The Big Goodbye

Chinatown was the last glorious stand of the 1970s Hollywood Golden Age, an age of chances taken and norms upended. Ushered in by Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider, it bowed out in 1974 with, as author Sam Wasson has it, Chinatown.

After that came Jaws – a film I love and admire enormously – and the practice of opening a movie in as many cinemas as possible to earn as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. Out went chances. Out went daring. Everything was focused on the deal, the profit, and that ever-important Opening Weekend.

For anyone who loves this film, and early 70s Hollywood, this is a fabulous, compulsive read. It’s also a disturbing and upsetting one.

Fabulous because it goes behind the scenes to explore the culture that allowed the film to come to life, and the devotion lavished upon its creation. (Robert Towne took almost three years of hard, hard work to write a script that director Roman Polanski then forced him to spend months re-writing. You’d never know that from the finished product, which glows like a pearl in its plotting and perfection.)

Disturbing because of what it reveals about the flawed individuals who created such a gem. Writer Robert Towne descended into cocaine-fuelled paranoia and never wrote anything as good again. Producer Robert Evans embraced cocaine and facelifts. Jack Nicholson started playing ‘Jack’. And Roman Polanski fled the USA to avoid imprisonment for raping a 13-year-old girl.

The film is one of the greatest Hollywood ever made. Sobering, therefore, to be reminded that achieving such heights isn’t always – if ever – a passport to success and further fulfillment, but a door opening onto darkness and disappointment.