1974 • R • 2hs 10mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
🕵️♂️ Who Framed Who? A Chinatown & Who Framed Roger Rabbit Double-Feature
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie. You walk into your pizza joint and the air smells like freshly grated Parmesan. You pick up your pie and ask the guy at the counter, “What should I rent from Blockbuster to go with this?” Tonight, he says, “You ever see the one where The Joker gets his nose tweaked by the water gang?” He could only mean Roman Polanski’s Jack Nicholson vehicle, Chinatown.
Here’s the plot. It’s 1937 and a woman called Evelyn Mulwray (Diane Ladd) is in Jack Gittes’ (Jack Nicholson) Los Angeles office. His job: Private Investigator. Her problem: Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), her husband, is cheating on her. Jake agrees to tail the dirtbag, who’s also LA Water and Power’s Chief Engineer. Jake snaps Hollis in the company of not-his-wife. The LA Times gets the pictures and runs them in the next day’s paper. Another bit of dirt done by Jake Gittes.
Then, twists! The next day the real Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) visits Jake’s office and threatens to sue him. An imposter hired Jake to to make Hollis look bad, and it’s working. See, Hollis refused to build a new dam that would bring water to LA from outer regions. There’s probably money to be made off of it somehow. Hollis turns up dead in a reservoir, lungs full of water and irony. Looks like murder to Jake. As he investigates, Jake discovers someone’s dumping gazillions of gallons into the ocean even though LA’s in the middle of a drought. There’s something funny going on with the water. Can Jake untangle this plate of water-murder-imposter spaghetti before someone untangles him? Can he keep the real Evelyn safe? Can he even keep his nose safe? We’ll find out.
How’d this thing get made?
Chinatown tells you what kind of movie it is from the jump. The black-and-white credits say, “I’m a Bogart picture.” But ’74 was a long time after the sour-faced god of grit last donned a trench coat for a silver screen outing. The ‘60s and ‘70s were the era of Bond flicks and paranoid political thrillers, not film noir. So how’d we get Chinatown?
Director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist) and actor Jack Nicholson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Batman) were looking for a project to do together. Nicholson hadn’t made the movies that made him famous yet, except maybe his part in Easy Rider (1969). Polanski had been working a lot but hadn’t made his top hits yet either. They’d each been around the Hollywood block enough times to make some choice of their own though. What would a Polanski-Nicholson joint look like?
What the two didn’t know was that screenwriter Robert Towne had already written a script with Nicholson in mind. Towne, who’d grown up in Southern California, read up on the water wars (sounds bananas, we’ll get to it in a minute) that made LA. Totally captivated him. Also gave him a new appreciation for the complicated history of his home region. He stirred in noir author Raymond Chandler’s characterization of LA as a dark, dangerous place and wrote himself a hard-boiled script. It was about tough guys, politicians on the grift, old cars, fine suits, and California water.
Towne’s script fell into the hands of producer Robert Evans. He connected the script to Nicholson, who made Polanski read it too. Up-and-coming Polanski and sneer-faced Nicholson had their project and were off to the races.
Speak Up
Let’s go back to … what’s that?
Do you not like Jack Nicholson?
What? He’s one of our finest actors! You seen the career on that guy? Plenty of people like Jack Nicholson.
Do you not like Jack Nicholson?
Fine, no, I don’t like Jack Nicholson. I don’t care if he had sex with all of Hollywood (which he did). Still a no thanks for me. But that works in my favor when I watch Chinatown. Because here he’s enjoyable to dislike. This guy’s like mud on your brand new AF1s. But though Jake puts a yuck in your tum, he doesn’t deserve what he gets. Makes the story all complicated.
Alright smart guy. Do you like Faye Dunaway’s eyebrows?
Yikes. Like them? Not my place to say. But am I worried for them? Yes.
Wow, guess someone replenished their electrolytes with Haterade today.
Oh, what do I like? That what you’re asking? Listen up pal, I’ll tell you. I do like L.A. Confidential.
Is that because L.A. Confidential was our Chinatown?
Wow, amazing take. L.A.C., man, haven’t thought about that in a minute. I mean, it might have been our Chinatown. I should watch that again. Maybe we’ll talk about it here someday. Enough questions though, we gotta keep going.
Based on a True Story
Let’s go back to Towne’s story. The LA conspiracy at the nougaty center of Chinatown? Making bank off the water-haves and water-have-nots? It actually happened. Just not exactly like Chinatown tells it.
Towne’s’ Hollis Mulwray was based on real-life water boy William Mulholland, early 1900s Superintendent and Chief Engineer at the LA Department of Water and Power. See, LA was booming. Oh, the people. So many people! But LA couldn’t grow without enough water to go around. The LA River? Insufficient. “Aha,” you say. “American cities aren’t built finding resources. They’re built on taking them.” Right you are. Mulholland designed an aqueduct stretching 233 miles from outlying farm country Owens Valley straight to LA. Said it was Mayor Fred Eaton’s idea which, who knows, maybe it was. His aqueduct opened in 1913, piping in untold gallons of the wet stuff. LA claimed him as a hero. They even named a street (and by proxy a David Lynch movie) after him—Mulholland Drive.
Then our water wunderkind Mulholland had a tough ’20s. His dam, the St. Francis Dam, imploded in ’28, killing 431 people. That collapse holds the record as California’s worst manmade disaster to date. Though Hollis Mulwray of Chinatown somehow still had a job after his dam collapsed, real-life Mulholland did not. He died in ’35, disgraced.
That’s what we know. We don’t know for sure that he sweet-talked farmers out of land and water. We don’t know that he colluded with powermongerers in LA to do it. We do know that Angelinos took Chinatown’s narrative as gospel. Much later, Mulholland’s granddaughter, Catherine Mulholland, took it upon herself to correct the record. Late in her career as a writer she published William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (2000). Her work draws on wide-ranging sources including her grandfather’s own notes in an attempt to set the record straight. Not sure if she did or not. Book reviewers said it was okay.
Not That Chinatown
Another tricky bit of business? The Chinatown of this movie probably isn’t present day Chinatown.
In the 1930s—the period during which our flick is set—Old Chinatown lay where Union Station lies now. Racist laws prevented folks of Asian heritage from owning buildings or land. So they rented in Chinatown. LA corruption—gambling, drugs, violence, you name it—ran wild there. Cops didn’t know whether intervening would actually help. Residents couldn’t tell whether staying or going was a come up.
LA condemned the area not long after, scattering API residents across the county and with even fewer options than before. Demolished it beginning in ’33. New Chinatown, appointed a center of commerce and culture, opened in ’38. That’s the LA Chinatown we know.
All’s Well That Ends Bad
Okay, where were we? Right, Towne wrote a script for Nicholson, Nicholson gave it to Polanski, they started making a movie. They shot in ’73 into ’74. Cinematographer John A. Alonzo did most of the shooting, focusing on natural light to capture a real-feeling LA. Every scene features the main character because the movie is subjectively from his perspective. When Jake gets conked on the head? Fade to black. No Jake? No movie. Under Polanski’s deft direction, a naturalistic movie took shape.
Things went smoothly enough. Except when it came to the ending.
Polanski and screenwriter Towne argued about Chinatown’s bummer finale. A lot. Here’s Towne’s original ending according to him. "The way I had seen it was that Evelyn would kill her father but end up in jail for it, unable to give the real reason why it happened. And the detective [Jake Gittes] couldn't talk about it either, so it was bleak in its own way.” Evelyn settles the score, but the cruelty of the justice system gives Cross the last laugh. Too tidy.
Polanski felt Chinatown had to do something. Something different in order to be remembered. As the director put it, "I knew that if Chinatown was to be special, not just another thriller where the good guys triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die.” He was right. Polanski also cut Gittes’ scripted voiceover and resequenced the script so that we unravel the mystery with Gittes. Those two decisions broke up Towne and Polanski. The director finished the shoot without the writer.
In 2012, Towne could say, “My version had an equally bleak ending [fact check: uh no] but it was too complicated and too literary. And after all of the complexity of that story, I think you need a simple and stark ending. And [Polanski] gave it that.” Indeed he did.
Boxofficetown
They made Chinatown for $6M and made a cool $30M. So folks went to see it. But what did critics think? The phrase “universally liked” leaps to mind. The pros singled out Towne’s script, Polanski’s direction, and Nicholson’s acting. Reviewer Roger Ebert said Nicholson’s performance kept Chinatown from being just a genre picture. Writing for The National Society of Film Critics, James Verniere called Chinatown “one of the best films of one of the best decades in American movie history”.
As always, not everyone’s a fan. New York Times reviewer and apparent grump Vincent Canby called Chinatown a “more or less thirties-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.” Vince, if I may. When a pretty good new movie puts you in mind of two past faves, pal, you got three favorites now. Math-wise, your’e 50% better off. If folks want to make throwbacks, let ‘em make throwbacks. Sometimes a new thing that seems like the old things makes the old things seem new thing again. Feels nice! Revisiting is not a crime. Humanity doesn’t draw a straight line forward anyway. It draws onward with incandescent loops of nostalgia and progress like a kid running down the block waving sparklers at dusk on July 4th. No one likes a stick in the mud, Vince.
In ’91 The Library of Congress added Chinatown to its National Film Registry, a collection dedicated to movies it deems "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. The American Film Institute consistently ranks Chinatown toward the top of its lists. The Guardian called it the best film ever made in 2012.
Nicholson himself directed and starred in a sequel, The Two Jakes, sixteen years later. If that seems like too long between entries, it was. Haven’t seen it. I hear it’s as good as that title—not good. Towne envisioned a trilogy covering three eras of Jake’s life. The Two Jakes made sure part three would never get made.
Today, Chinatown is still a name-brand movie. One of those everyone knows of, even if they haven’t seen it. Among screenwriters, Towne’s script is still sacred text. Though Chinatown nabbed 11 Oscar nominations, the only one it won went to Towne for writing it.
That’s Chinatown. What’d you think? Ever seen Chinatown before? I’d been meaning to get to it for years and really enjoyed it! Next time we’re following this up with a toon tale that rips off Chinatown’s plot, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It’s Robert Zemeckis’s (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) dark masterpiece that holds up really, really well.
Do me a favor? Pass this issue on to a pal who’d like Chinatown too! Let’s get it back in the conversation.
Notes
Jerry Goldsmith composed and recorded the soundtrack in a week and a half. They fired the last guy at the twenty-fifth hour. We last heard Goldsmith’s work in Alien.
John Huston, who plays baddie Noah Cross, was a great director and actor in his own right. You’d know him from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Africa Queen (1951) and his children, Anjelica and Danny Huston.
It’s a suits movie. Tailoring: The Motion Picture they should have called it.
Amazing photo of Faye Dunaway having makeup applied with her death appliance on.