The Big Goodbye

We’re film noir fanatics, so naturally, we’d be interested in an exhaustive history of the greatest modern example of the form. But Wasson sets his sights even higher. As the subtitle indicates, he also documents the end of multiple eras in the movie business.

Chinatown (1974) marked the close of the “New Hollywood” period when artists called the shots, as well as serving as a lush final example of big studio filmmaking, with all of Paramount’s resources in service of what’s universally acknowledged as one of the finest screenplays ever written. Wasson makes the action behind the scenes as compelling… show more.

I was having breakfast with a writer friend when she mentioned that she was listening to Sam Wasson’s book. I’d never heard of it, but after seeing The Offer last year on Paramount+, I had become fascinated with Paramount head and producer Robert Evans.

He is one of the three men who are the focus of this book. The others are Jack Nicolson and Roman Polanski. Wasson brilliantly weaves together their stories of love, loss, ambition, and the wielding of power, of friendships made and betrayed, dreams realized or dashed.

The sweep is breathtaking. Many previously unknown facts (at least… show more.

Sam Wasson is simply a good writer, crafting tight narratives that help this book read like a novel. The best part of this book is its examination of the creative process: in order for Chinatown to get made the way it did, a million (maybe two million) things needed to align in just the right way. The movie easily could have failed, but Wasson shows how the contributions of its many collaborators saved it.

Wasson has written some really great books about the movies and some I didn’t really care for. But he really nails this one about the making of Roman Polanski’s neo-noir classic, Chinatown. Weaving together the rollicking narratives of the film’s four main creative players (Polanski, producer Robert Evans, writer Robert Towne, and star Jack Nicholson), Wasson shows us how easy it would have been for any one part of this brilliantly complex jigsaw puzzle to fall in the wrong place and doom the whole endeavor. It certainly helps that the four men he focuses on are all outsize characters… show more.