![]() These films were built around a certain rather predictable model: a cast of stars, desperate to survive a cataclysm, which in the former took the shape of a capsized ocean liner and in the latter a skyscraper aflame. It’s a compelling argument, especially when we consider the rise of the blockbuster, beginning with “Universal’s Airport in 1970.” Even as Chinatown was in production, Wasson writes, Fox was earning “monster returns” from The Poseidon Adventure-the second-highest-grossing film of 1972, after The Godfather-and The Towering Inferno, the “top grosser” of 1974. The Big Goodbye-the title is a play on Chandler’s 1953 novel The Long Goodbye-begins in that 1960s milieu and follows an arc through the 1974 release of Chinatown, which Wasson posits as the last real Hollywood movie. They’re going to mine it until it runs dry.” The same, of course, might be said of Hollywood, where, by the 1960s, “United Artists and the Mirisch Corporation spent $750,000 for rights to James Michener’s Hawaii and novelists Harold Robbins and Irving Wallace were getting a reported million for the movie rights to books they hadn’t written yet.” “Everybody’s out to make a buck,” Wasson quotes him. His formulation begins with Gittes, who is retained to investigate Horace Mulwray, a water department engineer, for infidelity, only to discover the conspiracy. Here we see the history that captivated Robert Towne, Los Angeles born and bred he wrote Chinatown as a portrait of his hometown. Take it,” William Mulholland, who ran the Bureau of Water Works and Supply, would exhort as water poured into the aqueduct it is, perhaps, the quintessential statement of Los Angeles, its aspiration and its greed.) In a very real way, this is Los Angeles’s origin story, a narrative in which private interest, masquerading as public good, changed the landscape of the city for both good and ill. ![]() Harrison Gray Otis and Harry Chandler, had secretly bought up a hundred thousand acres. ![]() Cain, and Raymond Chandler, who saw beneath the city’s glittering surfaces, its speed and surf and sun-“their nightmare was the city,” he insists-and second, the deeper corruption of what Carey McWilliams called the “Owens Valley Tragedy,” in which an aqueduct was built, diverting water from the Owens River Valley, not to central Los Angeles but rather to “the north end of the San Fernando Valley,” where a cabal of civic leaders, including rail tycoon Henry Huntington and the Los Angeles Times’ Gen. Wasson breaks them down early in The Big Goodbye: First, the cynical sensibilities of novelists such as Horace McCoy, James M. That light is a key, if complicated, component of Chinatown, which attempts to conflate, or integrate, a pair of Los Angeles creation myths. What I mean is that my initial experience of Chinatown was about as neutral as it is possible to imagine, far from the way I would later come to think about the film. ![]() As for Polanski, I had no idea who he was. Had I seen Nicholson before? I don’t think so. I liked crime fiction, though, and I remember the prurient shock of watching as the film’s director, Roman Polanski, who had a cameo as a gangster, sliced open the nose of the detective hero, J.J. I had not yet given much thought to water, nor to the conventions of the hard-boiled mystery. I was about to turn 13: I did not know anything about Southern California, either its history or its prevailing myths. This was in the early 1970s, before the era of the multiplex, and movies would arrive in a cluster, spreading across the Cape’s beach towns like sea spray off Nantucket Sound. The first time I saw Chinatown, I was about as far as you can get from Los Angeles-sitting by myself in an old movie house in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
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