The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

Futility, he learned, forced character out of hiding:

Anthea Sylbert called direction. “Roman, like all great filmmakers, was a dictator,” she said, “a benevolent dictator.”

Bruce Lee, formerly Polanski’s martial arts instructor, and now his friend,

“Get her the gun,” Silas told Towne. “If anybody came up this driveway,” Silas continued, “forget it. Women shoot to kill.”

“Right now we’re working in Chinatown.” “What do you do there?” “Nothing.” “What do you mean, nothing?” “Well, that’s pretty much what we’re told to do in Chinatown,

When one is always in one’s car, after all, one isn’t really in one’s city. One isn’t with people.

A view of Los Angeles that hits home.

Why don’t they quit if they’re so miserable? Just like a screenwriter, “Marlowe knows everything,” Chandler wrote in The High Window, “except how to make a decent living.”

So Robert Evans called him. “The script’s a fuckin’ mess, Roman. I need you here yesterday.”

“It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the screen. If you don’t have a script, you’ve got nothing.” Evans’s assertion ran against the grain in midsixties Hollywood,

Her designs would be, paradoxically, obsessively rendered and invisible.

Designing costumes to Anthea was sending covert, subliminal information—“telling you who the character is before he even opens his mouth”—not drawing attention to her own originality and craftsmanship.

Film was, after all, a group undertaking. And he never forgot where his group came from.

This is the most all-encompassing art form in the world—musicians, painters, costumers, cinematographers, actors, every kind of talent—

Film

It was because he was short. The young girls, she thought, his sarcasm and needless cruelty, directing movies. It was about power for him. All of it.

Faye Dunaway’s thoughts about Roman Polanski. “SHORT MAN’s syndrome.”

historian Tom Gunning compared to film’s earliest, primitive period (1895–1906), a “cinema of attractions” that preceded the advent of narrative.

I actually love this era of filmmaking.

Christopher Lasch, in his 1979 The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations,

in the six years between Easy Rider and Cuckoo’s Nest, when at the peak of his creativity, Nicholson had made an astonishing fourteen films, most of them astonishing in their own right.

screened the picture for Billy Wilder (“Two good lines of narration can save you a half-hour of a boring picture,” Wilder remarked),

Wilder’s argument on behalf of voice over narration in movies.

It wouldn’t end, but it was over.

The Two Jakes fizzled upon its release in October 1990. The picture is everything Chinatown might have been without Roman Polanski: slack, overcomplicated, confusing.

Her father was Roman Polanski. In 1977 he admitted to having unlawful sex with a minor and fled America, never to return. He also made Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant,

Nostalgia blurs the edges of empires, and yet it did happen, didn’t it? The movies are the proof. They were made. People made them.