The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

Hollywood had always been a gambling business, but Jaws demonstrated it could be a big business less gamble. An executive no longer needed a great, or even good, script; he no longer needed an actual story (was Jaws really about anything?), only the requisite thrills—“set pieces” in executive-speak—and the advance approval of the marketing department to assure the bosses he was choosing wisely. The tail would wag the dog: As promotional costs ascended, budgets increased, decreasing the funds once available for script development and preproduction—components “fundamental,” Howard Koch Jr. said, to the aesthetic mastery of Chinatown. Equally dispiriting was Jaws’s—forgive the expression—political toothlessness. “The picture’s only villain, outside of the shark, is the mayor,” author Peter Biskind astutely observed. “An elected official, a politician. But Jaws was a film of the political center: of the three men who take on the shark, Quint, the macho man of the right, is killed, while Hooper, the intellectual Jew of the left, is marginalized, leaving Brody, the everyman cop, the Jerry Ford … to dispatch the shark.” For all its many virtues, Jaws ratified the growing trend in disaster pictures and the end of the Hollywood counterculture.