The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

Written by Sam Wasson

Narrated by Sam Wasson

From the New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and Fosse comes the revelatory account of the making of a modern American masterpiece.

Chinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making.

In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history. Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, as compelling a movie star as there has ever been, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage death of his wife, returning to Los Angeles, the scene of the crime, where the seeds of his own self-destruction are quickly planted. Here is the fevered dealmaking of "The Kid" Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. Here too is Robert Towne's fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written. Wasson for the first time peels off layers of myth to provide the true account of its creation.

Looming over the story of this classic movie is the imminent eclipse of the '70s filmmaker-friendly studios as they gave way to the corporate Hollywood we know today. In telling that larger story, The Big Goodbye will take its place alongside classics like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and The Devil's Candy as one of the great movie-world books ever written.

Praise for Sam Wasson:
"Wasson is a canny chronicler of old Hollywood and its outsize personalities...More than that, he understands that style matters, and, like his subjects, he has a flair for it." - The New Yorker
"Sam Wasson is a fabulous social historian because he finds meaning in situations and stories that would otherwise be forgotten if he didn't sleuth them out, lovingly." - Hilton Als

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781713524663

Sam Wasson

Sam Wasson is the author of seven books on film, including the New York Times bestsellers Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern American Woman; The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood; and Fosse. With Jeanine Basinger, he is the coauthor of Hollywood: The Oral History. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews for The Big Goodbye

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story of the making of the movie Chinatown, told, more or less, as disorganized often sordid biographies of the movie's producer, screenwriter, lead actor, and director (Robert Evans, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski). This is a tough book to rate. I enjoyed it a lot, it has many great anecdotes, but it has its problems. The text isn't well-organized, jumping around and leaving some holes in the storyline - Didn't Polanksi realize that his producer had completely replaced the composer and score of his movie? The author always seems to be looking around for new scandalous details, even when they concern secondary or tertiary characters, and the whole shape of the story seems to be guided by the decadent and miserable stories that are available. So, for example, Roman Polanski's statutory rape case is described in great detail, but it postdates the movie. Also, it still isn't clear to me how Chinatown represented the last years of Hollywood, there have been many great movies of all kinds made in the U.S. since then, and it's not like the old studio system was still active in the mid-1970s.

[pattylee-621744 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Except for a bog in the middle, quite readable. Also, I hate books with proper chapters. The tale of the making of the movie Chinatown is the story of the writer Robert Towne, the producer Robert Evan’s, the director Roman Polanski, and the actor Jack Nicholson. While the book is revealing and interesting, it is also sad because the end of the book is the end of Hollywood, now a place where art doesn’t matter, only money.

[john.cooper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Big Goodbye satisfies my main criteria for a book about a specific historical subject: the author has interviewed a vast number of people who were in a position to know about the things he's writing about (including the producer Robert Evans, who died last year at age 89); and he's documented his sources in extensive footnotes. That means I can trust what he's telling me—despite the over-the-top, enthusiastic style he uses to write it.It's hard to explain the breathless way this story is delivered without quoting it or parodying it. Another reviewer calls it "film noirish," but that's not quite it. It's almost closer to a romance novel, or a teen confessional. Again and again, crazy, hard-to-believe anecdotes are delivered, but when you check the footnotes, you find he didn't make it up. I think in a couple of instances the sources indicate that the story should be taken with a grain of salt, but for the most part, they're reputable. The one device that I found went too far was the author's way of quoting the words of someone long dead and adding, portentously, "He meant it." Or, "She meant it." The readers can decide for themselves how much the speaker might have meant what they said; no one, not excepting the author, is in a position to know for sure.Although the book is about the making of the movie Chinatown, it's told in the form of a multiple third-person memoir. First you're introduced to director Polanski, a young, charismatic force of nature still making his reputation in America, horribly haunted by a heartrending and brutal childhood. Then to screenwriter Robert Towne, a similarly talented young man with his own demons, scraping by on borrowed money and hocked property as he nurtured his pet project year after year. Shorter sections take us into the worlds of Nicholson and, to a shallower extent, Dunaway, as well as the production designer and cinematographers. The author understands the craft of movie making very well. The time, place, and project are all brought so vividly to life that it becomes easy to imagine oneself a bystander or bit player, maybe a lighting technician or assistant to the assistant director, unable to affect the course of events, but with an excellent view of them. Wasson portrays his subjects—Polanski, Towne, Nicholson, Evans, and the extended cast and crew around them—fairly, not avoiding the awful things they sometimes did, but putting them in the context of their lives and times. Maybe I would have written the book more soberly, but maybe a more serious style wouldn't have done justice to the subject.

[pivic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book about a state of mind: Chinatown, not to be confused with a physical locale. It is also a book about the persons who made Chinatown, the film, and how they affected others. Additionally, the book is one big sign-o’-the-times of the 1970s.

The main players are Robert Towne, scriptwriter extraordinaire, Roman Polanski, prodigal director and mess, Robert Evans, film-studio exec-cum-playboy, and Jack Nicholson, Hollywood noveau-golden-age Goose.

The book reminds me of Peter Biskind’s runaway Easy Riders, Raging Bulls which is often described as entertaining, apocryphal, and filled with smear. I cannot say how true this book is, especially as some of its participants are dead and others have not been involved in the making of this book, and as such, I choose to handle it a bit like a fable, something that Werner Herzog refers to as ecstatic truth.

The book starts off with Sharon Tate.

He would stare at Sharon, unbelieving. It was impossible, someone so perfect, and yet, there she was. Wasn’t she? “She was just fantastic,” Polanski would say. “She was a fucking angel.” Her hair of yellow chaparral, the changing color of her eyes, the unqualified kindness of her face. Did people like this exist? In a world of chaos, was it naive to trust, as a child would, the apparent goodness of things, the feeling of safety he had known and lost before?

This book wins, over and over again, by invoking a film-noir atmosphere. Wasson paints such a romantic and straightforward picture of Hollywood at the time, its inhabitants, and the main players who made Chinatown, that I felt the allure of the book and kept coming back to it. It reads like an old-school detective novel.

Robert Towne is a screenwriter with a slew of legendary films under his belt. Before making Chinatown, he was revered and simultaneously forgettable. He needed something to make his mark and keep going.

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.

By 1972 Towne and Payne were nearly broke. “In those days,” Payne said, “you could not pay Robert to write if he didn’t want to write. He just wouldn’t do it. He wrote only for love.”

Warren Beatty would call Payne: “How’s it going?”
“Slow. Robert won’t put a word on the page until he thinks it’s perfect.”
“If he ever asks you what you think, don’t say anything, because he’ll stop.” And then, as it always had, the moment came. He handed her pages.

“What do you think?” Julie glanced, but her answer was ready-made.

“Shorter.”

She hocked her diamond earrings.

This book contains many glimmers of the work magic that somehow came over everybody involved, which, in the end, managed to become Chinatown. It wasn’t from lack of trying. It’s obvious that the main persons fought hard to have their way with the film, including hands-on approaches from the likes of Evans.

One crisis immediately gave way to another. “What is this?” Polanski asked of the dailies. He was in the screening room of the Canon Drive office, surrounded by his team, the Sylberts, Koch, Cortez.

“This reddish tint. We didn’t shoot this.” Polanski went down to the lab to see how they were printing the film. “Why is everything tinted?”

“Robert Evans requested it.”

“He did?” Polanski raged into Evans’s office. “Why did you do this? Everything looks like ketchup.”

“I wanted to try. Just to see—”

“Well, now we know and now we go back.” Later, Polanski and Sylbert would laugh about this interference. Evans’s artistic convictions “were sometimes quite naive,” Polanski reflected.

Knowing he had transgressed on the tinting, Evans retreated, and the intended naturalism of the Chinatown dailies was restored.

What a writing process, right in the midst of cocaine madness!

So goodbye to his endless supporting characters, goodbye to the love story of Byron Samples and Ida Samples; goodbye to Evelyn’s affair with a mystery man and Gittes’s looming jealousy, “which I felt would have been more interesting,” Towne said; goodbye to Gittes’s and Evelyn’s protracted and suspicious courtship, her violent outbursts, his many faraway mentions of Chinatown; goodbye to Julian Cross’s drug addiction; Julie’s favorite scene, containing Cross’s eerie aria to the sweet smell of horseshit; goodbye to the betrayal of Gittes by his partners, Duffy and Walsh, and his extended consultation with his lawyer, Bressler; goodbye to Escobar’s jagged history with the Cross family; goodbye to Gittes’s passion, Towne’s passion really, for Seabiscuit, intended to contain Gittes’s uptown ambitions; goodbye to Chinatown’s multiple points of view: “You [should] never show things that happen in [Gittes’s] absence,” Polanski said; goodbye to the slowly encroaching paranoia, the hurricane of subplots that swirled around Gittes; goodbye to everything that wasn’t water. Everything, Polanski decreed, had to move the water mystery forward; if they could cut it, they should cut it. But when it came to certain elements—namely, the love story (Towne wanted more scenes; Polanski, certain a good sex scene would suffice, fewer) and of course the ending—Towne and Polanski had two opposing definitions of “could.” They fought. Their arguments were painful. Each was smart enough to see the virtues in the other’s strategy; both were correct.

On the coffee table there was a bowl of cash to take from—to remind his many friends and lovers that he was still, despite his earnings, very much the Weaver of Pupi’s. There was also an opulent cocaine pyramid, pointing skyward in a help-yourself bowl in the foyer. For Polanski, this was a welcome change from the Lotus Apartments. At Nicholson’s, the ghosts were slower to find him. But when night came and the living room dimmed, city lights stalked the windows, and the mood moved down and away, to Sharon and to Chinatown. Polanski saw why he had come back: It was because he had never left.

There are many great things about this book. The main gripe that I have with it, is that the rhythm of the book is unwavering in its hard-boiled film-noirish sensibility; it becomes a kind of parody of the times that it wants to display.

Yet, there is more behind the surface than the above. Wasson does go into Polanski’s rape of a child, Sharon Tate’s murder, the follow-up film—The Two Jakes—but leaves very little to chance. Reading this book is akin to a whodunnit by Christopher Brookmyre: a well-written tale that twists and hints throughout, and delivers well. I recommend this to all who are interested in the second golden age of Hollywood and who want to see a true work of art come into existence.