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  • The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson book cover
  • The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood by Sam Wasson book cover
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The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

Chinatown’s making, set against 1970s Hollywood

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Chinatown’s making, set against 1970s Hollywood

Sam Wasson’s account uses the production of Chinatown to examine a vivid, complicated stretch of Hollywood history. The book brings together the film’s key creative and commercial forces, including Robert Towne’s screenplay, Robert Evans’s dealmaking, and the lives of Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, and Roman Polanski around the project. Its subject is both a celebrated film and the layers of story and myth that grew around its creation. The result is a portrait of filmmaking shaped by personal relationships, studio maneuvering, and the particular culture of 1970s Los Angeles.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in the making of Chinatown and its screenplay
  • Readers exploring Hollywood history and film production in the 1970s
  • Readers interested in the figures associated with the film

Themes

Film productionHollywood historyScreenwritingCelebrity and personal relationshipsMythmaking

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Here for the first time is the incredible true story of the making of Chinatown--the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema.

IN Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye, the story of Chinatown 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 unvarnished account of its creation.

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