Film Books - The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
By Sam Wasson
Flatiron Books
February 4, 2020
$28.99
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By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Wasson's intricate, meticulous book focuses on one of the greatest
movies ever made, the glittering piece of perfection that is Chinatown
(1974). Yet the process of achieving it was anything but perfect. The
book goes into great detail on four very different men, Jack Nicholson,
Roman Polanski, Robert Towne, and Robert Evans, and everything that led
up to that moment, including the death of Polanski's wife Sharon Tate.
An early chapter on Polanski, which deals with the Holocaust and a
murder, butts right up against a chapter on Towne, who had it
comparatively easy growing up in Los Angeles and becoming a writer in
his 20s. But the two chapters do equal justice to the men, and make
their inner struggles equally compelling. The story behind the
production is amazingly, vividly detailed, not just in the physical
events, but also the players' emotional states, as if Wasson simply
traveled back in time and witnessed everything firsthand. (His research
must have been intensely painstaking.) Fights, drugs, and plenty of
not-so-glamorous stuff rubs up against casual name dropping of so many
legendary artists, who simply shared the same circles back then. And
when success is achieved, from the completion of a difficult shot to the
reception of the final film, it feels like a triumph.
