This is a fabulous book.
I was not planning to read it. Read the reviews, reserved it at the library, but I'm anti-nonfiction, I find that fiction resonates more, and I'd just finished a couple of music biographies that made me feel like I was wasting my life, they were just that frustrating. But I figured I'd skim "The Big Goodbye," get an idea, before it expired and went back.
But I instantly got hooked.
Most of these recreation of Hollywood books are not good. Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" is the definitive statement on seventies movies, and so far we haven't needed more.
But "The Big Goodbye" provides more.
Should you read it if you haven't seen "Chinatown"?
No. But even if you only saw "Chinatown" once, when it came out, you should. Because it will bring you right back, to the late sixties and early seventies.
Film. You've got no idea the respect it used to get. Sam Wasson talks about this. There were film societies. New courses in college. Film was seen as the American art form. You went back and watched W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, were a completist of the legends, from Greta Garbo to William Wyler and Jean Renoir. It was a badge of honor to see the foreign film, if you said you didn't want to read subtitles you were ignored. Today, an old film is "Old School," released in 2003. Movies don't engender that desire for history, to know the past. Today movies are all about the gross, every weekend the totals are published. As if big money makes a good movie, or little money makes a bad movie.
And the people in this book have big desires. Sure, there's a bottom line, you can't make too many losers, you won't work. But the films cost a couple of million to make, not nine figures. And marketing budgets were not stratospheric either. So art reigned.
Roman Polanski... I'm not going to address what happened in and around the jacuzzi at Jack Nicholson's house with that thirteen year old girl, even though it's addressed in this book, but what you ultimately realize is the reason "Chinatown" is so great is because of Roman. The supposed hero, the screenwriter Robert Towne? He gets credit for the idea, along with his girlfriend, who found books on old L.A. and more, and he had a cowriter who didn't get credit who most people are unaware of, but in truth it was Polanski's movie, he turned it into a movie. I hate to say it, but this book is the worst advertisement for the writer ever. I've always believed the writer is everything. But Polanski shaped "Chinatown." He knew what it lacked and ultimately what it needed.
And his history is delineated here. At length. You might know a lot, but you won't know it all. Read it and you'll understand where he came from, and how he dealt with Sharon Tate's murder, how he suspected his friends.
Robert Evans?
At this point, after the book and movie, he's been frozen into the past like the not quite dead Clive Davis. Busy trumpeting his own horn, as if he deserved all the credit. But Evans does deserve a good amount of credit, and he was all about the art and enabling the creators, unlike Mr. Davis. He wanted you to let your freak flag fly, he wanted to enable your imagination, but he was there to tell you when you went out of bounds. After Evans? Paramount was run by Barry Diller, a TV guy. The movies have never recovered.
Evans was an enabler, in some cases in a bad way, like with coke. But he was akin to Mo Ostin, even though Mo kept an even lower profile and was not self-aggrandizing. Make the talent feel comfortable, like there's someone on their side, they'll be loyal, they'll deliver their best work.
As for Towne... He grew up in L.A. So many are immigrants, but for those who were here before, their history informs them in a way those who are transplants can never fully fathom. Towne too slid into coke. But even worse, he had trouble completing scripts. And isn't it funny that when Towne ultimately got to direct, his desire, the result was nowhere near as good as when he worked with first class collaborators, on "Shampoo" and "The Last Detail." Towne was the ultimate script doctor, but he wanted more. And in movies, it's a long struggle, you need someone to believe in you, to give you the money. You've got to earn your opportunity. Towne got there, but ultimately seemed to be overwhelmed and frozen.
And all of these guys were womanizers. Like the rock stars, but the rock stars were selling something different. That was part of their image, whereas these film guys were holier-than-thou, thought they deserved respect, but they oftentimes acted reprehensibly.
So you'll learn how "Chinatown" gets made. And there were a lot of changes to the original script, A LOT! It took forever to come up with an ending. And Faye Dunaway lives up to her reputation as a diva, difficult to work with, but she ultimately delivers. And John Huston is drunk. And they fire the cinematographer and come up with someone new, just like they ultimately do with the score. Instinct as opposed to data, that's how films used to be made. And Jack Nicholson? He shines throughout. He may not have treated Anjelica Huston well, but his image is burnished even more in this book, he was cool, he believed in himself and delivered, he was a star.
So...
Do I really think you're gonna read this book?
Probably not. First because you probably don't even read books, I mean who has time, right? And you're up for lessons, but this is about what happened fifty years ago, how does that apply to you? But people never change, the problems remain the same, like the petty war between Frank Yablans and Robert Evans. Screw the movie, I want money and power!
And "The Big Goodbye" is not always the easiest read. Some of the sentences, the analysis, might flummox you at first, you might need to read them again, but ultimately what we've got here is a first class depiction of a golden era, the equal to "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," not a survey, but a deep dive into how movies are made.
But really, it's the history, call it nostalgia if you'd like, of the way it used to be.
It's not that I want to live in the past, tech delivered what the movies did not over the last twenty five years, but it was a golden era, like classic rock. Not every art form, not every business vertical continues to thrive at the same level. They have peaks, and then decline to a steady status. And the peak always happens with innovation, when you let the artists go free, worry less about the bottom line than the end product.
"Chinatown" is a great movie. And you'll be stunned how many choices, what detail went into making it. It's fascinating, and if you lived through it you'll want to know.
"The Big Goodbye" calls to you, you want to get back to it, and when you read it you're distracted, removed from the regular world, you're in reverie, just like in the theatre watching a great movie.
This book is really something. It's not the thing, but it'll tell you about the thing. And until you know about the thing, how it came to be, you can't create the thing yourself. And I know that's what you want to do.
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