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The film “Chinatown” was meticulously designed to capture a precise moment in Los Angeles’s history. Everything about its look and feel says 1937, not 1936 or 1938. In the same way, “The Big Goodbye,” Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film, is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie. It’s about the glorious lost Hollywood in which that 1974 movie was born.
In a scrupulously researched and reported book with a stellar cast of players, not to mention some astonishing sources, Wasson sees Roman Polanski as the genius who elevated “Chinatown” from good to great. Anyone offended by that should stay away. Everyone else should come running, because Wasson — whose previous books include “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.,” about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and the dance biography “Fosse” — is one of the great chroniclers of Hollywood lore. And he has truly outdone himself this time.
Wasson begins with four principals: Polanski, “Chinatown”’s director; Robert Towne, its credited screenwriter; Jack Nicholson, its very hands-on star; and Robert Evans, the Paramount executive and producer who saw himself as more of a star than anyone who ever worked for him. Had any of them had a happy childhood, “Chinatown” might not have been the masterpiece it became. And had any been born an aristocrat, it wouldn’t have trafficked in such painstaking visions of glamour.
Only Polanski and Evans talked to Wasson, and both had a lot to unload. Nicholson and Towne made him work around them, which perversely and diabolically works to the book’s advantage. Standing in for Towne, with whom the basic idea for “Chinatown” originated, is Julie Payne, who was his girlfriend at the time and later his embittered ex-wife; she and Evans both died last year. She was there during the golden era when Towne simultaneously worked on “The Godfather,” “Shampoo” and his passion project, which would have something to do with a lost Los Angeles of the sort beloved by Raymond Chandler, a scandal about the city’s water supply, a femme fatale and a detective specializing in catching unfaithful spouses. He was going to call it “The Picture Business.”
In a book packed with eerie resonance, it turns out that Julie Payne knew Sharon Tate, whose brutal death in the Manson murders terrified the world. The attack prompted Towne and Payne to buy a large dog from a vice cop who worked in Chinatown. When he told Towne that crimes there were seldom investigated, one of the most famous lines in film history was born.
Towne had dreamed of directing “Chinatown” himself. But Evans was hugely ambitious for it and had bigger ideas. He’d had a great success with Polanski on “Rosemary’s Baby,” and had to talk him into directing a mere detective story. But the possibility of pitting the private eye Jake Gittes against pure evil, in the form of the smiling, all-powerful mogul Noah Cross (who would be played by John Huston) held a certain appeal for Polanski. There was just one big change he insisted on, based on his own experience: Evil had to win.
“The Big Goodbye” is excruciatingly incisive on why this had come to matter so much to Polanski, how destructive it was to Towne’s more romantic version, and why it made so much difference to the final product. Wasson is sympathetic to Polanski’s point of view for many reasons, tarring Towne for everything from drug use to sentimentality to relying on an uncredited co-writer, his friend Edward Taylor.
In any case, the book makes a detailed case for how changes to Towne’s version transformed “Chinatown” into a counterintuitive classic. A film whose heroine was supposed to survive became one in which everybody loses. To all of its California sunlight and other noir-flouting design aspects, Polanski brought the deepest of shadows. The production designer Richard Sylbert talks about the film’s palette, which uses parched, arid colors except for when the rich and powerful appear. His sister-in-law Anthea Sylbert, the film’s costume designer, spoke directly to Wasson. She makes a wonderful observation about how the kinds of people who carry one, three or five keys in their pockets are three completely distinct kinds of people. She was one of the many “Chinatown”-era casualties of the new, corporate Hollywood of the mid-1970s.
The Nicholson of “Chinatown” emerges here as a movie star only by happenstance. Wasson describes him as someone who could have become a writer or director just as easily, who was extremely loyal to his friends, who relished this first chance to indulge his clotheshorse tendencies and who helped solve some of the film’s biggest problems.
One was Evans, to whom Nicholson was forever grateful for an early favor. That didn’t keep Nicholson from threatening to fight when he thought Evans had meddled with an early print. Another was Faye Dunaway, whose brittle, tic-filled performance here is chalked up to nerves and lack of preparation; he helped to talk her down. His adoration of John Huston can be seen as both hero worship and misogyny. When Huston’s Cross asks Nicholson’s Gittes in the film whether Gittes is sleeping with his daughter — well, of course he was. As Anjelica Huston has written in her memoirs, both loved women. Far too much.
“The Big Goodbye,” with a title referring in part to the Brigadoon-like Hollywood that would vanish after “Chinatown” was made, is full of wild tidbits about where parts of the film came from. Towne’s ex-girlfriend, the dancer Barrie Chase, told him that her father had had an incestuous relationship with her half sister, who was her mother’s daughter, which morphed its way into the film’s climactic scene. By complete coincidence, Nicholson would find out that the person he thought was his mother was his sister after the film was completed. There are layers upon layers to this account, just as there are to the film, and it flags only when Wasson violates the color scheme with purple prose. Say what you will about Polanski, as long as it’s not “memory was a despot that lived in his house and banged his pots and pans.”
