The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

But the bad guys would thrive. Forget it; they always would. “And, in a sense,” Towne said, “that was the point. There are some crimes for which you get punished, and there are some crimes that our society isn’t equipped to punish, and so we reward the criminals. In this case, greedy men displaced a whole community and took the land. So there’s really nothing to do but put their names on plaques and make them pillars of the community.” One of the final images of the first draft was just such a plaque high up on a mountain. Then a view of the valley, won with death, fogged below.

The world was chaos. He had long ago given up on God and the Devil, “divine justice, or any kind of plan in existence. We are born, it means nothing, we die.” Cogent argument lent the nothingness shape, fleetingly.

Blessed