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The Big Goodbye: ‘Chinatown’ and the Last Years of Hollywood

Sam Wasson

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Sep 18, 2023
Category: Entertainment

I started to read “The Big Goodbye” after dinner. I read until 11, slept for a few hours, read until 4.

The next night, I did it again.

Be warned: you may also get lost in Sam Wasson’s book — it is that good. I’m not an outlier: Francis Ford Coppola called it “the de facto blueprint for aspiring screenwriters, a platonic ideal of both structure and style taught as a template around the world.” The New York Times agrees: “Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie… Wasson is one of the great chroniclers of Hollywood lore. And he has truly outdone himself this time.”

Wearing my screenwriter’s hat, I can knowledgeably report that this is the best film book any film lover is likely to read. For general readers? Maybe one of the best non-fiction books not written by Erik Larson. [To stream “Chinatown” from Amazon Prime, click here. To buy “The Big Goodbye” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

Why such praise? Because “The Big Goodbye” is much, much more than the inside, untold story of the 1974 classic film.

The title is a metaphor. For Los Angeles, once a desert, now an irrigated suburbia. For power, which makes gods of the rich. And for a moral fog overhanging a city that advertises its virtues and conceals its vices. It’s a great book about LA in 1937, and a great book about us right now — as Towne has written, “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” — and it has a lot more to feed your head than most of what now passes for wisdom.

Yes, but what about the stories — the dish on Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, producer Robert Evans, and the film’s creator, screenwriter Robert Towne? The book is a blow by blow account — literally: cocaine is a minor character here — of the genesis of the film, the shooting, the post-production, and the studio machinations.

Like: Bob Towne, who invented a movie identity for himself — he was born Bob Schwartz. Starting when he was 18, he took a small dose of amphetamines every morning to give himself a “jump start.” A solitary genius? He had an uncredited partner who worked with him almost every day.

Like: Bob Evans, the producer, who showed up on the first day of filming on a stretcher.

Like: Roman Polanski, usually supremely confident, who threw up on the first day of filming.

Like the film score that was so wrong it was scrapped ten days before the premiere. And a million details, so interwoven that you feel Wasson talked to everyone; in fact, Nicholson and Dunaway gave no interviews. [You can understand why when you read this about Dunaway: “The crew finally did turn against Dunaway, and her delusions came true. They hated her. She regarded their every creative impulse with suspicion… Polanski saw signs of an actress who hadn’t prepared… A strand of Dunaway’s hair caught the light in the middle of shooting a scene, he called cut, and summoned her hairdresser to smooth it down… in the next take the hair popped up again and Polanski reached over and plucked it out.”]

All that is riveting. But the writing! The writing! Here’s the Introduction, called “First Goodbyes.”

Jack Nicholson, a boy, could never forget sitting at the bar with John J. Nicholson, Jack’s namesake and maybe even his father, a soft little dapper Irishman in glasses. He kept neatly combed what was left of his red hair and had long ago separated from Jack’s mother, their high school romance gone the way of any available drink. They told Jack that John had once been a great ballplayer and that he decorated store windows, all five Steinbachs in Asbury Park, though the only place Jack ever saw this man was in the bar, day-drinking apricot brandy and Hennessy, shot after shot, quietly waiting for the mercy to kick in. Jack’s mother, Ethel May, told him he started drinking only when Prohibition ended, but somehow Jack got the notion that she drove him to it.

Robert Evans, a boy, in the family apartment at 110 Riverside Drive, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, could never forget watching his father, Archie, a dentist, dutifully committed to work and family, sit down at the Steinway in the living room after a ten-hour day of pulling teeth up in Harlem and come alive. His father could be at Carnegie Hall, the boy thought; he could be Gershwin or Rachmaninoff, but he was, instead, a friendless husband, a father of three, caught in the unending cycle of earn and provide for his children, his wife, his mother, and his three sisters. But living in him was the Blue Danube. “That wouldn’t be me,” Evans promised himself. “I’ll live.”

Robert Towne, a boy, left San Pedro. His father, Lou, moved his family from the little port town, bright and silent, and left, for good, Mrs. Walker’s hamburger stand and the proud fleets of tuna boats pushing out to sea. More than just the gardenias and jasmine winds and great tidal waves of pink bougainvillea cascading to the dust, Robert could never forget that time before the war when one story spoke for everyone — the boy, his parents, Mrs. Walker and her customers, the people of San Pedro, America, sitting together at those sun-cooked redwood tables, cooling themselves with fresh-squeezed orange juice, all breathing the same salt air.

There was the day, many raids later — a hot, sunny day—when Roman Polanski found the streets of Kraków deserted. It was the silence that day that he could never forget, the two SS guards calmly patrolling the barbed-wire fence. This was a new feeling, a new kind of alone. In terror, he ran to his grandmother’s apartment in search of his father. The room was empty of everything save the remnants of a recent chaos, and he fled. Outside on the street, a stranger said, “If you know what’s good for you, get lost.”

When these four boys grew up, they made a movie together called “Chinatown.”

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. This is a book about Chinatowns: Roman Polanski’s, Robert Towne’s, Robert Evans’s, Jack Nicholson’s, the ones they made and the ones they inherited, their guilt and their innocence, what they did right, what they did wrong — and what they could do nothing to stop.

See why I read late into the night?

BONUS TIDBIT

Towne was known as a script doctor before “Chinatown.” He worked on “Bonnie and Clyde,” and, at a critical point in “The Godfather,” he flew to New York, stayed up all night, and, inspired by a line about “string” on the back of the book, wrote this memorable speech for Marlon Brando:

“I never wanted this for you. I worked my whole life — I don’t apologize — to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those bigshots. I don’t apologize — that’s my life — but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string. Senator Corleone; Governor Corleone. Well, it wasn’t enough time, Michael. It wasn’t enough time.”

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Excerpted from the “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.” Copyright © 2020 by Sam Wasson. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.