reality of the Manson murders, after which he and his friend Ed Taylor (who without receiving much money or credit apparently helped Towne edit and revise scripts throughout his career) "stayed up all night pontificating" about possible motives and suspects. But what I hadn't expected is that Towne decided fairly early on that the evil Jack Nicholson's detective encountered in 1937, the year in which Chinatown is set, would be a foreshadowing of a new era:

Towne's detective would only think he knows the world. By the end of the story, his apparent immutability would capitulate to a new and terrible awareness of corruption his former self could never have imagined, and all his venality, his air of self-possession, would come crashing down. How could the fate of real-life ideals be anything else? "World War II hadn't happened", Towne would explain. "And that kind of evil was not something that he [the detective character] would be used to dealing with."

Wasson returns to WWII throughout the book, an effect of which is to remind the reader that creativity, while in one sense a self-contained and hermetic process, is also contingent on time, place and historical circumstance. Wasson even hunts down Robert Evans's memory of something his father said to him while they rode an elevator together on December 7th, 1941, a remark that wouldn't be out of place as an epigraph for Chinatown...or Paths of Glory, for that matter: "the wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die."

Speaking of both WWII and Manson of course brings us to Polanski. Born in Paris in the inauspicious year of 1933, Polanski spent a few early years of his life in the Warsaw ghetto, eventually becoming separated from his parents and later learning that his mother had died at Auschwitz. He went to film school after the war, the National Film School in Lodz to be exact. In Poland and later in the US, he made among others a couple of movies that I really like (Knife in the Water, Rosemary's Baby), a movie that I think is incredible (Repulsion), and a movie that I truly hate (Cul-de-sac). He got out of Communist Poland and made it to Hollywood, met Sharon Tate, and in Wasson's telling struggled to ignore the evidence the world had already furnished that all was death and futility, told himself that the US was safe and that the war was over, and that even after Hitler and Stalin people were allowed to have kids. And then, as we know...enter a psycho named Charlie. Regarding the finished movie, which sounds to me like it became at least as much Polanski's vision as Towne's, we learn later in the book that Towne quote, hated Polanski's nihilistic ending, unquote; but then again, where does the idea for an ending come from?

It didn't even have a single scene set in Chinatown. That wouldn't fly. Nor would all the civics. Polanski loved the scenes about the water scandal, but "in reality", he said, "the capitalist swindle with the water and land of Los Angeles doesn't bother anyone." And the ending? Evelyn kills her father? Be reasonable, Polanski advised Towne. Why doesn't Cross "get away clean", Roman asked, "just like most bad guys really do?"

He was too tactful to say as much, but Towne felt even then that Polanski's objection referred to a tragic past that was more real to him than the script. "I don't mean this unkindly", he reflected, "but I think it was impossible for Roman to come back to Los Angeles and not end his movie with an attractive blonde lady being murdered."

It would be fair to ask where the "notorious twist" comes from as well, given what we all know about Polanski's life, but it turns out that that particular idea was Towne's from the beginning. Thankfully, Wasson isn't interested in telling anyone else whose books or movies they're morally permitted to read or watch, just as I've got zero interest in being told, but he doesn't shy away from Polanski's dark side either, which he allows to unfold as a series of more and more disturbing hints. He's a confounding person- a genuine artist who knows his craft; a survivor of the Holocaust and the horrific murder of his pregnant wife and friends; a person with an impish sense of humor who sometimes inspired sincere affection in others; and also a creepy and sinister guy who likes very young girls- but maybe he becomes a little bit less confounding if we just acknowledge the simple fact that such seemingly contradictory qualities can and often do co-exist in the same people.

He could also be charming as a sociopath, maybe not surprisingly. It was hard not to enjoy some of the hijinks and rivalries that emerged on set between him and Jack Nicholson, occasionally threatening to rise to the level of Herzog-Kinski madness. My favorite anecdote climaxes with Polanski smashing Jack's television with a baseball bat, and begins with Jack sneaking away from the movie set to watch the end of a game between the Celtics and his beloved Lakers that goes to double-overtime (Polanski: "what the fuck is double-overtime?"). Polanski didn't inspire affection in everyone, of course- he and Faye Dunaway were constantly at each other's throats, and Dunaway almost quit because she considered him too dictatorial. She believed that he took sick pleasure in the "my sister-my daughter" scene, where Jack has to slap her across the face, and that directing for Polanski was all about power and control.

Incidentally, power is also one of the themes in Chinatown: especially power in the form of capital and what it shows people of themselves, what it induces others to do. "Everybody recognizes 'in the beginning is the word' and all that fucking lip service", Wasson quotes Towne elsewhere in the book, "but I don't think it's in the nature of the writer's profession to go after that power", and it occurs to me that there is something renunciatory in Towne's conception of writing, in that of any writer who could concede that the way Jack Nicholson delivered his lines might mean more than the words themselves.

The quiet ceding of power and control over the world is in complete contrast to John Huston's character Noah Cross, whom we first see ravenously eating fish. In other hands, Chinatown could have been a cheap story- "look at what wealthy people do behind closed doors"- but I think my GR friend Evan put it well when he told me that he thinks of Chinatown as an example of "daytime noir", in which "sunlight is not a disinfectant, which might be even more disturbing." With that in mind, maybe Chinatown is really about what's all around us, taken for granted. When you find out for example that an old guy like Noah Cross raped and impregnated his fifteen-year-old daughter, your natural response is something to the effect of "Jesus, what a depraved fuck", but if we hear that the same person diverted water from a valley and deprived farmers of their livelihoods...or to take a slightly more contemporary example that fossil fuel companies have known about global warming for decades, but placed their short-term profits over the long-term survival of human civilization...that just sounds like business as usual, inevitable even, like the tides, or inevitable at least in a system that encourages acquisition and immediate satisfaction at all costs. In other words, Chinatown jolts you into considering that maybe both of Noah Cross's crimes (the "rational", comprehensible crime of the daytime world of money and the sick sex crime of the nighttime world of perverse interior compulsions) are of the same essence; both enabled by a degree of absolute personal autonomy that leaves no room to recognize the humanity of others, both by the successful pursuit of the very things- wealth, power, prestige- that we're all generally brought up to want. As John Huston tells Jack Nicholson, "most people never have to face the fact that...at the right time, right place...they're capable of anything."

(Review continued in Comment #2)

[Barbara K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was impressed by Chinatown when I first saw it, and it would continue to rank near the top on a list of my favorite films, if I had such a thing. It's extraordinary in many ways - acting, directing, story, overall "feel". A classic noir with a somewhat updated sensibility.

Which is why this book caught my eye. I also remembered that many fine movies were released in the mid-70's, and I was intrigued by the "last years of Hollywood" part of the title.

It was, for me, a slow start, and I was tempted to DNF about an hour in. Wasson begins with basic background information about the individuals most closely involved with the making of the film: Roman Polanski (director), Robert Towne (script writer), Jack Nicholson (actor and connective tissue among the other players), and Robert Evans (producer).

Polanski is first up, and it was tough sledding reading about his childhood in Warsaw and Krakow during the years leading up to and including WWII, his mother being murdered by the Nazis, his father telling Roman to run away as he himself was being rounded up. This horrific history becomes backdrop to the murder of Sharon Tate, his wife, by the Manson family. That event becomes a kind of jumping off point for the rest of the book.

And that is where the book really takes off, and when I couldn't stop reading (listening, actually). Wasson skillfully weaves together the stories of those four principals, their friends and lovers, and other individuals peripheral to the making of the movie. His chief points are that although Towne had come up with the original story, it was bloated and he was incapable of paring it down, and that it was the friendships among these people that made it possible for a brilliant movie to emerge from their sometimes competing artistic visions.

Even Wasson's lesser points are fascinating. John Huston's character (one of the creepiest I've encountered in film) is not that far from his actual personality (OK, with the absolute worst elements missing). And he illustrates Fay Dunaway's legendary status as "difficult to work with", but makes it clear that everyone knew it was worth it for the sake of her remarkable performance.

Wasson describes how the problems deciding what type of score would be best weren't resolved until days before it was released. When he described the vintage jazz style solution, I vividly recalled the trumpet solo that set such a perfect starting tone.

That "last years of Hollywood" part of the title? Wasson seems to conclude that a combination of studio takeovers by corporations interested in boosting profits, and excesses of cocaine, were at the root of the conversion from "people" based pictures to high concept blockbusters.

One final observation: You can't (well, at least I couldn't) read about Polanski's role as director and script doctor without being confronted with that question about whether you can continue to love the art after learning that the artist has some reprehensible qualities, an attraction to girls in their young teens in Polanski's case. Clearly I didn't lose my enthusiasm for this film after I learned, years ago, of his conviction and permanent relocation in Europe. By contrast, I don't think I could ever rekindle my enthusiasm for Bill Cosby's humor. Somewhere in the middle is a film that may or may not permanently drop off my favorites list - The Usual Suspects, given what we've learned about Kevin Spacey.

If you're interested in film history, and especially if you like Chinatown, I heartily recommend this book. I may have to pull time away from my reading soon so that I can give it another viewing.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

My introduction to the work of Sam Wasson is The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood. Published in 2020, the book covers the making of Chinatown, cited by many as the greatest screenplay ever written. Even more so than Peter Biskind's supreme account of 1970s Hollywood (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), Wasson recreates entire conversations. I found that approach a little dubious, got accustomed to it and most enjoyed the chapters devoted to author Robert Towne's writing process and the genesis of his script, particularly the help he received from his friend Edward Taylor, girlfriend Julie Payne, dog Hira and director Roman Polanski, uncredited for his work on the script.

-- "You had Paris in the 20s, Hollywood in the 60s," said record producer Kim Fowley. "And you wanted to get there because these places had hope. If you could get the bus ticket to get to paradise, even if you were a waiter, at least you were there." L.A.'s music scene, Fowley added, was so hungry for talent that "anybody who had charisma or a line of bullshit could walk into any record label and get a deal--maybe just one record, but that's how it worked."

-- Towne had never read Raymond Chandler before--his old roommate, Edward Taylor, was the big mystery reader--it was the loss that got him. Chandler's detective novels preserved prewar L.A. in a hard-boiled poetry equal parts disgusted and in love, for while Chandler detested urban corruption, the dreaming half of his heart starved for goodness. Poised midway, the city held his uncertainty; Philip Marlowe, his detective, bore its losses. "I used to like this town," Marlowe confessed in The Little Sister in 1949. "A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hill and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either."

"In reading these words and looking at these pictures," Towne said, "I realized that I had in common with Chandler that I loved L.A. and missed the L.A. that I loved. It was gone, basically, but so much of it was left: the ruins of it, the residue, were left. They were so pervasive that you could still shoot them and create the L.A. that had been lost."

-- Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones' when Towne first proposed the idea.

"Look," Towne said. "We can't get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It'll be L.A. in the thirties."

"Sure. Sounds great. What's it about?"

"I don't know." Then: "Water."

Jack would be Towne's detective. That right there gave him a clue to the character. Nicholson, Towne knew, was a popinjay, a clothes horse. He loved his shoes, his vintage Hawaiian shirts, and leather jackets. Towne remembered Nicholson admiring himself in the mirror. "Look at my perfect teardrop nostrils," he would say, smiling. Towne's detective would have a little of that vanity. He would mind his hair, his fresh pressed suits, his Venetian blinds. He would be class conscious, maybe a little Hollywood, and if those qualities opposed traditional concepts of a movie detective--gruff, high-minded, ascetic--all the better. This detective would be different. Towne said, "[In] most detectives I have ever seen--[and] in Chandler and even Hammett--all the detectives are too gentlemanly to do divorce work. 'If you want someone for that go down the block.' But I knew in fact that that's mostly what they did." For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Towne's hero would do it for the money. That would give the character someplace to go, emotionally; it would give Towne the beginnings of a character arc. "I thought that taking someone like that," Towne said, "maybe venal and crude and used to petty crime and people cheating on each other, and then getting him to see the larger implications and then to draw the distinctions would be interesting." He decided, whenever possible, to counter movie myth with real life. "So I decided to do a movie about crimes as they really were," he said, "because the way they really were is the way they really are. I didn't want to do a movie about a black bird or anything. A real crime, with a real detective."



-- Under Towne's desk lay Hira, the giant Komondor, toying with the phone cord he took for a water snake. Man, he thought, I never saw such purity in a living thing. Every walk, the same fire hydrant, the same look of happiness. At the most fundamental level, he thought, that purity is what people fall in love with.

Distraction--this was how it always started. "So much of writing," he said, "is trying to avoid facing it."

-- For a while Towne would walk in circles. He couldn't know who the characters were until he knew who they needed to become, and he couldn't know who they needed to become until he knew who they were. He wouldn't start to write scenes until he had a full scene-by-scene outline, and he couldn't outline until he saw his people in detail, what they thought they wanted and what they really needed. But didn't he have to have a good story first? Mystery plotting was a snake eating its tail: does character move the story, or does the story move the character? Towne would have to discover them both simultaneously and proceed with caution, allowing one to inform the other, slow, one short inch at a time.

-- By the fall of 1971, some six months after he had begun, Towne was still writing outlines. Some he discarded incomplete. Others ended unsatisfactorily.

"'Chinatown' by Towne'" one began:

"Only a few years back, when Gittes was working for the D.A.'s office, he got involved in the tong wars. He had been forewarned by his superior, Leon Whitaker, not to fool around with any of the goings on in Chinatown." If you had to go into Chinatown, Whitaker had told him, "do as little as possible."

-- Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write--and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets--but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them--that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would ever make such a movie?

-- "To say Edward Taylor was Robert's 'editor' was an understatement," said Mike Koepf, who knew Taylor well and shared credit with him on several screenplays. "They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. [Taylor] didn't take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you'd have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he'd pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed."



-- By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. "In those days," Payne said, "you could not pay Robert to write if he didn't want to write. He just wouldn't do it. He wrote only for love."

Warren Beatty would call Payne: "How's it going?"

"Slow. Robert won't put a word on the page until he thinks it's perfect."

"If he ever asks you what you think, don't say anything, because he'll stop."

And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages.

"What do you think?"

Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made. "Shorter."

She hocked her diamond earrings.

-- Julie exiled him to Catalina Island to get it done once and for all. It was the cheapest place she could find. At sixty-four dollars, she could rent an entire seaplane--room enough for Robert, Eddie, Hira, two IBM Selectric IIs, and provisions--and a room at the Banning Lodge, a funky bed-and-breakfast between Cat Harbor and Isthmus Cove, wasn't much more. The trouble was the restaurant, the only place to eat in the area. It wasn't open on Sundays, so Julie would have to fly out on the seventh day, every week, with food for all purchased, in part, with money Jack Nicholson delivered to Payne while Towne was away. Money was that scarce.

On Catalina: Towne sat in his bungalow, before his Selectric, before his window before the sea.

-- "They wrote the script out there on Catalina Island," Koepf said, "and the script they came ashore with was like 340 pages."

-- "It's a sucker's game," Towne said of his profession. "But sometimes you do get those moments when it all comes together. And that's exciting. Nothing can match that." "Sometimes"--a dreamer's word.

-- Arguments persisted on all fronts for another two months. "Robert was absolutely resistant to changing anything," Julie Payne said. Polanski had to fight to subdue, it not eliminate entirely, the disquisitions into Los Angeles politics that were personally and politically crucial to Towne. He was demanding a universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics. "Initially," Towne said, "I was more specific about the story in Chinatown. I wanted what happened to [Gittes] to be ridiculous--a humiliation--and instead Roman wanted to emphasize the tragedy, but he didn't want to be specific about it." But the more detail Towne revealed Gittes' first tragedy in Chinatown, Polanski argued, the farther they would stray from metaphor and the harder it would be to emphasize the cyclical nature of Gittes' tragedy--and it had to be a tragedy, total tragedy. Polanski was still adamant about that. "My own feeling," Towne said, "is if a scene is relentlessly bleak ... it isn't as powerful as it can be if there's a little light there to underscore the bleakness. If you show something decent happening, it makes what's bad almost worse ... In a melodrama, where there are confrontations between good and evil--if the evil is too triumphant, it destroys your ability to identify with it rather than if its victory is only qualified."

This was not the way the world worked, Polanski maintained. "You have to show violence the way it is," he said. "If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity." Catastrophe happens, Roman would argue. That's life.

Towne, a romantic, advocated somewhere, for hope. It did exist.

[Paul E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting history of a crazy and yet creative time in Hollywood. Holds your attention for 90% of the book (might have one or two unnecessary tangents).

[Harold Griffin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why Can't Film Critics and Historians Learn to Write?

Sam Wasson writes this history of Chinatown, its makers, its production process and its times in the best tradition of bad film historians: gushy, disorganized, disjointed and at times obscure. The prose occasionally resembles good English writing, but not often.

On the positive side, the narrative includes a great deal of very inside information -- at times way TMI -- on the making of the film, the personalities behind it and the era in which it was made. Kudos for collecting the data. There my praise ends. Oh, no, not true: the book had a catchy red cover with a picture of Jake Gittes, his fedora and his bandaged nose. Nice literary touch, reminiscent of Dostoevsky!

The New York Times gave this volume a great review. Some one else might call it a FAKE REVIEW!
(But I don't tweet.) The thing about writing a history of anything is that it ought to be, well, writerly. It ought to be literate, clear and organized. It ought to have a sense of when to quote and when to summarize, not just wallow in juicy insider detail. It doesn't have to try too hard to be hip and splashy.

A good bit of Wasson's wallowings deal with the messy process by which the final Chinatown script, and the film itself, came into being (such that by the time of the opening the principals were not even certain it was a good film). We are treated to false plot starts rejected by the producer, writer and director. We are flogged incessantly with the insuperable problem faced by that trio: what exactly the ending should be: upbeat or down. What is curiously missing, unless I slept through it, was when, how and by whom both the pre-ending plot, and the ending itself, became finalized. In that vein, I happen to have seen Chinatown the year it opened, and several times since, but I haven't watched it for years and several of the plot elements have evaporated from my little grey cells. How do you write about the twists and turns of content of a sophisticated movie without informing or reminding fans of the final narrative? A simple plot summary here would be an oxymoron, but Wasson could have omitted some of the long and gushy quotes of people who were either peripheral to the production or dope-fueled at the time, and summarized the final plot decisions for those of of whose memories were not fresh and didn't have a copy of the DVD on hand.

The last couple chapters of the book race their way to tell some of the post-Chinatown story of the principal actors, but the details selected are woefully incomplete (though perhaps excessive in the narration of Polanski's child molestation). And throughout the book there was much too much minute detail about incidental people, places and things. What could and should have been a very interesting and compelling book turned out to be an annoying data dump.

But hey, like Jake Gittes' world, the world today is Chinatown, and we should learn to adjust our expectations and abandon hope.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fans of Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" and Mark Harris's "Pictures at the Revolution" will adore Sam Wasson's ("Improv Nation") superbly written history of the making of the 1974 noir classic "Chinatown". This Oscar-winning masterpiece was created by combining the talents of Jack Nicholson (in his first romantic leading man role), screenwriter Robert Towne (suffering from writers' block after spending two years writing Warren Beatty's "Shampoo"), producer Robert Evans (the new head of a floundering Paramount Pictures who brought profits back by producing "Love Story" and "The Godfather") and director Roman Polanski (whose two films post-"Rosemary's Baby" had tanked).

More than half of Wasson's brilliant book is just a lead-up to filming "Chinatown"--but what a thrilling first half it is. Wasson backtracks to create full and psychologically insightful biographies of all four men, leading up to their friendships and working partnerships. The murder of Polanski's eight-months pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969 devastated him and changed Hollywood. "That was the end of the Sixties," said Towne. "The door closed, the curtain dropped, and nothing and no one was ever the same." Wasson's detective work goes beyond juicy tales of Faye Dunaway's alienating behavior. He uncovers several surprises, including Towne's longtime (but secret) writing partnership with Edward Taylor; the disastrous first previews of the film; and the last-minute jettison of the film's musical score to one composed and recorded in 10 days by Jerry Goldsmith.

THE BIG GOODBYE reaches beyond the filming of "Chinatown" to create a fascinating and superbly reported look at Hollywood in the 1970s and beyond.

THE BIG GOODBYE is a richly detailed and superbly written biography of the four men who forged a strong friendship and created the film classic "Chinatown".

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book won't be published until February, but I was fortunate enough to get my hands on an ARC. The first half was all about the writing of "Chinatown". Anyone who aspires to write screenplays or novels will benefit from discovering the narrative challenges that a successful script doctor struggled with when writing his first original screenplay. Although Robert Towne receives sole writing credit, I was surprised to learn how much Roman Polanski contributed to the finished script, including that memorable resolution. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The main players here are Towne, who comes off as difficult and slow to complete obligations; director Polanski, a master storyteller and a brilliant problem solver; studio head/producer Robert Evans, a movie lover and one of the last executives to place a commitment to quality filmmaking above the bottom line, and Jack Nicholson, a loyal friend to the men in his life and a betrayer of the women. I could have done with less detail about their personal lives, their troubles and their shortcomings, but the sections that dealt with the technical aspects of getting this masterpiece to the screen were informative and entertaining. Overall, I loved this book and will probably purchase the hardcover just to read the final corrected and edited version.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those of us who have loved the film Chinatown for almost 40 years, it is a surprise to learn that it wasn't the case for everyone, but its appeal has endured for these years for a reason. The part it played in the lives of its creators as well as that of Paramount Studios itself, and what has happened after makes for intriguing, immersive reading.

As with the book I read recently that delved into the backstory of Midnight Cowboy, Sam Wasson gives bios of the major players, their lives and backgrounds, dissecting the almost mythic personalities of Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski, Bob Evans, and Robert Towne, who were close friends and had been so for years. Thanks to the contributions of people who were in the rooms where it happened, there are insights into the creative processes, the infighting and feuds, the shenanigans, and the combination of talents and histories without which this example of cinematic art never could have happened. The pall of the murder of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate still hanging over the city had changed LA forever, and all were in their own way looking for a Los Angeles that had disappeared, and had maybe never existed. By choosing to set the film in 1937 (not 1936 or 1938), there had to be a distinct look, which is why Faye Dunaway had to be the blonde. Richard Sylbert and his sister Anthea, who did the design and costumes, had worked with Polanski on Rosemary's Baby, and were responsible for the authentic look of the film. For me, another gem was the story of Jerry Goldsmith's score, still one of my favorites, a soundscape like no other, in which the main love theme was based on Bunny Berrigan's I Can't Get Started. There is even information about the trumpet player who created that longing, beautiful passage.

Highly recommended for film nerds.

[Marta · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Chinatown is not a place, it is a state of mind.“ So says Richard Towne, who conceived the story of one of the greatest of Hollywood movies of all time. In Sam Wasson’s telling, the making of the movie also becomes an expression of the time: an era of great filmmaking and larger than life characters at the peak of their creative output, but also an era that was ending, where the drive to make great art was soon replaced by the drive to make money.

The book begins with Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate’s almost inconceivably happy love. She was beautiful, innocent, generous, open and inviting; her house was always open to friends. She was impossibly good, and Polanski, who have been running from loving ever since he has seen his friends and parents taken by the Nazis in Warsaw’s ghetto, could not believe that it might, just might be possible for him to be happy. Of course we all know the story, and when Wasson talks of the goodness of Sharon, I can’t help but tear up. One moment is particularly painful: when Roman’s father visits him, Wasson reveals that his wife - Roman’s mother - was also pregnant when she was mudered by the Nazis. How much tragedy can one family bear - caught up in the biggest cruelties of history? What a tragedy for father and son to share.

Polanski never recovered from the tragedy, and his worst tendencies, those that Sharon’s love kept from manifesting, overtook him. He acted out; he dated very young women; and later he had sex with a 13 year old girl, due to which he fled the US and cannot return. But Chinatown was shot before that.

I talk of Polanski the most, because his story is the most heartbreaking, but also because he is at the crux of a loss of innocence of a generation, especially in Hollywood. Hollywood was an open town where people partied and dropped by each other’s houses; there was free love and drugs and openness and youth. Nobody locked their doors. This ended with Sharon Tate and her three friends’s brutal murder. Attitudes changed overnight. Everyone was afraid, suspicious; the police knew nothing; the partied stopped, friends suspected friends… this disillusionment joined the unrest and protests already happening against the Vietnam war.

The script of Chinatown drew out of this feeling of hopelessness, and a longing for a lost era, the days of Los Angeles still being a small town, not dissected by highways and alienated by roads where everyone drove. Towne, the writer, struggled with the script, and when Bob Evans, the producer and director of Paramount picked it up, it was so bloated and riddled with subplots, without an ending, that Jane Fonda could not make heads or tails of it and passed on the role. Which was fine because star Jack Nicholson wanted Faye Dunaway. This was Nicholson’s first leading role; Towne wrote the script for him.

When Polanski appeared on the scene, he took everything over. He was an exacting artist; knew almost every part of filmmaking: he could act, write, do the camera work, was handy with props, and had the vision. He re-wrote the script; streamlined it, made it flow, made it focused on Jack, and gave it that incredible, haunting ending where the biggest criminals get away with it and you can do nothing about it. This was an incredible irony during the Nixon scandal.

Besides Polanski, the book also tells the story of Towne, the script writer; Bob Evans, the producer; and Jack Nicholson, the star. The bits about Nicholson being quite nice to work with and having an open home were quite fun; but he was a real asshole to women, especially to poor long-suffering Anjelica Houston. This seemed like just the way “the boys” were at the time. I never liked Nicholson - his talent and great performance in Chinatown notwithstanding, he always gave off the air of a self-serving asshole - and most of his roles were tailored for this. I could have completely done without the story of Robert Towne, and with a lot less about Bob Evans.

I am afraid I am a bit rambling here. This is a very good book that gives a great peek into the inner workings of Hollywood and some of its greatest personalities in the seventies. The writing is very good, reminiscent more of a novel than non-fiction. I am afraid I cannot do it justice at the moment as it is about many interesting people, a creative process, but also about a partcular place and time, an end of an era, the movie business, and people broken by tragedies, drugs and selfishness.

This is my first book about Hollywood and movie making, and it is excellent. I am glad I picked it up on a whim at the Audible sale. The author narrates and does a good job of it.

[Joel Azose · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a book in which Manhattan is described as "the big breast of the East".

The whole book is suffused with an indifference to or an antipathy for women. In hindsight, the introduction makes clear: Towne, Polanski, Evans, and Nicholson are all flawed, brilliant people who you should end the book feeling sad for. Everyone else... (The book is structured into four chapters. Each chapter begins with a line related to the woman who is attached to one of the four central men. Each of these lines - think "Sharon Tate looked like California." - places them relative to their Important Man, not so much as people in their own right.) To this end, the portrayal of Faye Dunaway as a shrew, as impossible to work with and hated by all, feels lopsided and almost certainly unfair. Anjelica Huston is a famous actor! From this book? You'd know her as the puddle of a woman, stunted by an absent father, and trailing a caddish, philandering Jack Nicholson like a puppy. One notable exception: costume designer Anthea Sylbert is afforded some dignity due to her unrivaled professionalism (which is coded male).

A quick timeline of the book's roughly chronological pacing:
p1-50: Roman Polanski falls in love with Sharon Tate. Sharon Tate gets murdered.
p67-p145: Robert Towne writes and rewrites Chinatown.
p145-185: Chinatown gets financed. Pre-production.
p185-236: Filming.
p236-264: Editing, some studio talk, some talk about drug use.
p264-290: Chinatown in theaters & at the awards shows.
p290-330 (end): Epilogue. Attempted Chinatown sequels.

I only say the above because the pacing of this book is *way* off from what I expected. You get fewer pages about actual filming than you do about Polanski's romance with Sharon Tate! The doldrums of Towne's inability to complete the script just sap any momentum the first half might have. There is also a full quarter of the book hanging off the back end, after the wrap of the movie. (And the less said about the lurid detail Wasson feels it's necessary to go into in that final section about Polanski's rape of an underage girl, the better.)

The subtitle of the book is: Chinatown **and the Last Years of Hollywood**, so I was also expecting to come away with an understanding of where the glorification of 1970s American cinema comes from and why it was truly The Last Years. I can't say this book delivers. It makes passing references to antitrust cases that shook up the film industry, sure. It talks somewhat about the change in movie advertising strategies, but man, do I wish that had been a bigger focus. Instead, we're meant to take at surface level the claim that JAWS' success showed that a movie didn't have to "be about anything" anymore to be a blockbuster... The big trends about how movies got financed and made are alluded to, then contradicted. Studio consolidation means they'll be gun-shy and not understand art. No! Studio consolidation means venture capital for experimentation! (No joke, both these are expressed as truth within two pages of one another.)

To sum up:
This book is interested less in the making of the movie than in the people behind the making of the movie. That's not bad, but don't go in anticipating the wrong thing. The writing style... Your mileage may vary. ("Manhattan is the big breast of the East.") It's scattered, it's poorly paced, it's honestly very male-gaze-y. Love Chinatown, would not recommend this book.

PS: the absolute STONES it takes to title Roman Polanski's chapter "Justice"... Sure, it's about his wife's murder, and his background as a child escaping the Holocaust, but... this man has eluded any meaningful punishment for his absolutely heinous child abuse, and is instead still being fêted with awards in 2020. Bad look.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorry, I pass. Long story, but here are some thoughts:

The author presents a gushing, extremely favorable, treatment of Roman Polanski and Robert Evans, but trashes Robert Towne, apparently on the basis that Polanski allegedly
rewrote the ending to "Chinatown.'' (Towne had the good sense not to talk with him, though he got access interviews with the other players, including Jack Nicholson and Towne's ex-wife).

I think the claim is dubious - it's a collaborative medium, but the screenplay has RT's fingerprints all over it - and his work on "Shampoo,'' "The Last Detail,'' etc., speaks for itself. The subtitle
about the "end of Hollywood'' is overblown - Evans was hardly the only producer to greenlight good work, and his record was checkered. Just ask Francis Coppola.

The book is written in a glossy, outdated Vanity Fair style (he's a frequent contributor) and padded with philosophical/political quotes and ruminations about the culture of the time, from existentialism to Watergate. Wasson detailed a lot of behind the scenes goings on, including some of Polanski's craftsmanship, but his bias is showing - clearly.

By the way, I've read the original script of "The Two Jakes," the sequel to "Chinatown'' that Nicholson and Evans ruined when they put it on screen. It (the script, not the movie) is a masterpiece, notwithstanding the botched job they did when they took on the film, over Towne's objections - he was the original director - for internal/political/personality reasons.

Read it and weep.

[LAPL Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sam Wasson, a Los Angeles writer specializing in film and theater, has written a book that examines the making of Roman Polanski’s film, Chinatown. This book stands as the most comprehensive examination of the film’s production, and will please cinephiles, as well as others. Wasson focuses on four men, who were pivotal to the development of the film: writer Robert Towne; producer Robert Evans; actor Jack Nicholson; and director Roman Polanski. Wasson contends that these four men shaped the creative and intellectual life of the film, constructing one of the most unforgettable films of all time. The book is a vibrant and absorbing account of the development, production, and aftermath of a movie that has been hailed as a masterpiece of American cinema and stands as the quintessential film about Los Angeles.

The book sketches a biographical timeline of the four men, highlighting how their creative interests and social lives intersected in the advancement of the film. Wasson shows that the creative processes and story developments were often negotiated between the players, with Polanski typically winning out over everyone. Wasson largely credits Polanski with the film’s artistic success and transforming what was essentially an average script into an unforgettable masterpiece that redefined the noir genre. In researching the film, Wasson interviewed many of the cast and crew members including Polanski and Evans, which gives their narratives a little more heft than his analysis of either Nicholson or Towne, neither of whom actually spoke with the author. In the case of Towne, Wasson spoke with Julie Payne, the daughter of actor John Payne and Towne’s ex-wife (girlfriend at the time Chinatown was written), and she provided some fascinating insights into the development of the story and screenplay that may be more invaluable and insightful than anything Towne might have been willing to contribute.

Polanski and Towne are the most compelling figures and were the primary creative entities behind the final film. Polanski’s personal history is a catalog of tragedies that read as operatic in scope. His work on Chinatown would also represent the first time he had returned to Los Angeles since the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and his reluctance was apparent. Tate’s murder had sent Polanski into a tailspin of suspicion and distrust resulting in a cynicism that would reveal itself throughout Chinatown. Coincidentally, we learn that it was Tate’s death that prompted Towne and girlfriend Payne to purchase a guard dog for protection, and the man who sold them the dog was an LAPD vice cop who had worked in the Chinatown area of Los Angeles. Towne inquired as to what the cop did while working in Chinatown, and his response sowed the seeds for an original story. In creating his screenplay, Towne wrestled with numerous scenarios and characters. Some of the ideas were interesting, while others fell flat and were best left on the cutting room floor, which for Chinatown enthusiasts is riveting to read about--some of those cut versions. The struggle between Towne and Polanski over the ending of the film seems to be a battle between dark and light, with Towne championing the happy ending he had envisioned, and Polanski believing that evil would triumph. In an ironic twist, Polanski’s cynicism probably earned Towne an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the film’s only Academy Award win.

In the book there is a glaring oversight about Faye Dunaway’s contribution to the film. Her presence accounts for significantly less print than that of supporting actor John Huston. All of this despite her co-star billing with Nicholson, and her masterful interpretation of an infinitely more complex character. The handful of acknowledgments she does merit are little more than passing mentions regarding her “difficulty” during production, including the now mythic battle with Polanski over a stray hair that he plucked from her head. Actors like James Hong share inherently positive memories of Dunaway that stand in stark contrast to stories about the woefully unprofessional behavior that Polanski was largely responsible for perpetuating. Given Polanski’s blotchy reputation with women, which has come under major scrutiny in the Me Too era, Dunaway’s participation in the film deserves a better examination.

Overall, the book is a real treat for Chinatown enthusiasts and movie nerds alike. It is extremely well researched and benefits from speaking with a wealth of participants, everyone from costume designer Anthea Sylbert to actor Jesse Vint, who had a small part as a farmer. Robert Evans and Julie Payne passed away since their interviews by Wasson, making the book even more unique and remarkable as a document recording the film’s history. Speaking as a die-hard Chinatown enthusiast, this book is sure to delight even the most grizzled fan and provides an exciting analysis of one of the greatest films of all time.

Reviewed by Nicholas Beyelia, Librarian, History and Genealogy Department

[Brian Fagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As you might expect from the book's subtitle, a major thrust of Sam Wasson's study of how Chinatown was made is the tidal change that came over Hollywood soon after 1974's great films. The financial success of the 1975 blockbuster Jaws, a new kind of movie, but also launched with a saturating advertising campaign, changed the focus there from art to money. Sometime later, as this trend was solidifying, Wasson says that a Michael Eisner memo to Paramount executives reminded them that "We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective."

So if you are a moviegoer who prefers escapist entertainment, this tender portrait of the artists who birthed the Neo-noir Chinatown will probably bore you. I know, all films are escapist to some extent, but there's a huge difference between an art film and an action film.

Wasson begins with background on the earlier lives of director Roman Polanski, the screenwriter Robert Towne, the producer Bob Evans, and, to a lesser extent, the principal players, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston. A big part of this examination is looking at losses each had sustained in their personal lives, and how those may have bled into their work on and the feel of this dark film about corruption, which was being made as the Watergate Scandal unraveled in America.

Wasson's biggest fascination is with the minutae of the artistic process, and he spends a lot of time lovingly walking us through the film's preliminary creative work, and then through the actual days of filming. Shot compositions, atmospheric considerations, wardrobe decisions, casting, score and the acting process are examined with the input of those involved.

Wasson particularly highlights Robert Towne's lengthy struggle with his original screenplay, using extensive notes Towne kept from the process. Wasson makes the point that there are few screenwriters who have a positive view of what they do, because once their work enters the studio system, they have literally sold out, and then they watch as it is cut and altered. As he narrates Towne's long creative struggle, we see how differently a screenwriter must work than a novelist - thinking in visual terms every step of the way. This is not telling a story, it's telling a movie. Towne, who's screenplay is often named as the best ever written, went through years of false starts and tangents before settling on a final structure. You'll learn about Edward Taylor, his great friend, Rhodes Scholar and secret collaborator for most of Towne's career:

"To say Edward Taylor was Robert's editor was an understatement," said Mike Koepf ... "They had a working relationship that although it was secret was significant. (Taylor) didn't take the lead a lot, but when he approached a scene, he was always correct. He would never argue, never criticize. He would say something smart and it was so goddamned smart you'd have to take it. He had a great read on human nature. If there was something wrong with the logic, or against human nature, he'd pick it out really quick. Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed."

Wasson quotes Maggie Parker, a film student allowed on the set, about the filmmaking process:

"When you see somebody like Roman (Polanski) using everything available to him to express his vision ... you realize (filmmaking is) about the details. This is the most all-encompassing art form in the world - musicians, painters, costumers, cinematographers, actors, every kind of talent - and Roman was a master of all of them. He was on top of every single detail in the frame of every single shot."

I've had that thought about opera, but Parker is right - in movies, after all of the creative work, you still have to get it all artistically on film.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3-1/2 stars) This is a big, messy book. Wasson presents lots of interesting facts and anecdotes about Chinatown, and Hollywood in the first half of the 70s. But it's also wildly disjointed at times. Though mostly told chronologically, there are odd jumps in the story; after pages and pages about the writing of Chinatown, suddenly we're told that it's being shot. Same thing when the shooting is over. Of the four main "characters" here (Robert Towne, Robert Evans, Roman Polanski and Jack Nicholson), only Polanski and Towne really come to life.

Wasson has done lots of research, but he includes one gigantic error, in saying that Cabaret got the Best Picture Oscar over The Godfather--of course, Godfather actually did win the Oscar, though Fosse got the Directing award over Coppola. This makes me wonder if there are other facts that Wasson didn't quite get right. He mentions that John Cheever's Falconer was going to be made into a movie, and notes how difficult that would be, but doesn't say why (I read Falconer many years ago but don't know why it would be so difficult). Wasson spends some time on the making of the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, but doesn't say a word about the plotting. I'm glad I read this, but like the original Chinatown script, this book could have used an editorial overhaul.

[César · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un ensayo sobre Chinatown y sus artífices: la gestación del proyecto, el rodaje y la repercusión de la película; Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, Robert Evans y Robert Towne. Y una ciudad: Los Ángeles. Y un estado mental: la decadencia de un viejo mundo que se desmorona y da paso a otro nuevo, más cínico, menos romántico.

Si te apasiona la película de Polanski, no puedes perderte esta lectura.

[Jim Thomsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

What you think of THE BIG GOODBYE depends in large part on what you think of CHINATOWN. I like CHINATOWN, moderately, but think it's a stretch to think of it as one of the all-time great film noirs. The book's baked-in premise is that CHINATOWn is an all-time great work of cinematic art, and if you're at odds with that premise, you'll be limited in your ability to enjoy a big fat book that gets so deep in the film's weeds that you're picking through potato-bug-sized factoids.

That said, I am interested in the time in which CHINATOWN was made, and its evolving artistic and business contexts, and THE BIG GOODBYE does a pretty good job of depicting Hollywood as being in a moment of quietly tectonic transition from the time CHINATOWN was first conceived to the day it was released into the world.

And THAT said, this book still takes a modest amount of anecdotal and scholarly reportage and research and stretches it unreasonably into a book-length work. (This is something I might not have picked up on had I not read Ronald Brownstein's excellent ROCK ME ON THE WATER, about the pivots made in politics and entertainment on the foundation of Los Angeles in 1974, and see how smartly packaged the same material can be in less rhapsodic hands.)

Part of THE BIG GOODBYE's padding comes from overwrought, overlong looks at the backgrounds of CHINATOWN's four principal players: actor Jack Nicholson, producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Robert Towne, and director Roman Polanski. (Author Sam Wasson posits, not entirely convincingly in my opinion, that the quartet's blend of uniquely formative pathologies and outward circumstances combined, combustibly, to create a classic.)

The other part of the padding comes from purple, over-plump lyricism in the service of the above. An example: "They apprehended Charles Manson, but what did that change? Polanski could not return to Los Angeles. The canyons, the watercolor estates, the ruby red carpet into the Beverly Hills Hotel, the bending banana fronds—they all assailed his brain with Sharon, their swinging over the Topanga cliffs, pasta dinners on the beach, the scorched-poppy sunsets, drive-ins, cotton candy, Cracker Jacks, potted plants, baby books (the books in her hands, her hands turning pages, her fingers, her fingernails). Unlike Sharon, Los Angeles was still there. But his eyes couldn’t see it. Where others saw crimson sunsets fade to pink, he could not stop her bleeding flesh from rotting to darkness, and though, in Los Angeles, there would be women and compassionate associates and the fondest friends, he would hear only what they wouldn’t say: the pity, the admiration of his forbearance, their bracing attempts at wisdom. That alone would be too much. 'For the world,' he said, 'it was an event. But what about me? My love was gone.'" Oh, and: "Memory was a despot that lived in his house and banged his pots and pans. It followed him to bed and sat on his head and shouted if he slept. It locked the door and cuffed his wrists and watched him try to run."

And that said, THE BIG GOODBYE, despite its padding, passes the time painlessly and pleasantly enough. Sort of the way CHINATOWN does for me.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes, it’s a good thing to sit on a review.

Normally, I try to get these out right away while the book is fresh in my mind. I don’t want to forget the sensation of reading a novel, completing it, and giving my thoughts before it’s fully digested. The thrill of reading books is actually finishing the book and appreciating and/or critiquing the story I’ve just received.

However, due to circumstances beyond my control, I wasn’t able to get to this review until hours after I finished The Big Goodbye. And that’s a good thing. Because while I probably would’ve given it a reflexive 4-stars and talked about it’s high points, just a slight bit of distance made me realize how the book annoyed me and even disappointed me a little.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: while acknowledging the general awfulness that is Roman Polanski, Chinatown is my all-time favorite movie. It’s not even close. I love it’s portrayal of Los Angeles, it’s message about corruption, world class acting. I could watch it anytime, anyplace.

So I was excited for this book, mostly to get the granular detail of how it was written by Robert Towne and made by Polanski.

I got those things and to that extent, the book was supremely satisfying. But the writing was not. The writer chooses to focus on four main “characters”: Polanski (who he is largely sympathetic towards), Nicholson, Robert Evans and Robert Towne. It was interesting to delve into their lives but Wesson hardly does anything but skim the surface of each. Which is fine but he also wants you to understand the psyche of each going into the making of Chinatown and it’s impossible to do so without knowing more about these men.

Wesson is more interested in their contributions to cinema and how those exploits led to the making of this great film. I get that, but it left me wanting more investment in who they are/were. A lot of this ground was covered in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, a far superior book that lays out the rise and fall of auteur cinema in the 70s in great detail.

Also, there’s simply no excuse for not giving Faye Dunaway more time. She’s instrumental to the movie and a fascinating person in her own right. Wesson portrays her as nothing more than a diva who had a fascination with Nicholson. I get she was difficult to work with but considering the way Wesson handles Polanski, I figured he would add more depth to her.

It’s a good enough book if you want to read about the making of Chinatown and what movie making was like in the 70s. But the broader aim of the novel, aside from the details of the film itself, have been better covered in other places.

[John Devlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very readable and at times almost poetic.

Wasson is trying real hard to make Chinatown and it’s four luminaries be about so much more: film, los angles, the American zeitgeist, stardom.

That task is ginormous, preachy, and self important but wasson handles the heavy lifting with a certain elan.

It makes for an entertaining read. I could have done with a little less AP English analysis is all.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant book. It captures perfectly the era that created the movie Chinatown and brings together — with a real time feel — the work done by the writer, director, actor, and movie executive to create art.

The book also takes you through the creative process and the actual nuts and bolts of making a movie — right down to the jewelry and the color of the nail polish chosen for Faye Dunaway to wear in her scenes. I was simply amazed by Wasson’s efforts in this book to leave no stone unturned. He catalogues a process superbly. The characters who created Chinatown become as memorable as the characters in the movie.

Highly recommended for movie buffs.

[Alberto · Rating 5 out of 5]

La historia detrás de la película "Chinatown" con un nivel de detalle escalofriante. Primero se nos cuenta sobre Roman Polansky, después sobre Robert Evans el productor, luego el guionista Robert Towne y finalmente sobre Jack Nicholson. Es recomendable ver Chinatown para poder sacarle más partido al libro.
También recomiendo ver el documental: "Robert Evans, El chico que conquisto Hollywood", "Roman Polanski: Se busca" o la serie "The offer". Para los amantes del cine un imprescindible, para el público en general bastante entretenido.

[Marc Pastor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poques coses m'agraden més que m'expliquin historietes de darrere de la pantalla. Si a més ho fan d'una etapa on el cinema de Hollywood va canviar de dalt a baix, millor que millor.
M'ho he passat pipa llegint aquesta recreació de la trobada de Polanski, Towne, Evans i Nicholson per rodar Chinatown, i com significa un abans i un després en les seves vides. En realitat, és la història d'una amistat amb altibaixos al llarg de les dècades. Uns amics que fan pel·lícules i són famosos i s'enganxen a la cocaïna de mala manera.
Ben estructurada, ben escrita, ben dialogada, es llegeix com una bona novel·la. No hi ha hagut dia que no l'agafés amb entusiasme i no trobés el moment de parar de llegir.

[Paul Lyons · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my kind of book. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE books on Hollywood and I love the movie CHINATOWN. But, I'm a meat and potatoes kind of fella when it comes to most non-fiction books, where I prefer "More matter with less art." Sam Wasson's "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood" is unfortunately has a disproportionate amount of art, and not nearly enough matter for my taste.

It's not that Sam Wasson is a bad writer. His "Fosse" book was fairly good. Yet the problems that plagued that book seemed to have progressed in "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood." What were the problems, you ask? Well, it comes down to this: a Sam Wasson book is a literary circus filled with verbal acrobatics, poetic reasoning, and a litany of quotes from high-minded intellectuals...in addition to facts and anecdotes that directly relate to the story at hand.

When I pick up a book with the title "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood," I want to read about the making of CHINATOWN, and not have to endure endless quotes from Joan Didion's 1979 book of essays "The White Album." I DO want to read about all of the players involved with CHINATOWN, and how they all came to together to make a great movie. I DO NOT want to read every single minor detail about every actor, writer, director, producer, production designer, costume designer if takes up the majority of the book! I mean, did we really need to go through the entire episode of Roman Polanski raping a teenager girl in 1977, and Jack Nicholson fathering a child out of wedlock, and Robert Towne's messy, ugly divorce and custody battle? What about CHINATOWN? Isn't the book about CHINATOWN? I would not mind all of this if the Sam Wasson's book also offered up an equal amount of content about the development, production, post-production and release of CHINATOWN...but he does not.

Yes, there ARE some interesting stories included in the book about the development, production, post-production and release of CHINATOWN, yet they make up only about half the book, if that. Yet, the author becomes so wrapped up in the other stuff...the fluff, the Joan Didion quotations, etc...that he forgets to fill in some important gaps in his story. For example, Faye Dunaway is made out to look like an ill-prepared, irresponsible, impossibly spoiled, dysfunctional actress. What's her take on CHINATOWN? The author seems to have spoken with many of the major players involved. Why not Dunaway? Like it or not, Faye Dunaway was very much part of CHINATOWN'S winning formula.

The hiring of composer Jerry Goldsmith at the last minute was completely without Roman Polanski's participation. That's a huge deal for a director whom the author painted as a perfectionist. What did Roman Polanski think of the score? The author mentions supporting players John Juston, James Hong, Diane Ladd and Jesse Vint, yet ignores the other supporting players that were integral to the story, such as John Hillerman, Perry Lopez, Bruce Glover, Joe Mantell, Belinda Palmer, Roy Jenson, Richard Bakalyan, Jerry Fujikawa, Rance Howard, Noble Willingham, Burt Young and Darrell Zwerling. I mean NOTHING about these people, who they were, and what their experience was like on the CHINATOWN set? NOTHING?

What's upsetting is that Sam Wasson leaves so much out, yet takes up valuable page-time with creative pondering, erudite film analysis quotes, Robert Towne's post-CHINATOWN cocaine problem, Roman Polanksi's rape trial, Richard Sylbert's turn as a Paramount executive, and what he defines as an end of era in Hollywood with the arrival of film execs like Don Simpson, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, who the author feels focused on big hit moneymakers and event pictures like THE EXORCIST and JAWS. Wasson even asks the question "Is JAWS really about anything?" Is his point that movies like CHINATOWN are really ABOUT something important, and popcorn movies like JAWS have completely replaced the "important" films after 1974 (the year CHINATOWN was released, and the year ABC TV executive Barry Diller was made head of Paramount Pictures)??

Again, "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood," for the reasons mentioned above, is not my kind of book. I desire "More matter and less art" with my non-fiction books. And yes, that is a quote from Shakespeare, yet I only used it twice in this review. I will discover and explore the works of Joan Didion on my own, thank you very much.

[Jason Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing and unexpected. About so much more than a single, all-time great movie, Wasson brings the reader into the homes and minds of Hollywood legends. He explores Nicholson, Towne (who takes a bit of a beating), Bob Evans, Dunaway, Huston and Polanski, bookending the story with Sharon Tate’s murder and Roman’s conviction for statutory rape. He explains how The Exorcist and Jaws ruined Hollywood’s appetite to make art and how the arrival of soulless executives like Don Simpson and Michael Eisner transformed Hollywood into the bottom line machine it is today. Wonderfully written and supremely readable, this is an early contender for best non-fiction read of 2020.

[Justin Gerber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’d go on and on about this, but…forget it. It’s Chinatown.

[Andrew Shaffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the original draft of CHINATOWN, this book could be stand to be trimmed by half. Precious little on Faye Dunaway, sadly. It’s one long dick swinging contest between four men (Polanski, Evans, Towne and Nicholson).

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wasson’s book is primarily about how the 1974 film, “Chinatown” came to be made, but it expands into a look at the movie industry, and to some extent, American society as well.

There were four key individuals involved in the making of “Chinatown.” Jack Nicholson, the star of the film, Roman Polanski, the director, Robert Townes, the writer, and Robert Evans., the producer. Wasson’s book concentrates on the interactions between these four.

Films begin with scripts, and the first character to be discussed is R obert Townes who was enamored of Los Angeles and became interested in its history, especially in how crucial water was to a desert community. He did extensive research and began to work on a script that involved the depiction of civic graft in getting the water from a distant source.

Nicholson, a friend of Townes’, liked the idea of a new and challenging role, playing a l930’s detective, Jake Gittes, who begins to unravel the tangled affairs of the waterworks.

Evans supported the work, seeing it as a serious work with significant social implications. He persuaded Polanski, a brilliant Polish director, to direct the film. Polanski and Towne clashed, Polanski finding Towne’s script much too long and cumbersome, and mostly succeeded in paring it down.

“Chinatown” ends with public and private corruption exposed, if not punished, and the confusion is aptly stated with the “It’s Chinatown” comment at the end of the film. This corruption in the film had real life overtones, with Wasson detailing the cult murder of Sharon Tate, Polanski’s wife, which arguably marked the end of the l960’s and its seemingly innocent flower children culture. Its shadow hung over the making of “Chinatown” and deepened with Polanski’s fleeing the United States in l978 to avoid criminal statutory rape charges. And it was also the decade of Watergate, another shadow, this of a broader political nature.

Towne received writing credit on the film, but much of his effort was stripped away and while he continued to work on scripts, he never again achieved the fame he received for “Chinatown.” His work on a followup film, “The Two Jakes”, in what was proposed to be the second in a trilogy of Nicholson “ Jake Gittes” films, was a disaster. The third was never made.

“Chinatown” was a fillm that Evans personally believed in; Evans came from a culture where producers gambled and put their personal taste for talent and quality on the line. A new emphasis on the financial bottom line of films with an increasing dependence on corporate support began to push this kind of producer to the sidelines. While Evans went on to produce more films, his kind of close involvement became less and less.

“Chinatown”, Wasson concludes, is about “a condition, the terrible awareness of one’s helplessness, what Towne had always called the ‘futility of good intentions.’ What makes “Chinatown” so uniquely disturbing as an American metaphor is that it is so unlike the whiteness of Ahab’s whale or the greenness of Gatsby’s light. However illusory, these are totems of possibility. . .” Pre-Watergate America , he adds, assured Americans that life was linear, not a matter of cyclical corruption as depicted by “Chinatown”, a feeling that is increasingly prevalent fifty years later in these opening decades of the 21st century.