The Neon Bible - Flashback: Chinatown
A plan to divert LA's water system. A private eye with a bandaged nose. Corruption. Lies. Incest. What was going on in Chinatown? No one knew until after they'd made it...
No one in Hollywood was surprised when Robert Evans announced that he wanted to produce his own movies. As head of Paramount between '66 and '74, he'd help bring major hits such as Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and The Godfather into being, almost single-handedly saving the studio from ruin. His desire to make films under the aegis of his own company was easy to understand, and Paramount readily agreed to back him, guiding Evans towards The Gambler, a poker picture scripted by James Toback and set to star James Caan and Lauren Bacall.
Instead Evans chose Chinatown, a script he'd received from Robert Towne, a gifted script-doctor and television writer then locked in a stalemate with the producers of The Last Detail over his repeated use of the work 'motherfucker' in his screenplay. Set in '30s Los Angeles, Chinatown was a dense, layered thriller in the tradition of Hammett and Chandler. It followed the byzantine investigations of Jake Gittes, a Marlow-esque gumshoe who becomes embroiled in an elaborate scam to profit from the city’s water supply. Initially, Evans was baffled by Towne's story, but there was a quality about the script that appealed to him, even if it completely escaped almost everyone else in the business.
Yet if his choice of script was perplexing, Evans' intended cast and crew were positively bizarre: Faye Dunaway, a leading lady famed for her quick temper; Jack Nicholson, a rising actor who'd yet to deliver a hit; and Roman Polanksi who combined the eccentricity of Kubrick with the meticulousness of, well, Kubrick. When Dunaway clashed furiously with the director during the shoot, Evans measured the line of people who’d be queuing up to say 'I told you so' in "miles rather than metres".
It was only when the film reached the theaters that the producer was able to face his critics. Chinatown became a massive box-office success and received 11 Academy Award nominations - although only Towne's script won an Oscar.
All these years on, Chinatown remains the quintessential Hollywood thriller, classic in style, modern in outlook. Many films have tried to better it - some, like LA Confidential, have come surprisingly close - but none has seriously approached Chinatown's near-mythic reputation.
"In the years since its release," said the New York Times in a 1990 retrospective, "Chinatown has grown into something more than even its glowing reviews and Academy Award nominations promised."
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