My Amazon Review of Sam Wasson's "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood"

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*

Sam Wasson has written a very long (416 pages in the print edition) and detailed book about the making of the classic 1974 movie “Chinatown.” It is far more than that in that he introduces the biographies of his four leading protagonists and it is in part a social history of Hollywood and Los Angeles.

His protagonists are screenwriter Robert Towne, who was born in San Pedro; Krakow born director Roman Polanski, actor Jack Nicholson of Asbury Park, New Jersey and producer Robert Evans, the son of a Manhattan dentist who served his Harlem clientele. These Hollywood icons were not to the manner born.

Robert Towne got his idea for “Chinatown” after reading Carey McWilliams classic history of Los Angeles, “Islands on the Land.” From that book he learned how the City of Los Angeles “stole” the water rights to the Owens Valley, 260 miles to the north. It was that water that enabled Los Angeles to become the great city of today. As Balzac once said that behind every great fortune there is a crime.

However Towne’s “Chinatown” is not a literal history. In order to copy the film noir themes of the 1930s, his water grab takes place in 1937, not the 1908-1913 time period when the great water project was developed. Further not much happens in the real Chinatown which is a metaphor for the corruption of Los Angeles.

We see Jack Nicholson coming into his own as a star. First in Towne’s “The Last Detail” and later in “Chinatown.” We learn how the movie simulated the breaking of his nose and for a star he unlikely as it sounds wore a bandage around his nose for most of the movie.

Producer and Paramount studio boss Robert Evans rightly fancies himself as the new Irving Thalberg, MGM’s legendary studio boss of the 1930s. He brings Paramount hit after hit, especially “Love Story” and “The Godfather” series. However he uses cocaine to excess and after his divorce from Ali McGraw he surrounds himself with a bevy of lovelies.

To me the most interesting character is director Roman Polanski. It he who rewrote Towne’s script and made the movie what it is. Polanski suffered from the Nazis and later the Communists in Poland, but manages to get to Hollywood. There he marries the actress Sharon Tate who while eight months pregnant was brutally murdered by the Manson gang. As a sidebar after the Tate murder, fear gripped the oh so liberal Hollywood community that there was a rash of gun buying for self-protection.

Given Polanski’s childhood and the brutal murder of his wife and unborn baby it is no wonder that he became so messed up with drugs and young women. That reached its denouement in 1977 when Polanski was charged with rape and drugging a 13 year old girl. Although the sentence was reduced to unlawful sex with a minor, he skipped the country and hasn’t been here since. Had #MeToo been around in 1977 Polanski would have been sent to the slammer for a long time.

I experienced Wasson’s Los Angeles when I first moved there in 1964. To him and to me the 1960s were a great time of optimism and only to him everything turned bad in the 1970s. I was on the periphery of Hollywood at the time knowing a few A-List movie stars and having two friends who wrote for movies and television. To Wasson Hollywood was about art up until the big 1975 hit “Jaws” hit the screen and then it became all about money. Not true. Hollywood was always all about money. Just look at the big houses in Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Malibu and the lavish parties. My guess is that Wasson took Mike Davis’ dystopian “City of Quartz” too seriously.

Readers will learn an awful lot how a great movie was made including costumes, sets and cinematography. For me the technical discussions and nuances of the personalities involved were a bit much. And one more thing the year “Chinatown” was up for an Academy Award “Godfather Part 2” won and its only major award was for Towne’s best original screenplay.

*With apologies to Quentin Tarantino.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2JY38YJQP6BGG/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Gary Krist's "The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination and the Invention of Los Angeles"

The Birth of La La Land

In 1900 the city of Los Angeles had a population of 102,000; by 1930 the population had soared twelvefold to 1,238,000. Gary Krist tells the story behind this explosive population growth that took Los Angeles from being a sleepy city on the shores of the Pacific to a world famous city through the biographies of water engineer William Mulholland, film director D.W. Griffith and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

He tells a good story about the city that I lived in for over 20 years and still work part-time there. William Mulholland an Irish immigrant and self-taught water engineer was a man of Napoleonic vision. He understood with the city leadership that if this desert city were to thrive it would need water. Mulholland seized the water from unsuspecting farmers in the Owens Valley 200 miles to the north. Aside from the Panama Canal it was the biggest public works project of its day. To be sure the farmers rebelled and dynamited portions of the aqueduct, but ultimately failed in stopping Mulholland.

He later came up with the Colorado River water project as well. While living in Los Angeles we mused that the city’s thirst for water so unquenchable that sometime in the future water from Canada’s Mackenzie River would be piped in to fill the hot tubs of LA. Mulholland star collapsed when he failed to do the appropriate due diligence on the soils where a major dam was constructed that collapsed killing an injuring hundreds of people.

D.W. Griffith was the leading motion picture director of his day. In part Hollywood was his creation. His racist “Birth of a Nation” was the biggest hit of its era with a showing in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. Griffith developed the film techniques that are still used to day and discovered many of the stars of the silent era. Nevertheless by the 1920s his star began to fade, but the Hollywood he was so much a part of creating went on to far bigger and better things. It was Hollywood that puts Los Angeles on the global map.

Aimee Semple McPherson was the first female evangelist with a large scale following. An immigrant from Canada she established her Four Square Church that now has 1600 affiliated churches. She captivated gigantic audiences who far away from home were yearning for some sort of spirituality. She is the precursor of the many spiritual fads that would arise out of Southern California.

My problem with Krist is that he is viewing LA’s history through his 21^st century liberal biases. The world of 1900 was far different than today’s. Los Angeles, if were to grow, needed the water and they stole it fair and square. If the city didn’t do that where would it be today? He is critical of the “whiteness” of the city’s establishment and if you weren’t a white Protestant you would not get into the club. However, economically the city was wide open and it offered hope and opportunity to practically all who came. No one forced over a million people to move to Los Angeles from 1900-1930. And for many there wildest dreams were exceeded. Along the way sprawling city of today was created. Krist is critical of the sprawl, but it was the sprawl that made housing affordable.

Although he mentions the important role of oil discoveries in the region in explaining the city’s growth, he understates it. In the 1920s California was the number one oil producing state and such oil giants as Richfield, Union, and Signal Oil was headquartered there. Also the world’s leading drill bit supplier, Hughes Tool (yes that Hughes) was headquartered there. If Krist were to write a history of Los Angeles from 1920-1950, my guess he would choose Howard Hughes as one of his leads.

He also remarks that much Hollywood’s creativity was lost by the late 1920s as Wall Street money began to dominate the studios. Here I differ, in my opinion the golden age of Hollywood creativity was from 1930-1945 aided in no small part by the arrival of emigres from Berlin’s famed studios who were being forced out by Hitler. As in the prior 30 years, Los Angeles was open to newcomers; the secret of its success which comes through in Krist’s book.

The complete Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2R2L0MAJWGGGN/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv