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Jack Nicholson: "Chinatown"

In case you missed it:

A major book on Hollywood came out last week. It's "The Big Goodbye," and it's the story of how Roman Polanski, Robert Towne, and Jack Nicholson made "Chinatown." This movie features the thing that most people agree is the single greatest Original Screenplay in all of history.

Roman Polanski lost his mother to the Holocaust, and he made it through childhood via genre pictures. Westerns, thrillers--lowbrow fare could thrill young Roman.

When he arrived in Hollywood, he had certain interests. He liked a claustrophobic picture: Put a few people in a small room and see how their true natures emerge. (Surely, that's why he chose to do "Carnage" many years later.) Polanski wasn't wild about the supernatural; he wanted events that could be explained with reason. He was fastidious about detail; if fashionable skirts grew incrementally shorter over a certain period, in New York, then you would see that trend reflected precisely in a Polanski film.

A bigwig handed Polanski the novel "Rosemary's Baby," and Polanski was hooked. He especially liked that he could explain all of Rosemary's behavior through madness (and you, the viewer, could decide if you accepted the explanation). Polanski wanted Ruth Gordon in bright colors, because "no one suspects that you're evil if you're wearing bright colors."

At this time in Hollywood, it was becoming possible to cast "an unknown," and so, in that spirit of risk-taking, some power brokers handed the Rosemary role to Mia Farrow.

Jack Nicholson was slated to play the husband--but someone objected. The part went to Cassavetes.

The great--and not fully expected--success of "Rosemary" helped to lead to "Chinatown." I'm not really at that stage of the story yet.

The jacket copy compares this book to "Devil's Candy," a canonical account of how "Bonfire of the Vanities" became such a disastrous Hollywood film. I've never seen "Bonfire of the Vanities," but I'm delighted that someone was weird and passionate enough to write a lengthy--and apparently gripping--chronicle of the movie's failure.

Wasson--who wrote "The Big Goodbye"--sometimes goes over-the-top with his prose. Janet Maslin was right to wag a finger at him.

Still, I'm liking this book. Recommended.
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