Review

"'The succession of booms has bred in the people of Los Angeles a rather easy code of commercial ethics,' Carey McWilliams wrote. 'To put it bluntly, the booms have periodically corrupted the civic virtue of the body politic.' Thus was Los Angeles, contrary to its pretty face, vulnerable to corruption. It grew too fast... It was a good place to be Philip Marlowe." - Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye. Sam Wasson has written a fine book about a fine movie. In 1973-1974, four legends of Hollywood conspired to write and produce one of Hollywood's greatest movies, Chinatown. The big four included the gaudiest names of Hollywood lore. Jack Nicholson was the star of the group and of the movie. Robert Towne was the screenwriter and Nicholson was his buddy. Towne was fascinated with the history of Los Angeles and how corruption became a way of life. He wrote a trial script about a private detective fighting corruption and losing to it. He became obsessed with old histories about local scandals, some at the turn of the century and some in the 1930s, where land developers stole water. Robert Evans was the producer, also chief executive of Paramount Pictures, and the peacock of Hollywood in the 1970s. He was elegant, had taste, and wanted to make movies about people (as opposed to events, like catastrophes). He imagined Chinatown as his signature movie which set the gold standard for dealing with human corruption, even incest, and doing it with style. Roman Polanski was the director. He was a man of towering genius, but a man with many problems, so many that they were a story in themselves. Polanski was nuts. He had a horrible childhood, persecuted in Poland by the Nazis, and then his very pregnant wife (Sharon Tate) was murdered in 1969 ("butchered" the tabloids said) by the Manson family. The besieged Polanski fled Los Angeles for Europe. Nicholson talked him back to Hollywood promising that Chinatown was the chance to make great art out of corruption, and that he would be given the freedom of a God. Jack delivered. Producer Evans gave Polanski control of the budget, casting, locales, equipment, and scheduling. Thus, began Hollywood's "big four" undertaking of Chinatown. Wasson tells a story of movie making so weird that one thinks of madmen playing with matches. Fabled wild man Jack Nicholson was the "Mr. Normal" in the group. Evans and Towne, the producer and the writer, were a little nuts and serious cocaine addicts. Both men would spend parts of the book in institutions. Polanski bought dangerously fast cars and drove them wildly around Los Angeles, worked maniacal schedules, and had sex and did drugs with a 13-year-old girl. Against the odds, the four misfits pulled off Chinatown. The script had no ending until Polanski wrote one, with only two days left in the shooting. Polanski's dark ending summed up the signature movie that Robert Evans had imagined. Corruption rolled on, Jack's detective, Jake Gittes, was compromised, Faye Dunaway was shot, and John Huston left in triumph. "Forget it, Jake," says one of the cops, "it's Chinatown."

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