You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.94 AVERAGE
3.94 AVERAGE
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I’d go on and on about this, but…forget it. It’s Chinatown.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
"Chinatown" is one of the great achievements of American cinema, a tour de force of acting, scriptwriting, and set design, and a film that marked the career peak of four movie giants: actor Jack Nicholson, screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, and director Roman Polanski. But, as Sam Wasson writes in this gorgeous, detailed history, Chinatown also represented the end of an era — not only for its stars but for the Hollywood in which it was created.
"The Big Goodbye" benefits from its colorful characters. Polanski, the Polish-born filmmaker who escaped Poland during the Holocaust and found a happy life in Los Angeles — only to have everything shattered by Sharon Tate's murder; Evans, who took over Paramount Pictures at a frighteningly young age and steered it toward auteur-made movies; Nicholson, the charismatic movie star; and Towne, his generation's finest screenwriter. But this is no hagiography. Each man is a deeply flawed egotist, to the detriment of their work and, it should be noted, to the women in their lives. None could have completed their work without the help of the others. Some of the book's strongest passages detail how Polanski whittled down Towne's complex, multi-layered script; there's a tantalizing alternate version of Chinatown hinted at in these pages.
That Chinatown emerged, in its present form, is remarkable. But the good times would not last. A cocaine addiction ravaged Towne's life; Nicholson, after one more classic performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, descended into camp; while it'd be years before Evans made another good movie again. Polanski's denouement, meanwhile, consisted of a rendezvous with a 13-year-old girl that landed him legal jeopardy and, famously, forced his flight from the country.
Was Chinatown really the end of an era in Hollywood? Wasson is persuasive on this point, arguing that the arrival of Jaws and of bombastic producers like Don Simpson — who cared about nothing but money — firmly ended the auteur-driven era. But I'm not so sure. Hollywood still loves its blockbuster franchises, but the arrival of Netflix and Amazon has provided a venue for movies like Chinatown. Here's hoping that when the world re-opens there will be more stories like this to tell.
"The Big Goodbye" benefits from its colorful characters. Polanski, the Polish-born filmmaker who escaped Poland during the Holocaust and found a happy life in Los Angeles — only to have everything shattered by Sharon Tate's murder; Evans, who took over Paramount Pictures at a frighteningly young age and steered it toward auteur-made movies; Nicholson, the charismatic movie star; and Towne, his generation's finest screenwriter. But this is no hagiography. Each man is a deeply flawed egotist, to the detriment of their work and, it should be noted, to the women in their lives. None could have completed their work without the help of the others. Some of the book's strongest passages detail how Polanski whittled down Towne's complex, multi-layered script; there's a tantalizing alternate version of Chinatown hinted at in these pages.
That Chinatown emerged, in its present form, is remarkable. But the good times would not last. A cocaine addiction ravaged Towne's life; Nicholson, after one more classic performance in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, descended into camp; while it'd be years before Evans made another good movie again. Polanski's denouement, meanwhile, consisted of a rendezvous with a 13-year-old girl that landed him legal jeopardy and, famously, forced his flight from the country.
Was Chinatown really the end of an era in Hollywood? Wasson is persuasive on this point, arguing that the arrival of Jaws and of bombastic producers like Don Simpson — who cared about nothing but money — firmly ended the auteur-driven era. But I'm not so sure. Hollywood still loves its blockbuster franchises, but the arrival of Netflix and Amazon has provided a venue for movies like Chinatown. Here's hoping that when the world re-opens there will be more stories like this to tell.
informative
medium-paced
An absolutely riveting read! Wasson digs deep into the people behind CHINATOWN, and renders each character in nuanced, vibrant strokes. You can almost smell the perfume and the hot dogs while you're reading.
The heart of this book is a deep and hurtful sort of nostalgia that will leave you wishing you could have been a fly on the wall in late '60s and early '70s Hollywood. Which is kind of a weird concept for a movie that is about being nostalgic for the LA of the 1930s. But hey, it works!
The heart of this book is a deep and hurtful sort of nostalgia that will leave you wishing you could have been a fly on the wall in late '60s and early '70s Hollywood. Which is kind of a weird concept for a movie that is about being nostalgic for the LA of the 1930s. But hey, it works!
What Wasson's doing here is something I happen to love attempting in my spare time, which is to link historical events with their cultural consequences. Here it's the death of the New Hollywood era with the production of Chinatown, the last vestiges of self-reflection before America turned to addiction (literally on coke, figuratively on media escapism) to dull the pain of a failed decade. Two delicious subjects that Wasson does a good job at connecting, if not a great one. There's a plethora of detail and research clearly at hand but it's all given at the pace of a mellow novel as opposed to a brimming historical text. Which is cool in theory but sometimes hazy in execution; Wasson tries to split the book between not one or two nor three but four subjects: Polanski, Towne, Evans and Nicholson. You can understand how trying to sum up the totality of four long lives over the course of only 330 pages may feel messy at times. Not that the messiness isn't warranted, or that the text isn't an often thrilling piece of journalism. Wasson just tries a little too hard a little too often, with flowery callbacks that attempt to explain a lifetime's worth of psychoanalysis in two sentences being one of his favorite tricks to pull. A good book, don't get me wrong. It's just not as immense as it would like to be, and not quite as cool as its own cover.
There’s a lot to like about this book. The writing is poetic and thoughtful. It’s clearly well researched. It adds nuance to conventional wisdom (illustrating where Towne and Polanski’s contributions to the screenplay came from; noting Billy Jack’s distribution scheme as a precursor to Jaws), and it tries to put Chinatown in the larger context of the New Hollywood.
Where it struggles is in trying to make the rise and fall of its four leads—Towne, Polanski, Nicholson, and Evans—align with that rise and fall. To make that work, you need to have an incredibly generous and empathic view of these men during their rise and then flatten their actions in the fall. It’s a clumsy parallel and it somewhat overlooks the bad behavior when they were at their heights. Wesson seems to excuse a lot when it’s in service to cinema, so Polanski can never be unprofessional on set; only Faye Dunaway can be unprofessional.
It’s still a very good book, but it’s at its best when it’s about the filmmaking and the industry rather than a biography of its leading players.
Where it struggles is in trying to make the rise and fall of its four leads—Towne, Polanski, Nicholson, and Evans—align with that rise and fall. To make that work, you need to have an incredibly generous and empathic view of these men during their rise and then flatten their actions in the fall. It’s a clumsy parallel and it somewhat overlooks the bad behavior when they were at their heights. Wesson seems to excuse a lot when it’s in service to cinema, so Polanski can never be unprofessional on set; only Faye Dunaway can be unprofessional.
It’s still a very good book, but it’s at its best when it’s about the filmmaking and the industry rather than a biography of its leading players.
a book about four men, but only two were interviewed for it (and one of those wrote a far more interesting autobiography). a rehash of a lot of stories more effectively told elsewhere, with a number of dead-end discursions (why the obsession with constantly including joan didion?). the most effective parts are focused on the production, not the myth.