The Big Goodbye, Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film, is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie ... a scrupulously researched and reported book with a stellar cast of players, not to mention some astonishing sources ... the book makes a detailed case for how changes to Towne’s version transformed Chinatown into a counterintuitive classic ... There are layers upon layers to this account, just as there are to the film, and it flags only when Wasson violates the color scheme with purple prose.
Sam Wasson...[has] a novelist’s eye for complex characters and a natural storyteller’s feel for scenes, dialogue and richly revealing details ... Wasson, in The Big Goodbye, weaves a tale in a voice that is intimate and sympathetic, yet critical ... Poetics...blossom throughout Wasson’s narrative, adding beauty and charm, though his prose occasionally overheats. He doesn’t shy away from nailing his characters’ fatal flaws and flagging trajectories ... Wasson’s book is an utterly stylish and entertaining ode to a bygone era and the gifted but troubled people who made it memorable.
...as Sam Wasson shows in compelling detail in his fine new book The Big Goodbye, the makers of Chinatown were simply too young, too ambitious, too controversial, and their movie, while undeniably brilliant, was like a brash finger stuck in the eye of the Hollywood establishment ... While Towne’s screenplay won an Oscar and has long been hailed as a modern classic, Wasson makes a strong case that its brilliance is really due to Polanski’s shrewd and uncompromising decisions ... The Big Goodbye excels at such insider insights, gleaned from a thorough canvassing of the relevant archives and from interviews with most of the principal players. The core of the book is an engrossing history of the film’s development ... what this book offers at its heart is a rich and enthralling account of one of the finest movies ever to come out of Hollywood. Chinatown is a melancholy and savage film that repays repeated viewings, especially when armed with the penetrating insights and fascinating details Wasson has marshalled here with such loving care.
Anyone expecting an uplifting tale of collaborative striving for artistic purity is in for a shock ... The film shoot yields many good stories ... This is a densely textured, well-researched, lushly overwritten portrait of a time when Hollywood film-makers behaved with passionate individualism and artistic boldness — and of all the massive rows, betrayals, sexual excesses and general badassery that entailed. Film fans will love the behind-the-scenes access to movie town legends, and buffs will relish the details. If you need to know the typewriter brand used by Towne, the reason Nicholson was called 'the Weaver' when young, or the designer frock worn by Anjelica Huston at the Oscars, this is the book for you.
... fascinating and page-turning ... more than a mere biography of a landmark movie; it aims to flesh out the wild and woolly era that incubated it, roughly the late 1960s to the late 1970s, and in this it mostly succeeds ... Despite the well-trod terrain, Wasson has flushed so many fresh sources out of the woodwork, and dived so deeply into the voluminous existing interview material, that we barely notice the absence of Towne and Nicholson. Wasson proves himself an indefatigable researcher, plundering every imaginable scrap of relevant material from court record ... Wasson’s intensive research has allowed him to create a tapestry so dense with detail that the characters spring to life on the page. Occasionally, however, he forgets the meaning of 'enough,' conflating information with trivia and drowning us in more facts than we could possibly want ... If this book has a flaw, it is Wasson’s intoxication with his subjects ... Nevertheless, in Chinatown, Wasson has found the perfect vehicle for convincingly demonstrating how personal filmmaking in a commercial context, albeit fueled by drugs and worse, enabled the New Hollywood to break the studio mold and reinvent the art of the feature film.
Wasson...delivers a vivid narrative, weaving together portraits of four seriously flawed men ... It’s possible Wasson is biased in favor of the sources he interviewed ... But Wasson’s revisionist conclusion is still fairly persuasive and abundantly clear: no Polanski, no Chinatown ... did not signal a new golden age, but instead was the last flicker of an old one ... It’s neither a new nor an original observation, and Wasson’s other attempts to reach for something deeper to say about America in the ’70s come across as awkward and heavy-handed attempts at sociology. It hurts to see his compelling story interrupted with pretentious quotes from Adorno and Barthes ... Wasson concludes his book with several long chapters about the less-than-stellar fates of Chinatown's principals. It’s a bummer of an ending and a disappointing way to celebrate an American classic.
Social historian Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, beautifully and smoothly evokes the era...while carefully weaving in the stories of the Chinatown creators: writer Robert Towne, director Roman Polanski, stars Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and legendary producer Robert Evans ... What's amazing about the story Wasson weaves are the details about the time, energy, and heart each character invested in the production of Chinatown ... The end of The Big Goodbye is a beautiful evocation of desire never fulfilled, thirst never quenched, and curiosity never satiated ... a graceful and worthwhile elegy to a time dear to those who are lucky enough to remember it. It also serves as seriously engaging text for younger generations ready and willing to expand their minds and explore the past to better understand the present. It will be hard to find a better film book published this year.
... takes the story of the movie’s making and significance to the next level. It is a feast for those of us who consider Chinatown one of the great works of (the first) New Hollywood. It might even pull in new viewers who have somehow missed out on this classic about pre-World War Two Los Angeles, water, power, and good intentions from 'back in the day' ... What becomes clear as Wasson lays out his case is that the story of Chinatown's making is almost as amazingly convoluted as the movie itself ... Wasson occasionally overwrites ... Such misdemeanors are crimes of passion, as well as matters of taste. After all, he enthusiastically compares Chinatown to The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick. And I, for one, by end of The Big Goodbye, was not only convinced but also entertained.
Wasson, I think, overstates the effect of the Manson murders, if not on Polanski (for whom such a gloss may be unavoidable), then on the larger Hollywood community. In The Big Goodbye, the killings take on the weight of another creation myth, a driving motivation for Polanski, pushing him ever more deeply into his art ... It’s not hard to recognize the attraction of that narrative, but it also gives the book a kind of built-in closure more ready-made than reality, most likely, would have been. Chinatown, after all—like any creative project—developed incrementally. Some of the most interesting material in Wasson’s book highlights what didn’t work ... Wasson is excellent on the nuances of Hollywood, which is hardly unexpected: He has the access and has written deftly about the industry in previous books. At the same time, he is far too forgiving of Polanski, holding the story of his statutory rape case for the final pages, where it unfolds as afterthought. Still, the problem with Hollywood, as West also noted, is that it is a universe unto itself.
... Wasson swims in the muddy making of the 1974 film, the messy lives of its four main players, and the murky chronicles of L.A.’s studio system and the municipal water wars to produce a page-turner as suspenseful and spellbinding as the Raymond Chandler novel from which the book takes it name.
The reporting Mr. Wasson deftly weaves into his densely populated narrative only makes the actors, producers, writers and director more elusive. People go to movies in part to find a coherence and resolution lacking in everyday existence; The Big Goodbye suggests that those who make them are similarly motivated ... Mr. Wasson has shown deftness in this genre ... The Big Goodbye ranges more darkly and ambitiously, from the Manson killings of 1969 to Hollywood’s corporate upheavals of the late 1970s. The author’s gift for swift encapsulation and meticulous splicing allows him to drop in great quantities of detail without losing the thread. Scenes tend to be sharply visualized: When he does venture into the interior, the prose can become pulpishly florid ... Such cadenzas are fortunately incidental to Mr. Wasson’s book. He rarely gets distracted from the connecting of dots by which he constructs the diagram of his Los Angeles.
... perhaps too narratively stylized ... Towne’s book laces in such cinematic prose devises and the hothouse atmospherics of ’30s crime fiction of Chandler and Dashell Hammett and some gossipy tangents that should have ended up on the cutting room floor ... The heart of the book deftly describes the Polanski’s methods as a hands-on director and the artistic vision of the four main players that veer from simpatico to a test of wills. And some thrilling prose re-enactments from the actors’ perspective ... Wasson’s four main bio tracks seem to pull him in too many directions and sabotages the flow of the book. Wasson’s overreaching style aims to evoke the cynical and romantic atmosphere achieved in the movie, not to mention its dark poetic mystique.
Much will be familiar territory to anyone who has read Evans’s entertaining memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture (1994), Polanski’s fine autobiography Roman by Polanski (1984) and Peter Biskind’s magisterial study of the 1970s Hollywood generation, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) ... A lengthy section on the various drafts of the script will interest film students who have heard it praised as one of the greatest screenplays of them all, although the book really comes alive when describing the actual shooting of the film itself. There is much that is good here, and the narrative moves along in an almost novelistic, colloquial style. However, Wasson has an unfortunate habit of cherry-picking facts while ignoring others which may be inconvenient for his purposes ... the author downplays the importance of San Francisco’s Dashiell Hammett ... Overall, Wasson has a tendency to give credit to the Evans era of Paramount Studios for the success of many who came within its orbit at the expense of their previous careers, especially if they took place in Europe.
The book bemoans lovers of the bottom line while offering glowing portraits of the four men most responsible for Chinatown’s success ... Wasson goes deep on Towne ... Wasson’s portrait of Towne is deeply respectful, even though he is, in a way, the worst person in the book. And that is saying something when one of the other main characters is a child rapist who lives in exile to avoid prosecution ... Unlike its subjects, Wasson’s book indulges in a less inventive kind of nostalgia. It attempts to stop time ... While Wasson is too young to be pandering to baby boomers this way, he nevertheless lays it on thick, in slabs of poetic twilight ... The prose often gets even more florid, and weirder, taking on a sicker hue when those who can’t share Wasson’s rosy view of Hollywood are invoked ... Wasson’s deep, abiding nostalgia seeks to replicate Chinatown’s noirish feel, but without any of the film’s revisionist approach to genre. Wasson sometimes goes for the California gothic of Ross Macdonald’s detective novels, but the way he writes is the opposite of hard-boiled. He’s too in love with soft focus ... This is like the evocation of TV shows in Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, but without Tarantino’s self-awareness.
Wasson tells the story of its making with pace and verve, though his prose can sometimes be portentous. He keeps noting any spot of bad weather as though it were an omen, and he finds it hard to resist a bit of purple prose.
... great style and lyricism ... If the Oscar-winning Chinatown is indeed 'the best American screenplay written during the ‘70s'” Wasson does it justice by following Towne’s method of constructing finely detailed, lively backstories of all characters, major and minor. It’s impossible not to fall for this love letter to a love letter that pastes together the often sticky collage of how talent plus perseverance can equal a classic film ... The four main antagonists are vividly portrayed ... By comparison, short shrift is given to Faye Dunaway, brilliant as the femme fatale but high maintenance behind the cameras ... Wasson admirably credits the talents usually relegated to the credits with extensive reportage ... Wasson's book concludes with a slog through the personal and professional declines of those who achieved career peaks with Chinatown. He should have emulated its noir climax: the truth is revealed, the victim punished, the corrupt absolved, the hero chastened. The camera pulls up and away in an ending crane shot as we trudge into the darkness to ponder a story well told and fraught with meaning. Roll credits.
Couldn’t help thinking this one might be about a bunch of grumpy old men with cigars bemoaning how much Hollywood has changed ... While there is some of that inThe Big Goodbye...it also offers a lively behind-the-scenes peek into the making of a great American movie, both the art and the business of it. Meticulously researched, the book is stuffed with – sometimes very dark – detail ... [Wasson] is careful not to judge the lifestyle of the era ... But he gives the boys a pass on some of that bad behavior, maybe because of their 'artistic genius' ... Ah, the women. They are in the book, of course – Tate and Dunaway, as well as Ali MacGraw, Anjelica Huston, Julie Payne....various assistants, mothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends and groupies – but it’s made clear they were never as important as the work. The Big Goodbye – a recommended read for fans of Chinatown – is after all about four charming, talented, indulged, white men who ran an exclusive boys club. Some things never change.
As I read Sam Wasson's breezy, cocaine-dusted history, roughly two-thirds of which is about director Roman Polanski's Chinatown, I kept wondering: How would it be different if Faye Dunaway had agreed to talk? Dunaway, an easy target in recent years, continues to be in Big Goodbye, which emphasizes her tardiness and unpredictability. But, reading between the lines, it's hard not to wonder what it was like to be virtually the only woman on set, one whose director disliked her and whose key scene is of her being smacked in the face repeatedly by her co-star, Jack Nicholson. Wasson didn't speak with him, either ... And there are other gaps in the book, which bases an analysis of the 1975 Oscars on Cabaret having beaten The Godfather for best picture in 1973 (it didn't), which gives Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne's ex-wife an oversized role because she agreed to talk and which seems to have been overhauled in editing — so that, for instance, a punchline about Polanski's skiing only makes sense when you get to the setup for the joke 50 pages later. Wasson, whose biography of Bob Fosse is riveting, makes interesting observations about 1970s moviemaking, but Big Goodbye reads like a book by a writer/researcher who too often was forced to write around missing material and say, 'Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.'
Sam Wasson’s book...is awfully good ... as fine an unwrapping of the moviemaking process as I’ve read ... Wasson tracked down every pertinent bit ... Wasson’s occasionally overripe prose threatened to activate my gag reflex ... But when he’s not writing bad Chandlerese, Wasson generally keeps his storytelling straight and sleek, and is gifted enough to redeem himself with expertly delivered, shapely insights[.]
Inimitable Wasson...examines the development of the iconic film ... Wasson argues convincingly that Chinatown was one of the last great Hollywood films; in the years following its release, the industry shifted from a dream factory realizing ambitious visions to a corporate machine churning out blockbusters ... On par with Wasson’s exceptional Fosse, this portrait of a neonoir classic will weave a spell over cinephiles.
...a multifaceted dissection of the infamous noir film ... Wasson portrays drugs and crime in a matter-of-fact manner befitting the movie itself, and he doesn’t minimize or romanticize any of the less-than-savory elements involving the principals of the narrative; this applies especially to Polanski ... If you love Chinatown, then you’ll love The Big Goodbye—and it’s good reading for any American cinema buff.
