They Lose Their Noses

I've written about Chinatown before. It's seminal to my appreciation of what movies could do. I caught it years after it came out in a rep house on a double bill with, no kidding, Byrum's Inserts. The savvy of that double bill only now occurs to me.

I expected a Chandler/Cain riff starring Jack Nicholson in full leading-man glamour mode. Yeah, I got that too. And a dozen layers of everything else from design to tone to performance in apparent perfect harmony, in exact concert to its time and also timelessly ageless.

Chinatown now looms large in the the myth of New Hollywood, a view maybe more revisionist than prescient. It's both post-modern and retro; the easy "best screenplay ever written" answer (regardless of reality); the event horizon when all of 1973's MVPs were in the same rooms and working on the same project. It didn't do so well when it came out, regardless of subsequent opinion. And it's the perfect example of worst title ever is the best title only after you've seen it.

And to think for most of the early drafts they weren't even going to end it with a scene in Chinatown.

Sam Wasson's 2020 book-length examination of Chinatown, The Big Goodbye has the subtitle "Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood." He's a young(ish) turk who's written about Blake Edwards and Bob Fosse to good effect in the past, other touchstone creators whose main work I presume was before his time. I get it. The nostalgia for the '60s is only shared by those who weren't here, the famous saw goes. No one over 50 likes Boogie Nights.

Chinatown isn't perfect -- no film is -- but Polanski has gotten as close to anyone in avoiding obvious mistakes (at least when a camera's around). I personally consider his Knife in the Water the most perfect film I've maybe seen, even with some rough dubbing. Every edit just frame-perfect. Wasson knows Chinatown is important. It symbolizes the end of an era, the last great roar of the bohemian elite in the toy palace built out of the rubble of the Easy Rider republic. As recounted in other works of the period by Richard LeGravenese and Ted Demme and Peter Biskind, the "New Hollywood" barely lasted under the weight of its own excesses for six years.

Wasson's going to make a point by going behind the scenes of the bastard child of old and New Hollywood, a script which started as an annoyance Robert Towne had over a nearby development project (so it says here) and was rendered into dark cinema by Polanski still in the traumatic throes of the Manson murders (it says here as well).

How did this wondrous piece of art get made and mean so much?

And... here is where my troubles began. You know the genre of film books that seem determined to unearth all the unsavory gossip of famous or infamous celebrities. These guys aren't so smart, they have worse relationship problems than you ever could. No one reads. Oh, and the drugs. How the mighty have fallen. You're better than this lot. Wasson has quite a group here: the hypochondriac and insecure writer; a failed-actor-now-studio-chief trying to turn the Titanic of Paramount Pictures around under the cold eyes of Gulf & Western; the lead actor who struggled to make it and is taking this lead role as seriously as he can muster; and director Polanski, notorious for more things than there are stars in the heavens.

And Wasson reminds us. Over and over. He opens with a recounting of the Cielo Drive murders and Polanski's inability to get over it. His obsessive staging of every violent scene in subsequent films. Towne so asthmatic he can't work, hits his girlfriend, can't finish, takes credit from somebody else. Evans endlessly bed-ridden with his sciatica, falling into a cocaine snowdrift. Nicholson doesn't know who his real father is and can't stay faithful to Anjelica Huston.

The overarching effect is there's no way this dysfunctional group will make anything note-worthy, mired as they are in their own self-absorbed problems. Wasson is almost dismissive of the work, with a couple interesting exceptions. Nothing but professional praise for Richard Sylbert's production design and Anthea Sylbert's costumes. And a haliographic revelation of Towne's long-secret collaborator Edward Taylor, with whom Towne tested every script, note and idea throughout his career.

Evans can't decide if he's a producer or an executive. The music sucks. John Huston's drunk. We don't have an ending.

There's a precedent to this. Casablanca the other famous classic cobbled together, nearly on accident in the last minute, way more than the sum of its parts, not solely attributable to any one but instead the perfect melange of efficient direction, unfussy writing of an overly complicated story, and damn lucky casting. How did it work? It just does.

Wasson doesn't let anyone off the hook in the last pages, either. Polanski drugs and sleeps with a 15-year-old model and goes into exile. Evans quits/gets fired from Paramount. Towne ends up in a fog of cocaine and can't finish Greystoke either. 15 years later Nicholson fucks up directing the sequel, The Two Jakes.

As the book goes you realize Wasson is more a collector of stories than a storyteller. Unlike the film, the book is less than the sum of its parts. Wasson's point in the subtitle is barely addressed. There's no "end of Hollywood." Instead, Billy Jack has proven you can saturate book a film and make huge grosses "no matter how bad it is" and then, Jaws came out. Chinatown is the "end" of Hollywood simply by nature of its date of release. The modernity of it, hidden so completely you can safely ignore it, evades Wasson's gaze. Why can't they make a picture like this anymore?

The most obvious new primary research here is Wasson's description of Edward Taylor helping Towne through his career, often sitting with him for days and weeks at a time writing scenes, beats, and dialogue, as well as insights into Towne's personal life from ex-wife Julie Payne, whom he lived with during the '70s. While Payne's personal life may have inspired some of Chinatown's twists, it's hard not to finally come away with the sense Wasson includes this material because it makes Towne look just a little bit worse.

Wasson's blindness to a certain bias towards tabloid dismissal appears in cold print on page 314. On the disappointing subsequent careers of his protagonists, he says of Nicholson's post-1974 work: "...[Nicholson's] productivity had declined and the films he chose were largely those that offered him opportunities for flamboyant self-parody (The Shining) and amenable fluff (The Witches of Eastwick)."

Think what you will of Nicholson's wired performance in The Shining, the reason to star in Kubrick's reconstruction of horror being an opportunity for "flamboyant self-parody" was probably not near the top of the list. You could question Kubrick's choice of takes and we know there were hundreds of them. (George C. Scott also knows a performance is often not yours to finesse. But he was warned he'd get his hair mussed.)

And to suggest George Miller's 1987 Witches with its industrial, feminist, Updike-ian undercurrents as mere "fluff," well-produced and half-assed as it is, seems a serious mis-reading.

Wasson wants to place Chinatown in the crux between an old Hollywood (already dead or dying as of 1968, per Mark Harris) and something new, also dying, and towards a more cynical era. But probably being a product of that more cynical age, he never trusted the process. He diminishes the achievement of Chinatown by not taking its creators very seriously and pushes the cynical period earlier than he realizes. 

The book comes across not as a celebration, and the only insight to be gleaned is people who make art are, well, complicated. But maybe that's what made the art more interesting in the first place.