The Big Goodbye Quotes

“So much of writing,” he said, “is trying to avoid facing it.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“I have something I’m working on,” Towne revealed. “A love story.” “Go on.” “It’s called Chinatown.” “Keep going.” “That’s all I have.” Towne elaborated as best he could. He told Evans about the water, about the detective who falls in love with the daughter of an eminent criminal, “and I have Nicholson. He wants to do it.” “Sounds perfect for Irish”—Evans’s nickname for Nicholson—“It’s set in Chinatown?” “No. Chinatown is a state of mind.” “A love state of mind?” “The detective’s fucked-up state of mind.” Evans was lost. “I see.” “But the love story is Chinatown too.” “But it’s not set in Chinatown?” “No. Chinatown’s a feeling.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“She tried to imagine marriage, as she had as a girl at St. Clerans, her family’s estate in Ireland, covering her eyes with a veil and dream-walking the grounds as a fairy-girl bride, but she quickly came to: There was always present the vortex of a darker past, what had been done to her and Jack as children, what they had done to each other as adults, and would probably, even against their will, do to each other again. In Barcelona they met again. They talked of Regina Le Clery, his friend who had just died in a plane crash at Orly Airport, and again of her mother, killed in a car crash in 1969, who managed her father’s many transgressions ably, like a deposed queen burying a broken heart; and they talked of ghosts, memories that lace the eye; and he fell asleep fingering the pearls, once her mother’s, she wore that night to bed; and following him to France, she discovered he had slept with another woman.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Luck, my friend, is where opportunity meets preparation.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“At Woodland, in walked David Geffen, Anjelica Huston, maybe Dustin Hoffman, tennis shoes under his arm. “Did I miss the game?” Alain Delon … Mengers and Evans at the pool, drinking a bottle of white wine cellar–plucked for the occasion: “Now really, Sue … Do you get white wine at Columbia?” Giggling: “You and I have never agreed on any kind of material. And so far you’ve been right.” Now down to casting. “I think of De Niro.…”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“On the phone in the living room, Henry Kissinger, a frequent overnight guest, engages in apparently serious conversation: “Mm. Yes. Yes, undoubtedly.…” Gilruth swoops in to light pine-scented candles and slip a coaster under Kissinger’s drink. Kissinger nods his thanks. Gilruth nods back. They’ve done this before. The music, a comely mingling of rock and jazz standards: “You must remember this.…” The threads of golden sconce light pinging off the roses … The china, gilded with a naked girl riding a centaur, waiting contentedly on a dining room table. Printed linen walls.… Gilruth—handsomely grizzled, William Holden with a tan—whistles while he works. “A sigh is just a sigh.…” “Yes,” Kissinger says. “Yes, goodbye.” Click. “The fun-da-mental things … apply.…” Kissinger stands. “As time”—he croaks on his way to the guest room to change—“goes … by.…”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“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. He insisted it must be in the film as a literal location, but he filmed it metaphorically, amid the vacant black limbo of nightmare. It’s hard to see and it’s too quiet. It doesn’t seem real.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“The wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“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.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“The Fortune,”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“The Two Jakes.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Personal Best,”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Greystoke.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“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.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“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. It is no wonder, then, that Towne’s metaphor should borrow its desolation from Polanski, a European. “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. As Towne foresaw, the only place left to go was up—up to The Sting, to “Happy Days,” Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, to “a mix of nostalgia and parody,” Kael wrote, the mass denial of the terrible truths Gittes was powerless to undo.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“The sound stunned Evans. The ache, the longing, dying but sweetly pleading, like a happy memory drowning in truth. It was what he had been searching for, not just for Chinatown, his love story in need of love, but for those long Woodland nights he waited out alone in bed, flipping through old photograph albums, the pictures of Ali, whom he had let go, pictures of Ali and his son Josh, the family he had traded, one night at a time, for The Godfather. He knew he had fucked up. Goldsmith’s music was scant consolation, only magic, but where love and real life failed his foolish cravings, the music ennobled them in brass and piano and harp. Their glissandos were running water, growing in him the feeling, easy to forget, of why he was right, despite all the shit, to love Hollywood in the first place. The feeling was that word he lost so much trying to find and hold on to—now he had it—a word, in the time of Nixon, almost embarrassing to speak—“romance.” For Evans it was more than moonlight and ocean winds and Gatsby’s green flare across the bay; it was not fantasy but palpable evidence of a dream becoming true, the rare and shivery threshold of immeasurable pleasure, the promise imagination grants the mundane, and the mountain stream through which beauty and goodness, against all probability and reason, flow down into the world as art. It was, out of the darkness, a faith. Like Polanski’s crane, a lift, redemption, grace. True or false, it didn’t matter; as long as it was felt once, it could be felt again. Hearing that music for the first time, thinking of his father, he cried.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“If you give me ten more minutes of music,” Evans whispered to Lambro in April, three weeks before the preview screening, “I can get an album out of the score. There was an hour of music in Love Story and we won the Oscar for that.” Prestige. Evans would remember, thirty years earlier, his father riding the elevator down from rich Uncle Abe’s apartment: “The wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die.” His father, the piano-playing dentist. “I’ll live.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“The hegemonic sanctity of all American institutions—with the notable exceptions of Hollywood and the music industry—went down with the president, finishing off, historian Andreas Killen writes, “the greatest prolonged boom in the history of capitalism.” That year, a year Killen called “a genuine low point in U.S. history,” something that had been ending for years was suddenly over. There was the 1973 oil embargo and subsequent depression; the ’73 failure of the Vietnam War, the longest war to date in U.S. history, with more than thirteen hundred MIAs; the January ’73 report in Time that airplane hijackings had reached epidemic proportions, and the disturbing number of passengers aboard those flights who, incredibly, found themselves siding with their captors. So disenchanted were they, Tom Wolfe wrote, with “the endless exfoliations of American power,” that he observed: “It is astonishing how often hostages come away from their ordeal describing the Hostage Taker as ‘nice,’ ‘considerate,’ even ‘likeable.’” (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.)”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“We still have dreams, but we know now that most of them will come to nothing. And we also most fortunately know that it really doesn’t matter. —Raymond Chandler, letter to Charles Morton, October 9, 1950”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood