The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

adaptation of the novel The Last Detail—about a group of sailors escorting a maligned convict to jail—was proceeding at a healthy clip. In the script, Towne decided, his sailors would swear like actual sailors. The draft he turned into Columbia had as many as forty “motherfuckers,” Towne explained, “because it was actually an expression of their impotence. All one [could] do in the face of the injustice in there was swear.” Columbia wouldn’t have it. In a letter disseminated to the principals, executive Peter Guber presented the studio’s demands in no uncertain terms: In the fight on the train, excise “fucking asshole” and “you fucking move.” After the fight, Buddusky says, “He’s a fucking mess.” In front of the café, Buddusky says, “Fuck the crowd,” and Mule says, “We’ll miss the fucking train.” Inside the bar scene, take out the third “mother fucker.” Etc. In light of the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, the drugs in Easy Rider, the sex in Carnal Knowledge, in light of “this newfound freedom we suddenly had,” Towne said, it was flat-out regressive to stall a project in 1971 for profanity. The toppling of the Production Code, Hollywood’s cobwebbed bureau of self-censorship, had yielded an extraordinary wave of freer filmmaking that may have raised conservative eyebrows, but, as its strong box office indicated, was at long last luring Americans away from their televisions. For the first time since its inception, Hollywood was a young business again. But Columbia’s David Begel...