Liars and Saints

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. Pola...

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 refle...