Once the director Roman Polanski got the script, he rewrote large pieces of it as well. Towne’s friend Edward Taylor, a prodigious reader of mystery novels, gave a lot of effort to the script without receiving any credit. According to Sam Wasson, Towne had nothing but a muddled script that made so little sense that when Faye Dunaway read it she couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. It’s amazing that Chinatown ever made the transition from a concept in Robert Towne’s mind to the big screen. Jake Gittis is the type of guy who is hired to sift through the shadows and poke his nose in where no one wants it to be. The sun shines so brilliantly in Los Angeles that it illuminates the shadows if one takes the blinders off and bothers to look. It has a more cynical understanding about the insidiousness of human behavior that remains hidden under a veneer of respectability or buried under a mound of money. It has that timeless quality, an old setting mixed with modern concepts. It came out in 1974, but it could have just as easily come out in 1944. I have a lot of nostalgia for the movie 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.” Thinking you’ve got it figured out and realizing you’re dead-that’s Chinatown. Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark-that’s Chinatown. Not just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a condition of total awareness almost indistinguishable from blindness. ”Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind. "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 "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 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. 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. Wasson for the first time peels off layers of myth to provide the true account of its creation. Here too is Robert Towne's fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written. Here is the fevered dealmaking of "The Kid" Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. 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 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. In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. and Fosse comes the revelatory account of the making of a modern American masterpieceĬhinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. From the New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |