The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind. Not just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a condition of total awareness almost indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark—that’s Chinatown. Thinking you’ve got it figured out and realizing you’re dead—that’s Chinatown.

***

“The studio pioneers might have been tyrannical,” Polanski said, “but at least they understood the business they’d built. They also took risks.”

It was the old Los Angeles story, gold, bandits, fool’s gold, fools. “The greatest talents from all fields—as much artistic or scientific or literary—have passed through Los Angeles,” Polanski would say. “At the same time it’s a place where there aren’t any new developments—either intellectual or cultural.” It was a kind of dreamer’s physics: For every California promise, there was an L.A. disappointment. The sun set over the ocean; night emptied the streets; the Beverly Drive estates that once delighted, isolated. The moon rose. It got quiet. Where’d everyone go? “It’s like an immense suburb,” Polanski complained, “where you rarely, if ever, see other people. There’s no communication—people live as gentleman farmers, and this might explain why some people there are no longer actually creating anything.”

Los Angeles grew too big for its local roads alone, new freeways—the 101 in 1960, the 405 in 1961—strained the small-town ambience that once characterized driving-optional neighborhoods like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.

Polanski understood immediately, was, despite his love for imperial Hollywood, not the typical Hollywood executive, let alone head of production. Foremost, Evans was great looking. He looked relaxed, satiated, sexy, like someone who was still enjoying the movie business, or what was left of it. In fact, he looked so good it almost played against him. His black velvet hair and pressed collars belied how impossibly hard he worked, and wrongly assured many, at first glance, that they had been right to dismiss him as a pretty playboy loafer riding high and lucky on the expense account of a lifetime.

“There are no young people in Hollywood,” Polanski had grumbled in 1964. By 1967, that had changed. Bonnie and Clyde, which opened that year, was a watershed; it ushered into Hollywood an era of hot blood, fresh sex, and violence, and introduced a vision of America—less romantic, more realistic—that would change the game and the players, pervading the movie industry and thus the city of Los Angeles. “The change has come with startling speed,” wrote Peter Bart. “Hollywood, a town traditionally dominated by old men, has been but taken over by ‘young turks.’ The big deal and the big news are being made by men 40 and under.” Even the executives were getting younger. There was Robert Evans, of course, at Paramount; Richard Zanuck, 31, at Fox; David Picker, 35, at United Artists. Something was indeed happening.

* its like these young guus were called up from Central Casting for a movement no one was in charge of. Like Gates and Jobs for computers and Vanderbilt for the rise of railroads

Bogdanovich, Coppola, Altman, Friedkin, Polanski—the generation that had grown up with the movies was now, at long last, beginning to make them.

Peter Bart reported in The New York Times, “namely, that it is becoming stylish in the movie colony to be a liberal thinker,” barely possible in the previous generation, when moguls kept their stars’ public images on a tight leash.

“Get her the gun,” Silas told Towne. “If anybody came up this driveway,” Silas continued, “forget it. Women shoot to kill.” Towne got the message. “Where do you work?” he asked the vice cop. “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, is nothing. Because with the different tongs, the language and everything else, we can’t tell whether we’re helping somebody commit a crime or prevent one. So, we just … we do nothing.”

Silas is a real undercover cop actually working in Chinatowne that sold Towne a dog meant for security

Safe in their hotel room in Oregon, Towne and Payne settled in for the evening. “I want to write a movie for Jack,” Towne told her. That is, he wanted to write a leading-man part for Nicholson, his first. Jack had had his share of big roles in small movies and small roles in big movies, but he never played a big part, the romantic lead, in a big Hollywood movie. Towne would change that. “What kind of movie?” “A detective movie. Maybe Jane Fonda for the blonde.” “What’s it about?” “Los Angeles. In the thirties. Before the war.” He was still thinking about Raymond Chandler, about the Los Angeles they had both lost. “What happens?” “I don’t know. That’s all I know.” “I’ll go to the library,” she said. “Let me see what I can find.”

“Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city,” wrote Los Angeles historian Morrow Mayo. “On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes, and mouthwash.” Other cities experienced booms, whose migrants settled gradually and came from neighboring regions, but Los Angeles, the most advertised city in America, experienced constant booms, drawing migrants from all corners of the country, and at such an incredible rate, that each boom, to accommodate the influx, inflicted destructive erasures on self and city. If the city ever knew what it was, it kept forgetting.

In 1938 the average apartment tenancy in Los Angeles was six weeks long.

No wonder Los Angeles, into the forties, had the largest number of dog and cat hospitals in America, and the nation’s most prestigious animal graveyard, the Hollywood Pet Cemetery. It was loneliness.

Into the forties the divorce and suicide rates of Los Angeles were more than double the national average. It was a good place to be Philip Marlowe.

Be they dreamers or detectives, the original heroes and antiheroes of L.A. crime were palpably screenwriters in disguise, losers of varying degrees of honor as far from their big score or big bust as were screenwriters, divested of their creative ownership, from their dream, their writing. For, as Chandler wrote near the end of his Hollywood career, “I am a writer and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me.… It doesn’t have to be great writing, it doesn’t even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.”

* Agency of your life

While the Los Angeles basin is home to nearly half the residents of California, it contains—according to McWilliams’s statistics—only .06% of the state’s natural water flow. There is not a single Southern California river, natural lake, or creek with a steady year-round supply of water, he writes. In fact, the entire region is no more than a semi-arid desert masquerading as a paradise. Without the water imported from Owens Valley, the Colorado River and other sources, life as it exists in Southern California would be unsustainable.

Los Angeles, more than most cities, seems to me to have always been a place where people never thought they would come to live but had to strike it rich and get out of there. It was a place to be mined, whether for gold or oil, or fame and Hollywood.

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.

He had his name removed from the picture. Forfeiting the recognition and residuals that came with screen credit, Towne revealed a measure of integrity that wouldn’t fill the bank account but reaffirmed Payne’s devotion. She respected him. “Robert was not working for money,” she said. It was a relief. Having grown up in Hollywood, Payne had seen her share of disconsolate compromise, especially in screenwriters—their ideals, careers, and even marriages corrupted by misguided ambition and its ancillaries self-denial, artistic failure, addiction. Her stepfather, the screenwriter Charles Lederer, was then caving to methedrine and Demerol, nodding off in his yellow chair in his book-piled office on Bedford Drive, his mind lost to the empty vials at his toes. “Twelve bloody babies…,” he droned to Payne and Towne, clawing at his arms. There were big bugs under his skin, he insisted between weeping jags, crying out for his aunt, Marion Davies, ten years in her grave. Grief and memory collided in chemicals, and all that he lost Lederer gurgled back in broken haikus that Payne, fluent in the family psychosis, pieced together for Towne: “Twelve bloody babies,” she explained to him, “means the twelve months of the year.”

“Memories swell [like a bee sting],” he wrote. “When we first feel them in our skin there’s that breathcatching moment before knowing whether we’ll feel grief or joy.”

He remembered feeling part of a community—a group of people with shared values—and that sense of moral unity—“the notion that some things are not for buying and selling”—that seemed to have left America after World War II. Or was it after the Kennedy assassination? Or the murder of Sharon Tate? “I have no regrets,” he would write, “about having missed that semi-fabled epoch when men were men, women women, and writers rogues, but I increasingly feel—I suspect we all do—that the history of life on earth is not one of evolution so much as devolution. With each succeeding generation we get weaker and smaller; the Titans are always in the past.”

*

This is what he was now, surly and ecstatic, giant and decreased, less a man than an idea lost on a dreaming sea. Evenings, night, always found him alone, a light turned on above his head, walled in high cliffs of paper. Behind the paper sat a boy and his tide pool.

For his detective, Towne would go against genre; his detective would do divorce work. Unlike Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Towne’s hero would do it for the money.

Interesting contrast with how he felt about screen writers working for the money

Gittes would be lost in Chinatown, Towne decided. There are only two rules, two limits, he has: “Look out for your client and don’t get tough”—Towne crossed out “tough” and wrote “lost in Chinatown.”

Dextroamphetamine. That had always helped. Ever since Towne was eighteen: One quarter of a 5 mg tab just to get a “jump start” in the mornings.

Amphetamine for ADHD, sports performance, and so soldiers can stay awake and fight longer

Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write—and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets—but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them—that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would even make such a movie? Columbia wouldn’t even let him write forty fucks.

Robert was the strong one and Edward was the weak one, but Edward was the brilliant one. I mean the guy was smart. Character psychology and motivation were his forte. The guy deserves credit, a lot of credit indeed.”

Those who wanted him to fail—be they competitors, enviers, or ex-lovers—would attribute Paramount’s fairy-tale ascent to Evans’s legendarily great good luck, but as Evans, borrowing from Seneca, liked to counter, crossing his ankles on the coffee table: “Luck, my friend, is where opportunity meets preparation.” They surely met in Robert Evans.

Evans hung in. He knew what Towne had done for The Godfather and how much Coppola had gained by it. So he broached the subject of Gatsby. Was Towne interested?

Towne had some credibility

If a screenplay doesn’t get made, does it make a sound?

Everything, Polanski decreed, had to move the water mystery forward; if they could cut it, they should cut it.

They would fight over individual words. Polanski simply would not relent. “People can go crazy sitting with me,” he said, “because I like eliminating every unnecessary word.” “Bob,” Polanski asked after one dispute, “do you think I’m a schmuck?” “No,” Towne returned, “You’re a terrific .400 hitter, which means that I think you’re right less than half the time.”

Evans—making a rare appearance away from work—confessed that he still didn’t get Chinatown, but frankly he wasn’t worried. He was betting on talent, his friends, the surest bets in Hollywood.

Writers had the blank page; Robert Evans had the dial tone.

gerontocracy

Polanski had tossed out Evelyn and Escobar’s affair along with their tangential subplot; he cut many of Gittes’s lowlife vulgarisms and class consciousness, reviving in their place certain hard-boiled characteristics common to the genre;

Interesting twist since Towne loved the detective genre

They were shooting in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, Angelino Heights, a hilly enclave of Victorian and gingerbread houses in turn-of-the-century colors, soft red and orange, turquoise and sea green, with ornate wraparound parapets and spangled Moorish filigrees, the grand promise of an earlier Los Angeles. Since then, most had faded. The lawns had browned.

“And it’s just like I’ve always said,” he explained, “that John Wayne—an actor—was more important to the mass psyche than any single American president.…

(The term “Stockholm syndrome” was coined in 1973, the year the bad guys won. The year we realized the game was rigged and it was better to be hostage-taker than a hostage.)

“It was bizarre,” Koch remembered. “We were making Chinatown the movie, and America was becoming Chinatown the country.” Corruption was hardly a new concept; it was only that America, dreaming for centuries, Polanski believed, was late to the dark awakening. “You find these things in any country,” he said, “where money and power matter,” where good intentions, as Towne might put it, invariably surrender to futility. To powerlessness and defeat. Polanski was making Chinatown about the price of learning that particular truth, “whether about politics or the relationship between a man and a woman,” or the moment when the wall went up around the ghetto, and the phone rang in London and he learned, for all he thought he knew, that he didn’t know anything.

*

But I still have this desperate desire to be loved, to excel in everything, to win admiration and respect, especially from men.” Money and success had brought her little comfort. “Deep down,” she said, “I’m always running hard because I’m running scared. The children of the poor, the children of the divorced are not the most secure people in the world.” Between takes she would look over to her director, “a wicked grin on his face.” She thought, He’s enjoying this moment far too much. 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 and Roman Polanski

Evelyn: Well, I’m judging only on the basis of one afternoon and an evening, but if this is how you go about your work, I’d say that you’d be lucky to get through a whole day.

*

“Longing on a large scale is what makes history,” writes Don DeLillo.

*

the wreckage of Chinatown, transmitted metaphorically, transcends its story and characters. Chinatown is a condition. The condition is the terrible awareness of one’s helplessness, what Towne had always called “the futility of good intentions.” If its resonance surpasses the literal, it is due not only to Towne’s overall concept, the thematic rigor and omnipresence of power and abuse in the script, but to Polanski’s cinematic rendering of Chinatown itself.

It moves too fast for comprehension, evoking, in pace, sound, and color, the figurative, a state of mind, Gittes’s state of mind, his Chinatown past, now his Chinatown present, creating a temporal Sisyphean circle that implies the fruitless persistence of return, emotional incarceration, the failure to mitigate incomprehensible trauma.

What makes Chinatown so uniquely disturbing as an American metaphor is that it is so unlike the whiteness of Ahab’s whale or the greenness of Gatsby’s light. However illusory, these are totems of aspiration, of possibility. Futility and fate, by contrast, are concepts that defy the capitalist’s dream of agency and advancement, the (graying) Protestant work ethic that assured pre-Watergate Americans that life was linear, not cyclical, and the game wasn’t rigged against them.

*

“The American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier,” wrote the philosopher William Barrett in 1962. “His spiritual horizon is still the limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not lived through the crucial experience of human finitude.” A decade after this writing, that spiritual horizon reached its finitude in Vietnam and Watergate, and symbolically in Los Angeles, the geographic end of America.

The Oscars was a feat of public relations, and he was more than happy to do his job. “It’s good for who it’s good for and bad for nobody,” he said. “And it’s a great night out, seeing everybody down there. Who doesn’t like seeing movie stars? That’s why I started working in the business.”

Simpson didn’t believe in the auteur theory; he believed in cocaine.

With so many clients at hand, power shifted: the behemoth agencies, not the studios, would call the shots. It was an industry-wide holdup, and a rich one to boot. ICM represented the producer, the director, the screenwriter, and the author of Jaws, earning them, according to The New York Times, a staggering “ten percent of 53¾ percent of the profits.” Backed by the tremendous power of ICM, Mengers could negotiate a fee of one million dollars for Gene Hackman to appear in Lucky Lady. “As long as they’re dumb enough to pay these prices,” she maintained, “I’m willing to let them.” Fees skyrocketed, budgets skyrocketed, and the attention paid to a film project zeroed in on the deal, and, to defend the enormous upfront investment, the marketing—the beginning and the end of a project—leaving the middle, the actual film itself, almost an afterthought.