The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (Preview)
New York: Flatiron Books, 2020. 416 pp., illus. Hardcover: $28.99 and E-Book $14.99.

Reviewed by Kevin Canfield

Say this for Sam Wasson: he has a very precise sense of time. In a previous book, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (2010), he chronicled, often to the hour, the making of Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). His latest, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, is an attempt to identify the mid-Seventies moment at which a distinctive strain of idiosyncratic filmmaking was snuffed out. The culprits? Upstart executives who knew TV but not movies, increasingly powerful talent agents, and modern blockbusters and their attendant marketing campaigns. 

Wasson ticks off several important dates in the industry’s last half-century, but in his telling the most critical is June 20, 1974—opening night for Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s noirish tale of family secrets and water-rights corruption in 1930s California. “In retrospect,” he writes, “1974 represents the final flowering of a film garden passionately tended by liberated studio executives and an unspoken agreement between audiences and filmmakers.” In a period of growing cynicism about politics and other aspects of public life, Wasson says, moviegoers wanted hard truths, and that’s what bold, empowered directors, writers, and actors delivered. Alas, new commercial imperatives were about to change everything.

This version of events has its appeal—it’s fun to pinpoint the instant at which everything went to hell. And to a degree, it’s accurate. Yet it’s a reach to suggest that Chinatown—a great movie, though not a singularly powerful, divisive, or expensive one—signaled the end, or even the beginning of the end, of an era. And while Wasson may be right that the compact between edgy filmmakers and discerning moviegoers felt more solid in 1974 than in years to come, this isn’t a theory that can be tested. But if his premise is somewhat arbitrary, it’s one that yields entertaining results. Drawing on his ample reporting, he crafts a wide-ranging, informative, and gossipy portrait of a significant film and the four men most responsible for its success. Wasson is a confident writer whose prose sometimes turns purple, and though several passages are overwritten, this is a frequently absorbing book.

Wasson begins with a thumbnail biography of Polanski, who, in keeping with all we’ve since learned about him, quickly emerges as a genius and a cad. A harrowing childhood—his family moved from Paris to Poland in 1936; his mother was murdered at Auschwitz—hardened Polanski’s worldview, and his relationships with women were not idyllic—“he would lie and cheat and hurt.” He married Sharon Tate, a twenty-four-year-old actress, in 1968, the same year that his unnerving Rosemary’s Baby became an improbable hit for Paramount Pictures. 

The Manson Family’s sickening murder of the pregnant Tate, in August 1969, sent the director into a prolonged emotional tailspin. Polanski responded with middling films and provocative photo shoots—to promote Macbeth (1971), he clutched a dagger in Esquire magazine—and by seducing “young women, some, he confessed, as young as sixteen (Switzerland’s age of consent).” It was around this time that Jack Nicholson, just done with the Robert Towne–penned The Last Detail (1973), called to see if Polanski would sign on to the screenwriter’s follow-up; Robert Evans, who’d righted the ailing Paramount by betting on, among others, Rosemary’s Baby, was ready to make the movie. The director said no, then yes. He “had always wanted to make a detective film; it was a genre steeped in the Hollywood he had grown up with.”

A self-described “subterranean character who’d done some uncredited work on Bonnie and Clyde [1967] and The Godfather [1972],” Towne had been thinking about the script for years. At various points, Wasson writes, he considered calling it Deal Me Out, Last Chance, and Lost in the Sun. But if he wavered on the title, Towne was confident that the lead role—Jake Gittes, a sardonic private eye who’s tormented by a tragic misstep in LA’s Chinatown—was perfect for his close friend Nicholson. They’d met in a Los Angeles acting class, and by now, Nicholson, an expansive sort, had established a kind of actors’ salon at his place on Mulholland Drive. The house, per Wasson, boasted “an opulent cocaine pyramid, pointing skyward in a help-yourself bowl in the foyer.”

Towne had done a tremendous amount of research on California, circa 1937, working closely with Edward Taylor, a longtime friend. If this book has a reportorial scoop, it has to do with Taylor’s seemingly extensive contributions to the film. Wasson notes that Towne “rarely spoke of” Taylor to people in the movie business. But Wasson’s account—he refers to “stacks of legal pads filled with Taylor’s original scenes, plans for restructuring subsequent drafts, long swaths of dialogue”—suggests that Taylor’s efforts were those of a “co-creator.” He wasn’t credited for his work. 

The first draft of the screenplay, a sweeping rumination on the allure and pathologies of the LA of Towne’s youth, ran to a ridiculous three-hundred-plus pages. He and Polanski met to pare it down—and proceeded to bicker for weeks on end. Polanski cut what he viewed as extraneous characters, relationships, and dialogue, “demanding universality from a story Towne had scrupulously grounded in specifics,” Wasson writes. They disagreed about the final act, a battle that Polanski eventually won. Says Towne, whose screenplay took the film’s only Oscar, “I think it was impossible for Roman to come back to Los Angeles and not end his movie with an attractive blond lady being murdered.” 

Polanski had a reputation for working slowly, but he finished on time and stayed very close to his $3 million budget. The production was not without its complications, though. Cinematographer Stanley Cortez, who had shot The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), worked in a way that Polanski described as “old-fashioned”—he was replaced by John A. Alonzo. Meanwhile, Polanski and Faye Dunaway, Nicholson’s co-star, weren’t connecting…

To read the complete review, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Summer 2020 issue, or order a copy of this issue, which also includes a feature interview with Bertrand Tavernier.

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