THE BIG GOODBYE: CHINATOWN AND THE LAST YEARS OF HOLLYWOOD

Did Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood spur your interest in real ’60s-’70s LA stories? If so, author/biographer Sam Wasson’s forensic account of Hollywood history in transition offers good reasons to revisit Chinatown’s oft-visited depths.

As writer Robert Towne explained, the 1974 film’s title is a metaphor for a state of mind. Duly, Wasson maps out historical and psychological routes down the streets walked by Towne, director Roman Polanski, star Jack Nicholson and producer Robert Evans. Though Wasson spotlights each man’s flaws (Polanski’s crimes are addressed), he also anatomises their scars, yearnings, strengths. On Nicholson’s “impotent outrage”, his insights are sharp enough to slit your nose.

As these variably damaged players collaborate and clash – coke-fired business calls pop off the page in Wasson’s punchy prose - against the backdrop of a changing LA, Chinatown’s development is meticulously plotted. Although well-documented elsewhere, the making-of stories bear repeating as evidence of triumphs - Faye Dunaway’s performance, Jerry Goldsmith’s score, Towne’s script – snatched from gob-smacking turmoil.

In its staggeringly unlikely fusion of disparate elements, Chinatown’s glory comes to justify Wasson’s elegiac fascination with the era. “Nostalgia blurs the edges of empires,” he writes, “and yet it did happen, didn’t it?” Almost in disbelief, Wasson crystallises a fleeting filmmaking moment at its departure point and leaves us marvelling anew that it ever came to be. Once upon a time, indeed. Kevin Harley