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

The Link to my Investors Business Daily Interview on the Corona Economy

https://www.investors.com/videos/is-the-coronavirus-recession-already-here/

Quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Online 3/21/20

“A public health emergency is morphing into an economic emergency,” said David Shulman of the UCLA Anderson School of Management. “The basic outlines of the economy will be determined more by biology than by economics.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-triggered-downturn-could-cost-5-million-u-s-jobs-11584783001?mod=hp_lead_pos1

First Aid for the Economy

A long time ago when I was in the Army I learned the basic principles of battlefield first aid. They are stop the bleeding, clear the airway and treat for shock. That is what the Fed and the Administration/Congress are now trying to do. It should not be viewed as a Keynesian stimulus.

Put bluntly they are trying to keep the economy alive by supporting people and businesses until the supply side of the economy recovers from the shock of the coronavirus. Put another way they are trying to put a floor under the economy with income support and a "whatever it takes" monetary policy. Thus the time for a classical Keynesian stimulus will come when the public health emergency passes.

My Amazon Review of Derek Penslar's "Theodor Herzl: A Charismatic Personality"

A Prophet with Honor

A really wanted to like Harvard history professor Derek Penslar’s biography of the great Zionist hero, Theodor Herzl. Simply put, the words don’t fly off the page, they just sit there and hence I had to put the book down too many times. That said Penslar presents a nuanced view of Herzl’s life. He shows his charismatic personality that captivates European Jewry and he shows his bouts of depression, his heart condition which kills him at age 44 and his less than successful roles as a husband and a father.

Herzl comes from an assimilated upper-middle class fin-de-siecle Vienna family. After receiving a law degree he becomes a correspondent and literary editor for the very influential Vienna newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse. From that post he witnesses the antisemitism of Vienna mayor Kurt Lueger. Then as Paris correspondent he sees the vitriolic antisemitism of republican France that the Dreyfus affair brought to the fore. He then realizes that there isn’t much hope for the Jews of Europe.

Herzl becomes the voice of a nascent Zionist movement with his publication of the now classic “Der Judenstaat” (The Jewish State). He calls for a Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in 1897 and out of that grows a formal Zionist organization. He goes on the meet the German Kaiser, the Ottoman Sultan and the Pope. His charisma is so strong that this highly assimilated Jew becomes a hero to the masses of Jewish people trapped in the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Along the way he continues to write plays. How he found the time is beyond me.

Penslar goes into great detail of Herzl’s failed idea of creating a Jewish State in British Uganda. That proposal is rejected by the masses of Eastern Europe and it falls of its own weight. The Jewish Homeland had to be Palestine.

There is great stuff in the book. I only wish that Penslar told the story with the verve and charisma of Herzl.

For the full amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1376C9VDNFRA9/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Views Online on NBC Digital

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/coronavirus/how-tax-deferments-are-just-the-start-to-helping-the-economy/2239094/

The Link to the UCLA Ziman Center Version of "Sum of All Fears"

Below is the link to the UCLA Ziman Center version of my "Sum of All Fears" report. It has a comment on real estate AND all of the figures are available on their pdf format.

https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/documents/areas/ctr/ziman/UCLA_Economic_Letter_Shulman_03.17.20.pdf