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Chinatown

I really liked Sam Wasson's "The Big Goodbye," a history of "Chinatown," start to finish.

The story: Robert Towne, drawn to Chandler and other old-fashioned mystery writers, realizes there is material in the "water wars" from L.A.'s recent past. He has a friend--a possible genius and mystery addict--who basically hands him the "Chinatown" story (and consents not to win any credit). Polanski gets involved. Polanski rewrites the ending to make things darker, and he makes sure that a really disturbing sensibility (ants crawling on corpses) flows through the entirety of the film.

No one knows if the movie will work--and it works. It works in a big way, winning Towne an Oscar, netting several additional nominations. A how-to-write manual guy later elevates "Chinatown" as the ur-script, the ideal script in all of Hollywood history, and the script still has that reputation in 2020.

The key players make a mess of their lives. Polanski rapes a child; Towne becomes a monster, embroiled in a horrid custody battle. Nicholson loses his great love--Anjelica Huston--when he impregnates someone else.

If you enjoy Hollywood trivia, then you can't miss this book. It has the little bits of candy I love: The haunting score almost didn't exist, it was a last-minute addition. The famous sister-daughter-sister-daughter scene grew out of an actual situation one of the creative types was familiar with. Faye Dunaway insisted on being actually smacked around in that sister-daughter scene. Dunaway and Polanski had a sadistic working relationship, and Dunaway suspected that Polanski sometimes re-re-re-filmed scenes of humiliation because he wanted to see Dunaway suffering.

The book took me back to the movie, and I loved noticing all of the humor and thought in Nicholson's performance. Time well-spent. Recommended!
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