Thirty years after a broken Jack Nicholson was escorted off a blood-soaked street with the warning “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” the movie’s portrayal of dark, capitalist evil corrupting sunny Los Angeles remains as vivid as ever.
What is hard to believe, even after three decades, is the arguments and obstacles that “Chinatown,” one of Hollywood’s greatest movies, had to overcome to get made, even at a time when Watergate and Vietnam were forcing Americans to examine their society’s values.
Nowadays, the movie which blends “film noir” thriller with a tale of incest and municipal corruption — the theft of water from rural communities to make the desert of Los Angeles bloom into valuable real estate — seems so perfect that it is studied in film schools.
But four of the men who made the movie, producer Robert Evans, screenwriter Robert Towne, assistant director Hawk Koch and star Jack Nicholson, gathered on the stage of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recently to regale an audience of industry insiders with the troubles they had.
Evans set the tone at the unusual reunion.
He wouldn’t let scriptwriter Towne sit next to him on the stage, setting tongues wagging that a feud continues after all these years. All that he was doing, however, was saving the seat for Nicholson, who turned up as a surprise guest.
To hear Evans tell it, he was the only one at Paramount Pictures who thought he knew what Towne, director Roman Polanski and Nicholson were up to with the film.
But, he admitted, even he didn’t really know.
“If there were 500 people working at Paramount, 500 people thought it was the worst thing they’d ever read in their lives. I said, I don’t understand it, but so what? How can I lose?”
He was referring to having hired Hollywood’s hottest director, Polanski, and one of its rising stars, Nicholson.
The film’s plot drew from everything — Towne’s fight to stop a housing development to a magazine article he read about Los Angeles in the 1930s to an expose about how officials diverted water from other areas to ensure Los Angeles’ growth.
Incest and corruptionTopping that off was Towne’s friendships with an incest victim and a vice cop who told him he couldn’t make arrests in Chinatown because local officials had been bought off.
The screenwriter cheerfully admitted he and Polanski had titanic battles over every aspect of his script during the day — but that didn’t cut into their partying at night.
The men are still friends, and Towne credits Polanski for many of the touches that turned “Chinatown” into what Richard Schickel, Time magazine’s film critic and the evening’s moderator, calls “a perfect accident, one of the great American films of the last 30 years.”
For example, it was Polanski who insisted that the ending be changed so that John Huston’s evil capitalist Noah Cross triumphs, while his daughter, Evelyn Mulray, played by Faye Dunaway, gets a bullet through her head on a Chinatown street.
Towne had wanted a more upbeat ending: Cross killed by the daughter with whom he had fathered a child, followed by a courtroom scene in which she gets sent to jail.
“Roman was right to say that he wanted an ending this stark for a movie so complicated,” Towne said. “I said, ‘I’ll write it but it will be shit.”’
Evans reminded Towne he never would have won an Oscar if he had done it his way.
Towne also credits Polanski with sharpening the key ‘My sister, my daughter” scene in which Nicholson, playing sleazy divorce detective Jake Gittes, slaps Dunaway silly because she made no sense in explaining what her relationship was to the film’s mystery woman.
And it was Polanski as well who came up with the idea that if a thug slashes Gittis’s nose halfway through the film because he was too “nosy,” then the character would have to wear a bandage or stitches for the rest of the movie. Polanski went on to play that thug with great gusto.
The director clearly played a major role in shaping the blockbuster and seemed headed for a major Hollywood career. But four years later he was in exile in Europe, having fled there to avoid jail for having had sex with a minor.
After years of making indifferent films in Paris, he won an Oscar in 2003 for best director for “The Pianist,” an account of the Holocaust in Warsaw, based partly on his memories of surviving during the war.
Evans said he was convinced “Chinatown” would bomb and that the Paramount front office hated it.
But said Nicholson: “I didn’t know we were pariahs. I thought we were as hot as firecrackers.”
After the panel discussion, Nicholson stayed to watch a showing of the film and told Towne, “You know, it’s pretty good.”