« Chinatown » : requiem pour Hollywood

“You like to snoop around, my little kitten. You know what happens to guys with long noses, huh, can't you guess? They lose their noses! The scene where Roman Polanski opens Jack Nicholson's nostril with a flick of the switchblade is one of the most famous of Chinatown, a poisonous thriller set against a backdrop of incest and water war, a classic of 1970s cinema signed Polanski. Today, Sam Wasson, historian of the 7th art ^and author of definitive books like Fosse, devoted to the choreographer Bob Fosse, or 5th Avenue, 5 hours in the morning, on the shooting of Diamonds on sofa, explores the genesis of Chinatown in the beautiful The Big Goodbye. Chinatown and the last years of Hollywood.

Based on meticulous documentation and exclusive interviews with the main protagonists, including Polanski, producer Robert Evans or the creators' spouses (and despite the refusals of Nicholson, screenwriter Robert Towne or Faye Dunaway, who wanted to get paid), Sam Wasson describes the shoot as if you were there. Thus, for the scene of the mutilation, we learn that Polanski, who saw hundreds of extras, kept the role of the gangster-surgeon with delight. Special effects specialist Logan Frazee tinkers with an articulated blade, with a tube attached to the knife that must shoot a spurt of blood on Nicholson's nose. Despite the tests, it is impossible to say if the mechanism will work correctly, without removing the actor's nostril. "You dirty Polak," Nicholson growls. You better watch what the fuck you do. » Polanski laughs, throws his line and the effect works perfectly: the catch is in the box. However, Polanski – dissatisfied or sadistic – will do no less than… 14 takes!

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Revolutionizing Hollywood

The Big Goodbye focuses mainly on four extraordinary personalities, four colossi with feet of clay: Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski, Robert Evans and Robert Towne. They are convinced that they are going to produce a masterpiece, in this blessed period when hairy artists are revolutionizing Hollywood, a unique, free moment, when the industry of the ^7th art finally trusts young people creators, and where friendship and quality outweigh profitability.

Robert Towne is the most enigmatic of the four. A friend of Nicholson, he wrote for his friend Vas-y, fonce and The Last Corvée, but his specialty is "script doctor" and he has already patched up the screenplays of Bonnie & Clyde, John McCabe or Because of an assassination... He dreams of light, of money, of a thriller set in the 1930s, and will blacken thousands of sheets of notes, dialogues, plans, to end up with a "messy" scenario of 340 pages, with 40 "fuck", which does not speak of Chinatown, and which nobody really understands. "Chinatown is a state of mind," he says laconically, as he suffers martyrdom trying to structure his script that he wants to direct himself.

With Nicholson in his sleeve, he manages to hook the young producer Robert Evans who will start works like Rosemary's Baby, Secret Conversation, Love Story, Serpico, Marathon Man or The Godfather, of which he will find the first cut too short, demanding by Francis Ford Coppola that he restore all the falls to lengthen it by one hour. Evans has flair, taste, works with a reduced staff and he gives the artists complete freedom.

In 1973, Jack Nicholson was the hot actor of the moment. After years of hardship, horror and biker films, he investigates important films, with the best directors of the moment: Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, This pleasure that one says carnal, The King of Marvin Gardens, Profession: reporter… Cool and glamorous in his 1930s costumes, he will be in all the plans of Chinatown, which will allow him to make his friends work and which must bring him consecration.

After the triumph of Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski begins a veritable descent into hell, devastated by the assassination of his wife Sharon Tate and his friends at 10050 Cielo Drive, by the Manson sect. After the failures of Macbeth and Quoi?, this fan of US thrillers and Raymond Chandler partially rewrote their Chinatown script, determined to show "violence as it is" and to sign his great work, supported by the best technicians in Hollywood.

Hair creping and fights

Started in September 1973, the shooting is of course rich in conflicts, rants, strokes of genius. If Polanski is at the height of his creative talent, he is also demanding, dictatorial and he sometimes seems strangely absent, “looking lost in the distance”, reliving his tragedy through flashbacks. He will face the capricious Faye Dunaway, who refuses to speak to the assistants and who will even ask Evans for her head, after Polanski tore out a rebellious lock of hair.

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He will get along much better with Nicholson, a nice Buddha who sets the mood and who thinks only of the success of the project. Except when the actor, a basketball fan, refuses to leave his trailer (which the translator strives to call “trailer”) to watch a Boston Celtics game. Polanski then rushes into the caravan and pulverizes the furniture and Nicholson's TV, who, mad with rage, leaves the shoot in his underpants...

Not to mention the chronic back pain that bedridden Evans, Nicholson's hemorrhoidal attacks, rental jewelry, drug stories, the dismissal of veteran Night of the Hunter cinematographer Stanley Cortez for the benefit of John A. Alonzo, the music composed in 48 hours by Jerry Goldsmith or the considerable contribution to the screenplay of the enigmatic Edward Taylor, professor of sociology and statistics at the University of Southern California (USC), largely forgotten history, whom Towne will never credit in the credits of one of his films, despite their long-term collaboration, and whom he will not even thank during his speech at the Oscars…

Once upon a time in… Chinatown

A remarkable historian, Sam Wasson writes like a novelist, swinging his tongue and swinging uppercuts like, “Sharon Tate looked like California. Moreover, certain episodes, so documented, precise, seem the fruit of his imagination and, between novel and investigation, he does not hesitate to describe the states of mind, the pangs of his protagonists, or to pour into the psychology when he repeatedly evokes Polanski's tragic childhood in the Warsaw ghetto to explain his gray areas. Like certain passages from Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino, the book exudes an incredible scent of melancholy, showing, smelling, smelling, the vestiges of a world, of a golden age that has been definitively lost.

Indeed, in addition to being a splendid making-of, The Big Goodbye recounts, on a requiem tune, the end of a glorious era of American cinema, buried by blockbusters including Jaws, directed by a certain Steven Spielberg. The cinema then fell into mass industry, the kings of marketing replaced the artists, George Lucas made his fortune with merchandising, films were reduced to pitches (the high concepts of Don Simpson), openly commercial films (at the era, disaster movies, superhero movies today), with the search for easy, quick profit, and formulas based on sequels, remakes, spin-offs...

swan song

Our four heroes will not recover. After his Oscar for the screenplay of Chinatown (this will be the only golden statuette for the film, The ^Godfather Part 2 being the big winner of the evening), Robert Towne, entangled in his cocaine problems, will continue his doctor script work, most often on minor films (for 20 years, he has written a single film and two episodes of a series).

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In 1977, after the rape of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer, Roman Polanski fled the United States. Definitively. Fired from Paramount, Robert Evans fell for cocaine trafficking in 1980, and in 1983, he found himself on the list of suspects in the murder of a Cotton Club investor, Roy Radin. Responsible for the debts of the film, he will lose his fortune, estimated at 11 million dollars, as well as a good part of his reputation, before dying in 2019. As for Nicholson, who ended his career in 2010, he will of course shoot Flight over the Cuckoo's Nest or The Shining, but the cachet of his films will become his main motivation and "More" his favorite word.

A very great book on the backstage of the dream factory, The Big Goodbye tells the story of a utopia: that of a film industry capable of making a fortune by producing a work of art. Ben Affleck, who took an option on Wasson's book and who plans to make a film of it, will he be able to do the same?

The Big Goodbye. Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, by Sam Wasson, Éditions Carlotta Films (€21.99)