ON FILM: Oscar-winning writer reflects on Chinatown

By Philip Martin

LITTLE ROCK — One of the reasons Hollywood loves home video is because home video allows them to perpetually repackage and resell old material.

Classic movies can be dusted off and re-presented every few years in anniversary editions; less-than classic films can be offered up as nostalgia. We rent or buy these DVDs to patch up the holes in our education or to reminisce.

People who write about the movies often see these releases as occasions to revisit and sometimes revise old opinions. Sometimes they allow us chances to write about old movies that are special to us, and to interview the filmmakers that made these films. Paramount sent out an e-mail offering an interview with Robert Towne to promote the just-released 35th anniversary edition of Chinatown (Paramount, $24.99).

While I have no firm opinion on whether this new version has any concrete advantages over any of the other Chinatown DVDs available, for a critic to pass on an interview with Towne would have been malpractice.

Towne is best known as the screenwriter of Chinatown, The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975), but he also did uncredited script doctoring on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972). Towne is a writer with a complex and adult view of the world; his protagonists are generally people consigned to the fringes of society, loners who negotiate a hard yet not quite hopeless world. They glimpse goodness often enough to know it exists, but it is too rare to count on.

Chinatown is essentially, Towne says, a movie about “the futility of good intentions.” It follows private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) - a dandyesque character who is sort of a bizarro Philip Marlowe - as he investigates what first appears to be a husband’s adultery but turns into a gigantic conspiracy.

Towne had another ending for Chinatown in mind, one that “was tough” but that did not allow the evil Noah Cross (John Huston) to escape unscathed. But director Roman Polanski famously overrode Towne and substituted his own dark and unhappy final scene. Towne admits that it caused a good deal of tension at the time.

“They were both tough endings but his was simpler and starker,” Towne says. “I thought at the time Roman’s was too melodramatic. But in the interval I think it serves the picture very well.”

Towne hasn’t much to say about Polanski, but he understands the journalistic imperative and listens politely while I ramble on about how Polanski might be compared with the naive Gittes, who benefits no one by solving the central mysteries of Chinatown.

Yes, he agrees, Polanski may have been like Gittes, and he may have been a little like Cross too, but that’s not the subject of this interview.

So what is it like to make a movie as fundamental as Chinatown, a movie that in many respects is more real than the actual history of Los Angeles?

“It was a very ambitious project,” Towne says, “but in the course of doing it, the complications involved in the making of any movie become so pressing and frustrating you just hope you get away with something - that it won’t be a complete disaster. You start off with great ambitions and you end up hoping it won’t be a complete flop.”

And you wake up with an Oscar for Best Screenplay?

“And then you wake up surprised to find that not only has it survived,” Towne says, “but that it seems to have survived very well.”

Towne is diplomatic when I suggest that a film like Chinatown could not be made today, that no studio would greenlight a project of such seriousness and subtlety.

“Certainly you couldn’t make a film of that budget now; perhaps an independent film could be made from a script like that,” he says finally. “I agree with you, I don’t think they spend as much time on scripts these days.” E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 10/16/2009

Make a comment on this story.