The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood book cover

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

Hardcover – February 4, 2020

by
Price
$18.00
Format
Hardcover
Pages
416
Publisher
Flatiron Books
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-1250301826
Dimensions
6.4 x 1.45 x 9.57 inches
Weight
1.3 pounds

Description

A New York Times bestseller "The wondrous thing about Sam Wasson’s new book is that it feels both necessary and inevitable - as if Chinatown couldn’t (or shouldn’t) exist without it. Reading The Big Goodbye, something strange happens: it acquires the historical, dizzying, incestuous gravitas of the film itself. Wasson has a habit of making vividly thematic, compassionately revelatory art." - Bruce Wagner , author of Force Majeure and I Met Someone "Sam Wasson has written a smart, human and utterly engaging book about an iconic American movie. With its rich depiction of 1970s Hollywood, The Big Goodbye is grounded in marvelous reportorial detail and moves with novelistic urgency." - Julie Salamon , author of The Devil's Candy and An Innocent Bystander “A fascinating dive into Hollywood” ― Maureen Dowd, New York Times “ Chinatown (1974) was a watershed moment in a colorful era of American filmmaking. Wasson looks past the myth to tell the true story of its making.” ― USA Today , “Winter Reading Guide: This Season’s Must-Read Books” “If you love Chinatown, then you’ll love The Big Goodbye― and it’s good reading for any American cinema buff.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Inimitable Wasson…argues convincingly that Chinatown was one of the last great Hollywood films… this portrait of a neonoir classic will cast a spell over cinephiles.” ― Library Journal, starred review "Wasson…is one of the great chroniclers of Hollywood lore. And he has truly outdone himself this time." – The New York Times “Wasson’s fascinating and page-turning description of the talent and ideas behind “Chinatown” is more than a mere biography of a landmark movie.” – Los Angeles Times "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 Associated Press "It’s the definitive book on Chinatown." – Vanity Fair “[THE BIG GOODBYE] is as fine an unwrapping of the moviemaking process as I’ve read.” – Airmail The Big Goodbye is a graceful and worthwhile elegy to a time dear to those who are lucky enough to remember it…It will be hard to find a better film book published this year. – PopMatters.com The Big Goodbye is a fun and insightful read about the business of Hollywood and the complex, creative process. – Coachella Valley Weekly An absorbing account of the making of ‘Chinatown’…Wasson is a stylish chronicler of Hollywood politics…”The Big Goodbye” evokes the care that went into every frame. – The Economist “densely textured, well-researched… …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.” – The Sunday Times "Cultural historian Sam 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 its name." – The AV Club “Hollywood stories are hardly in short supply, but Sam Wasson can be trusted for some juicy, compelling discoveries. His latest investigates the making of Chinatown…his innovative approach: and assembly of mini-biographies of Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, and more, each packed with intriguing revelations.” – Entertainment Weekly "Sam Wasson does a wonderful job with this book... beautiful [and] meticulously researched." - CBS This Weekend "Wasson’s book, which is compellingly told and meticulously researched, tells the story of the origins and making of Chinatown, and of the studio that produced it, Paramount, which was saved from collapse by the dynamism of its young head of production, Robert Evans. " - the Irish Times "Sam Wasson's forensic account of Hollywood history in transition offers good reasons to revisit Chinatown 's oft-visited depths...his insights are sharp enough to slit your nose...Wasson crystallizes a fleeting filmmaking moment at its departure point and leaves us marvelling anew that is ever came to be." - Total Film " This is an exceptional film book, far more than the production history of Chinatown , and so vividly written you will want to seek out the work of Wasson's previous studies...Wasson writing about Los Angeles with the same love and diligence Towne brought to the script...I exclaimed aloud more than once, and even welled up over the final page. The Big Goodbye is worthy of Chinatown , this unforgettable movie―high praise indeed. - Sight and Sound "This scrupulously researched and reported book is about not just a cinematic masterpiece but the glorious lost Hollywood in which that movie was born." - The New York Times, 10 Books We Recommend This Week "In author Sam Wasson's meticulous new book "The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood," the film historian ("Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.") turns his eye to the minds behind one of the greatest, bleakest films ever to come out of the studio system. Delving into the lives of screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, star Jack Nicholson and director Polanski, he reveals the inspirations behind the film, as well as the aftershocks it left. And he makes it clear why "Chinatown's" themes of corruption and abuse of power have never seemed more painfully topical."- Salon.com "A big, chewy read, with talented, larger-than-life rogues stalking its pages ― men with names like Nicholson, Evans, Towne, Polanski. It evokes nostalgia for a movie that used nostalgia as a weapon, and it reminds a reader, once again, of how the works we take for classics came close to never happening." - Boston Globe "The hottest new book about the movie business... [it]presents a vivid picture of a key moment in Hollywood history as well as the gripping odyssey of a writer struggling to convert his vision into great cinema." - Deadline "There is no greater treat than Sam Wasson's new book... a completely fascinating account, filed with intriguing new information of the making of one of the undeniably great films of the modern era." - LA Times USA Today “5 Books Not to Miss” and “Must-Read Books of Winter 2020” Entertainment Weekly “20 Books to Read in February” and “50 Most Anticipated Books of 2020”DailyBreak.com “These 10 Books of February are Like a Box of Premium Chocolates” Houston Chronicle “Eagerly Anticipated Reads of 2020” Financial Times “2020 Vision: The Year Ahead in Books”Kirkus Reviews “New Year’s Reading Resolution List”The Criterion Collection’s The Current “November Books Roundup” Connecticut Post "Sit, stay and Read" Minneapolis Star-Tribune's "10 Books For At-Home Entertainment During Quarantine." SAM WASSON is the author of many books including the best-selling Fosse and Fifth Avenue, 5 AM: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman. He lives in Los Angeles.

Features & Highlights

  • From the
  • New York Times
  • bestselling author of
  • Fifth Avenue, Five A.M
  • . and
  • Fosse
  • comes the revelatory account of the making of a modern American masterpiece
  • Chinatown
  • is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making. In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history. Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, as compelling a movie star as there has ever been, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage death of his wife, returning to Los Angeles, the scene of the crime, where the seeds of his own self-destruction are quickly planted. Here is the fevered dealmaking of "The Kid" Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. Here too is Robert Towne's fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written. Wasson for the first time peels off layers of myth to provide the true account of its creation. Looming over the story of this classic movie is the imminent eclipse of the '70s filmmaker-friendly studios as they gave way to the corporate Hollywood we know today. In telling that larger story,
  • The Big Goodbye
  • will take its place alongside classics like
  • Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
  • and
  • The Devil's Candy
  • as one of the great movie-world books ever written.
  • Praise for Sam Wasson:
  • "Wasson is a canny chronicler of old Hollywood and its outsize personalities...More than that, he understands that style matters, and, like his subjects, he has a flair for it." -
  • The New Yorker
  • "Sam Wasson is a fabulous social historian because he finds meaning in situations and stories that would otherwise be forgotten if he didn't sleuth them out, lovingly." -
  • Hilton Als

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
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(465)
★★★★
25%
(387)
★★★
15%
(232)
★★
7%
(108)
★
23%
(357)

Most Helpful Reviews

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necessary reading for film buffs, residents of Los Angeles, and lovers of good writing

I started to read “The Big Goodbye” after dinner. I read until 11, slept for a few hours, read until 4.

The next night, I did it again.

Be warned: you may also get lost in Sam Wasson’s book — it is that good. Yes, I’m a sometime screenwriter, and “Chinatown” is one of my favorite movies, and I taught it to my NYU students every year, and I interviewed the reclusive Robert Towne for New York Magazine, so I come with a bias. I’m not alone: Francis Ford Coppola called it “the de facto blueprint for aspiring screenwriters, a platonic ideal of both structure and style taught as a template around the world.” Wearing my screenwriter’s hat, I can knowledgeably report that this is the best film book any film lover is likely to read this year. For others? Maybe one of the best non-fiction books of the year.

“The Big Goodbye” is much, much more than the inside, untold story of that 1974 classic.

Chinatown, for those who know the film, is a metaphor. For Los Angeles, once a desert, now an irrigated suburbia. For power, which makes gods of the rich. And for a moral fog overhanging a city that advertises its virtues and conceals its vices. It’s a great book about LA in 1937, and a great book about us right now — as Towne has written, “There are some crimes for which you get punished, and there are some crimes that our society isn’t equipped to punish, and so we reward the criminals” — and it has a lot more to feed your head than most of the punditry now passing for wisdom. In case you don’t totally understand the end of the movie (“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”), 331 pages will hammer that sorry truth home.

Yes, but what about the stories — the dish on Roman Polanski, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, producer Robert Evans, and the film’s creator, screenwriter Robert Towne? The book is a blow by blow account — literally: cocaine is a minor character here — of the genesis of the film, the shooting, the post-production, and the studio machinations. Like: Towne, who ever since he was 18, took a small dose of amphetamines every morning to give himself a “jump start.” (A solitary genius? Towne had a uncredited partner who worked with him almost every day.) Like, on the first day of shooting, Bob Evans showed up on a stretcher, and Polanski, usually supremely confident, threw up. Like the film score that was so wrong it was scrapped ten days before the premiere. And a million details, so interwoven that you feel Wasson talked to everyone; in fact, Nicholson and Dunaway gave no interviews. [You can understand why when you read this about Dunaway: “The crew finally did turn against Dunaway, and her delusions came true. They hated her. She regarded their every creative impulse with suspicion… Polanski saw signs of an actress who hadn’t prepared… A strand of Dunaway’s hair caught the light in the middle of shooting a scene, he called cut, and summoned her hairdresser to smooth it down… in the next take the hair popped up again and Polanski reached over and plucked it out.”]

All that is riveting. But the writing! The writing!
151 people found this helpful
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the history of Los Angeles

I am 82. I grew up in West Hollywood. The whole deal - Hollywood High, brief jobs at Pickwick Bookstore, years while in high school ushering at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I remember the time CHINATOWN tried to recreate and this book is a gem. Mr. Wasson captured it all. This is a great book - maybe the definitive book on movies, Los Angeles and the lost dream of southern California.
108 people found this helpful
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The Big Goodbye is a detailed look at the making of the film classic Chinatown

Last summer I greatly enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Hollywood the Quentin Tarantino film on Hollywood life in 1969. The Big Goodbye by Sam Wasson returns us to that era of Hollywood history. In this wonderful book
which reads like an exciting noirish novel we examine the making of the film classic Chinatown. Wasson recounts the horrible slaying of Sharon Tate and her friends in the summer of 1969 and what kind of a city L.A. was in that creative era. The book examines in detail how a movie is made and focuses on four key men who made Chinatown a nominee for the Best Picture Oscar and garnered Robert Towne the Academy Award for his screenwriting gem.
1. Director Roman Polanski the director and widower of the murdered and tragic Sharon Tate. His pregnant mother died in Auschwitz. We see how his mastery of movie making helped to make his Chinatown a hit. He would later be accused of abusing young girls and now lives in Europe.
2. Screenwriter Robert Towne: A good friend of Jack Nicholson he wrote the brilliant screenplay on which Chinatown was based. Towne later became a drug addict, divorced and never again did as well with writing a screenplay.
3. Robert Evans the Paramount studio head and the producer of Chinatown. He sparked the revival of his studio in the 1970s though he dealt with the demons of sciatica and drug addiction. He was married seven times to such women as Phyllis George and Ali McGraw. A troubled complicated man.
4. Jack Nicholson: The great actor who made Jake Gittes come alive in Chinatown. Nicholson loves his friends, L.A. Lakers basketball, existentialistic philosophy and moviemaking.
The quartet of Evans, Polanski, Nicholson and Towne made a film classic despite disputes, money issues and dealing with the hard to work with Faye Dunaway a great actress.
This is one of the best books I have ever read on Los Angeles and moviemaking. A pure joy to read! Enjoy and remember its Chinatown!
18 people found this helpful
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Writing style ruins the book

Chinatown is one of my favorite movies, so the subject matter of the book fascinated me right away. The problem I have with the book is the author’s writing style which became an issue within the first couple of pages. His use of nested parenthetical phrases and overuse of commas, dashes, and semicolons, makes for a tedious read.

It takes too much mental accounting to parse and tends to take the reader out of the story. The internal voice I had while reading was one of a person who not only talks too much, but does so in an irritating, halting fashion.

Because of so many nested parentheticals and choppy run-on sentences, the writing does not flow. Sadly it was a tiresome reading experience from the start.
17 people found this helpful
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An In-depth Study of a Modern Masterpiece

When Robert Towne, still struggling to finish his script, was asked why he called it Chinatown when there weren't any scenes there he answered; 'Chinatown is a state of mind.' Then the script was finished, the film shot and decades later it's rightly regarded as a masterpiece and I would still contend that Chinatown is a state of mind. I loved this book. It's as if it were tailor-made for me; I'm a huge fan of noir.

Mr. Wasson sets the tone with a fantasy/horror tour of Los Angeles in the late sixties. Yes, there were a lot of creative people finding each other and creating art, film and music in those hills over the city, but there was always the threat of violence in the air, too. The book then settles in on the process of how the film was made. And I love process! It never gets lost in the weeds and becomes something that you have to wade through. It's quite the opposite, in fact. It's a quick, enjoyable and fascinating read. I enjoyed the view into Towne's thinking - what inspired him, what frustrated him while he was writing the script. Then he finished the script it was no longer his alone. Roman Polanski had his own ideas. The most notable argument that Towne and Polanski had was about the ending. Towne wrote a happy-ish ending, Polanski wouldn't allow it. Polanski was right.

When Noah Cross (John Huston) crosses the police barrier to comfort his daughter/granddaughter and Jake (Jack Nicholson) can only look on in frustration. That not only fit the ethos of the film's universe, but the political climate of the United States in the mid-70's as well. The long, expensive and bloody Vietnam War had been lost. The sitting President of the United States {Richard Nixon) had cheated, lied and covered up his up his misdeeds. Bad people in power manipulated and used the rest of us for there own purposes and most often they got away with it. Hmmm, that still seems very familiar...

This is a great book for fans of film, detective fiction, noir and old Los Angeles!
12 people found this helpful
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Boring

I tried to read this book at least three times and finally put it down. The author's style vacillates between boring and aggravating. It's possibly the least interesting book I've ever read about Hollywood and the film industry.
7 people found this helpful
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Interesting and Insightful....but only for a while...

When Sam Wasson is discussing the film itself, he does a masterful job. The "inside baseball" dealmaking, behavior of the producer, director, stars, writers and others is very insightful and well written. But.......when he brings politics into the discussion, trying to blame the downfall of the great years of Hollywood on Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Capitalism and anyone and anything else he can think of, his book completely falls apart. For some reason, he believes that the 1960s was the greatest generation this country every produced and it was all taken down by capitalism. Really? There is no real mention that the 60s generation was the most hedonistic, narcissistic, self-destructive, self-centered, egotistic, spoiled generation in American history. Who forced all these people to behave in the self-destructive way they did? Why can't the blame be laid clearly where it belongs...on the people themselves. If Wasson had stuck to just the making of the film and the stories of the people involved, he would have had something great here. By bringing his very biased and warped view of the 1960s into it, in my opinion, he ruined what could have been a memorable book. Instead, the very slanted political views that he forces upon the reader leaves a very, very bad taste in the mouth when one reaches the end of the book. It's a shame. This could have been a very fine book about the making of a Hollywood classic. Instead, it turns into a political diatribe. Wasson is obviously a very talented writer. Too bad he couldn't have just "kept to the script" and discussed the film itself. That would have been more than enough.
6 people found this helpful
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An uneven book, with a disappointing lack of focus

This is a disappointing mess of a book – partially because it tries to do too much and therefore loses focus – and partially because the author’s at times unreadable slips into purple prose. Far too much time is spent on the backstory of the lives of Roman Polanski (I mean, pages and pages about the Manson murders, which have been covered so much better elsewhere), Robert Evans and Robert Towne, while for instance, Faye Dunaway is barely even mentioned – even Jack Nicholson seems to get shorted. An excessive amount of pages are devoted to the writing of the script - the many pages spent going over the different drafts as Towne tries to get the script into some kind of shape was especially tiresome. That the book spends more time on the writing of the script, then the shooting or editing of the film is another bizarre decision (only the filming of a few scenes are even mentioned). That the book continues well past the release of Chinatown, to describe the changes in Hollywood, the bad decisions of people involved with the film, and ends with a section on the completely forgettable Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, from 1990, makes for some more dull reading. All that said, when the book is actually focused on the film Chinatown, there’s some good information to be picked out of the mess, sections on the set design and cinematography, sections on figuring out how to shoot the ending of the movie, that give the book some worth (if like me, you rate Chinatown as one of the great films).
5 people found this helpful
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Miserable writing.

Ok for some gossip. But writing is in Walter Winchell style, superficial, turning nouns into verbs: "he would honey-darling agents" "battle-plan his production". Many quotations seemingly made-up and how does he know what went in very intimate encounters? I cant read more than three pages at a time without becoming annoyed.
5 people found this helpful
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Splendid book

This is the first book I've read in a long time that made me want to keep reading. I ate it up. Wasson's style is smooth, unpretentious, and clear. He focuses on the five major figures of his narrative and interweaves them wonderfully: Julie Payne, Robert Towne, Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski. How did they all figure in the making of _Chinatown_? As the story progresses and the reader becomes confident in the writer's authority, she or he learns the multiplex answers to this question incrementally. As with all great films, it's a miracle that it got made at all, let alone succeeded so remarkably. Thankfully, Wasson presents his five figures disinterestedly (i.e. neutrally) and allows readers to form their own judgments. Highest recommendation.
5 people found this helpful

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