Review: The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood – HeraldScotland

Faber & Faber, 18.99

WHERE and when does a movie begin? How far back can you trace its origins? How close can you get to the source?

Take Chinatown. Do we trace it back to writer Robert Towne reading Chandler and getting nostalgic for the Los Angeles he remembered as a kid? Or him watching developers tearing up the land around his home in LAs Hutton Drive waved through by city hall?

Or do you go back further to the Second World War and the Jewish ghetto in Krakow where Chinatowns eventual director Roman Polanski spent his childhood and from where the Nazis took his mother?

Or maybe, like every other crime story, we start with a murder. Maybe we go back to an August night in 1969 when Charles Mansons followers broke into a house on Cielo Drive and murdered the five people they found inside, including Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, Polanskis pregnant wife.

In The Big Goodbye, author Sam Wasson explores all these tributaries and more in telling the story of the 1974 movie about crime and corruption both financial and moral in 1930s LA. Wasson in the past has written about Audrey Hepburn and the choreographer Bob Fosse. Here, he argues that Chinatown is one of the last gasps of the New American cinema of the 1970s before the blockbuster bulldozed in and took over the neighbourhood.

He locates Chinatowns story within the lives of four of its main participants, adding the stories of its star Jack Nicholson and its producer Robert Evans to those of Towne and Polanski. Nicholson was the coming man, an actor who had shared a flat with Towne, was the star of The Last Detail, written by Towne, and someone who felt he owed Evans a favour. Evans was enjoying his status as the man who saved Paramount, after a run of hits including Rosemarys Baby, The Godfather and the hugely successful Love Story.

Evans saw in Chinatown a chance to combine Hollywood traditional glamour with artistic integrity and he was prepared to push Townes desire to direct to the side as a result. Polanski, meanwhile, had come to believe, from experience, that there was no such a thing as a happy ending and kept pushing against the romanticism of Townes script. Hard to see how else he could have reacted given what happened to his wife.

Wasson deals with the murders of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent and Jay Sebring sparingly. At the same time, he refuses to look away from the horror of it. As a reminder of what happened it shows up the callowness of Tarantinos counterfactual take on that night in last years Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The senseless murders of that summer marked an end of innocence for the hippy idyll of the 1960s (Altamont was still a few months in the future). Strung out on grief, Wasson reports, Polanski turned himself into a detective in its wake. He would sneak into friends garages and swab their cars for fingerprints. He bugged their homes. Hed even surreptitiously checked Bruce Lees lens prescription against that of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses found at the scene of the murder.

There were no lessons to be drawn from the murders, Polanski would say. There is just nothing. Its absolutely senseless, stupid, cruel and insane. Im not sure its even worth talking about. Sharon and the others are dead. I cant restore what was.

That nihilism followed him through to the making of Chinatown a few years later. Shooting started with casting not finished and no agreed ending. The films female lead, Faye Dunaway, quickly made herself unpopular with crew and her director. At one point Polanski pulled an errant hair from her head which was ruining his shot. It didnt go down well. Nicholson had it easier, although Polanski did end up chucking Nicholsons TV out of his trailer during a Lakers game when the actor wouldnt present himself for a set-up because he was trying to catch the end of a game.

No wonder, then, that Nicholson was worried Polanski was to be the one who was to slit his nose with a prop knife that had to be sliced in the right direction in one of the films most notorious moments. Polanski shot 12, maybe 14 takes. Hed got the shot he wanted on the first.

Evans was the man who had to placate everyone. Including Towne who was seeing his romantic vision darkened, his story tarnished.

But maybe he shouldnt have been surprised. America was going through Watergate, the fag end of the Vietnam war, an oil embargo. Nihilism, understandably, was in. As the films last line has it: Forget it Jake, its Chinatown.

Wasson corals all this with energy and commitment. His style at times overblown, reaching for effect, seductive for that very reason is obvious from the first line after the introduction: Sharon Tate looked like California. If you respond to that, then this is for you.

Wassons argument is that 1974-1975 was a pinch point for Hollywood. The last hurrah for the American version of auteur cinema; the kind of films Evans produced and Polanski directed. In 1974, the year Chinatown was released, so were Alan Pakulas The Parallax View, Robert Altmans Thieves Like Us, Francis Ford Coppolas The Conversation and Steven Spielbergs The Sugarland Express, movies that were ambitious, adult, arty.

Spielbergs next movie, Jaws, would change the current, opening in hundreds of cinemas rather than trying to build an audience as had been the release pattern before. It worked. Spectacularly.

Soon the blockbuster was key. TV execs began to take over Hollywoods studios and the appetite for ambitious, adult and arty began to recede. Deal-making took over from film-making, Wasson argues. There were still ambitious films ahead: Altmans Nashville, Michael Ciminos The Deer Hunter, Coppolas Apocalypse Now, but the tide was going out. And Star Wars was waiting in the wings to change everything. Who wants auteurs when you can have franchises?

Wassons book is a lament for a style of movie-making that is no longer in favour. It has not, despite the books elegiac tone, disappeared though. Martin Scorsese kept making movies and, in the years that followed, American directors such as Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson would all emerge.

Still, the film ecology did change. It keeps changing. Chinatown the movie is now as distant from us as it was to the 1930s. It stands as a reminder of how Hollywood once was.

Wasson wants us to believe that Chinatown is a heroic achievement. But he doesnt hide away from the fact that there are no real heroes in this story. Townes reputation soared after Chinatown but so did his appetite for drink and drugs. Evanss, by contrast, took a huge hit with the failure of The Cotton Club. And Polanski? He pleaded guilty to statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Nicholsons house and then fled to Europe. Some things you should never forget.

Read more here:

Review: The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood - HeraldScotland