Sleuthing ‘Chinatown’

Hollywood may be obsessed with youth, but some films improve with age. On the 25th anniversary of “Chinatown,” the film’s creators have revisited the movie and are somewhat surprised to find that it holds up better than they ever could have imagined.

One evening not long ago, “Chinatown” director Roman Polanski happened upon the movie while channel-surfing with his wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner, at their Paris home. At first, he says, he didn’t even recognize his film because it was a bad print dubbed in French. It was so chopped up with commercials that Polanski dug out a laserdisc just to check out the first half hour of the movie. He and Seigner found themselves hooked and saw it through to the gruesome finale.

Polanski’s reaction to the film--25 years after its June 21, 1974, release--is inexplicably modest. “I like it more now than I did then,” the 65-year-old director said in a rare, exclusive interview by phone from a resort in the Dolomite mountains in Italy.

Of course, many critics and fans have been far less restrained over the decades, hailing “Chinatown” as a near-perfect gem, one of the great movies of the last 30 years, a film that seems to improve with time and repeated viewing. It’s also arguably the apex of Polanski’s career, which includes such formidable peaks as “Repulsion” (1965), “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), “Tess” (1979) and “Frantic” (1988). The film was an Oscar winner for Robert Towne’s screenplay and was nominated for 10 other Academy Awards, including best picture and director.

For anyone wanting to revisit the movie, it’s widely available on video and airs regularly on cable’s premium movie chanels. Paramount will release “Chinatown” on DVD later this year, but Polanski himself won’t be coming to town to prepare or promote it. The director still can’t enter the U.S. without risking possible arrest for having had sex with a teenage girl in the 1970s. (He fled the country in ’77 rather than face a probable prison term and now lives in Paris with Seigner and their two children.)

So the task of overseeing the transfer of the film to DVD has fallen to Towne, who famously feuded with Polanski during the making of “Chinatown,” although they have long since patched up their differences and even worked together on “Frantic.” The DVD will include interviews with the filmmakers and actors.

“Roman and I wanted to interview each other for the DVD but Paramount wanted to stick to the more traditional format,” Towne says.

“Chinatown” is a noirish mystery that centers on private eye J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who is hired to investigate a supposed case of marital infidelity. Gittes soon stumbles on a government (and family) scandal in which the head of the Los Angeles water department and others are found to be diverting water, stealing land and committing murder, while nefariously reshaping the city’s boundaries.

Besides Nicholson (who was not available to comment for this article) the film also stars Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray, the wife of a slain water department chief, and John Huston as venal tycoon Noah Cross, Evelyn’s father. Polanski has a high-profile cameo in the movie as the little hood who slits Gittes’ nose.

Polanski talked about what he admires about the film today. “When [Gittes] comes up to the door [of Evelyn’s house] and knocks on the door [and it slams in his face] . . . and nothing happens. And we hold like this for a long time,” he says. “I [also] liked the scene when [Evelyn] walks out of the Brown Derby, when [Gittes] says, ‘I like my nose, I like breathing through it.’ Remember? I like that shot when it starts with the page going to fetch the car and doing it in two profiles. . . . [Today], maybe I would cut two close-ups. I don’t know whether I would, actually. Maybe I wouldn’t.”

What would he change if he could? “Little details here and there,” he says. “The lousy reflection in the lens of [Nicholson’s camera] when he’s photographing Hollis and Katherine from the roof [at El Macondo]. . . . I wanted to [film] it upside down and [was told], ‘Oh, they will never understand it. Why is it upside down?’ When you see something reflected in the lens, it’s always upside down! It should be upside down, it should be slightly concave. That could [have been] better.”

Unhappy With the First Results

Screenwriter Towne, 64, also likes the film now more than he did when it was released.

Among his favorite scenes, Towne likes “the way in which we worked the scene with that wonderful character actress [Fritzi Burr] who was the secretary for Yelburton in the water department: [imitating her] ‘Yes, yes, they own the water department!’ [Imitating Nicholson] ‘I take a long lunch hour--all day sometimes.’ That willingness to irritate her in order to get information: Very few directors would insist on that,” Towne says.

Polanski and Towne were truly unhappy when they saw the rough cut of “Chinatown” in the spring of ’74.

“I finished the film and I looked at the rough cut, and as usual the rough cut is this very depressing moment for a director,” Polanski recalls. “And a director who does not have experience [with] it is close to suicide at that stage. But even knowing that that very difficult moment would pass, I still was tremendously depressed seeing the rough cut. I showed it to a friend of mine . . . and was so ashamed when the lights came up. And he said, ‘What a great movie!’ I said, ‘Is something wrong with him?’ I truly didn’t think that he could be right.”

Polanski says he never once thought during the making of the movie that it would become a classic. Neither did Paramount’s head of production, Robert Evans, who produced the film through his own production company.

“Up until the time the reviews broke, we weren’t sure whether we had a disaster on our hands or something that was just different,” says Evans, 70, adding that most Paramount executives openly predicted the film would fail.

Polanski Was Reluctant--at First

From its birth as a sprawling first-draft script in ‘73, “Chinatown” was never considered a commercial sure-shot. At first, even Polanski passed on it (at the time, he was busy in Rome).

“I really felt happy in Rome,” he says. “I was working there, I had a great house and a bunch of friends with whom I worked. It just wasn’t interesting for me to go to make a film in Los Angeles.”

Besides, Los Angeles reminded him of personal tragedy; four years earlier, his wife, Sharon Tate, pregnant with their child, was sadistically murdered by members of Charles Manson’s gang.

“I had too vivid memories of all those events of ’69 and I didn’t feel like going to work there,” he says.

But the calls from Hollywood to Rome kept coming, first from Nicholson, who personally asked Polanski to direct, and then from Evans, who apparently made the director an offer he couldn’t refuse. Polanski was soon on a plane to LAX.

What eventually followed was a pivotal eight-week writing session in which Polanski and Towne dismantled Towne’s script and then painstakingly rebuilt it piece by piece. Their writing workday would begin around 9:30 or 10 in the morning and would last until around 7 or 8 in the evening--and was usually followed by a night of hard partying.

“I don’t think there was a day that we worked that we didn’t go out and play at night,” Towne recalls. “The mood at night was--it was the 1970s. We had a good time. Fooled around. I’ll leave it at that.” Apparently, the after-hours carousing continued even during the shooting: “[Nicholson] could stay up until 6 in the morning but he would be [on the set] at 8 or 9 knowing his lines like nobody else,” Polanski says. “There was never any kind of problem with him.”

Turning the muddy draft into a filmable script proved an enormous task.

The first draft “was gigantic and could not actually be shot the way it was written,” Polanski says. “But there were terrific things in it. The second draft, I remember Robert took a long time and then it was even longer. There were many more characters and it was quite convoluted. We sat down and with discipline tried to combine some things.”

Towne concedes that if his first draft had been filmed as it was, “it would have been a mess.” Most of the rewriting consisted of re-sequencing scenes while organizing and clarifying the complicated plot.

“We took the script and broke it down into one-sentence summations of each scene,” Towne says. “Then we took a scissors and cut those little scenes . . . and pasted them on the door of the study at his house where we were working. And the game was to shift those things around until we got them in an order that worked.

“At an early stage in the writing of it, I remember . . . thinking, what should be revealed first: the real estate scandal, the water scandal or the incest? As obvious as the answer became, that was the first question I dealt with. And I did realize the water scandal had to come first, a fairly obvious choice when you stop to think about it. But beyond that, the rest of the structural changes of significance took place with Roman, shifting them around back and forth.”

Polanski says he “did more of a construction, the shaping up of the plot. . . . And also I worked on the dialogue in a way that people can go crazy sitting with me because I like eliminating every unnecessary word.”

He says he also put Gittes into sharper focus, partly by using a radical style of subjective point-of-view (in which he filmed much of the movie over Nicholson’s shoulder). “The events that happen are really only seen by [Gittes],” he says. “You never show things that happen in his absence.”

Writer and Director Fought Over Ending

Towne and Polanski argued frequently during their collaboration. “We fought every day,” Towne says. “We’d fight about how to get to a restaurant.”

“Chinatown’s” success “happened through a lot of arguments, fights,” Evans agrees. “There was warfare throughout the picture, but that’s healthy.”

The most substantial disagreement was about the ending of the film, in which Towne wanted Cross to be killed by Evelyn. Polanski insisted on a more disturbing finale in which Evelyn is shot dead in front of her young daughter, Katherine.

“We were arguing about the end and could not agree. . . . I was adamant about it,” Polanski says. “I did not believe in a happy ending in this type of a movie.”

With the backing of Evans, Polanski eventually won the battle over the ending. “I wrote that last scene the way it is now,” Polanski says. “And I sketched the dialogue and I remember in the evening I gave Jack what I wrote down and said, ‘Fashion it into your speech.’ And Jack very quickly jotted a few things of his and then we shot it at literally five to midnight.”

Today, Towne says Polanski “was right about the end.”

Many see the tragic ending as an echo of the horror of the Manson murders on some level. That real-life tragedy also probably helped Polanski to make Gittes a credible detective. After all, the murder of Polanski’s wife turned the director into a sleuth for a time; in the months before the murderers were caught, he obsessively tried to find the culprits himself.

Does Polanski think his own experience trying to track down his wife’s killers informed the film?

“I can only tell you that every experience helps you with your work. This, of course, did to a certain degree,” he says. “I am unable to tell you how much better the film is because I had certain things happen to me. Whatever you do, you learn. And each next movie has one layer more to make it richer.” (The director has no dearth of personal tragedy from which to draw; he spent much of his early childhood in Poland escaping from the Nazis, who had killed his mother.)

One change they agreed upon that Towne now regrets is the opening scene in which Gittes meets with his client Curly. It was originally written with Curly saying he wanted to kill his wife, and Gittes telling him he’s not rich enough to get away with murder. And in fact the cut dialogue is missed under close scrutiny; when Nicholson’s character says, “I only brought it up to illustrate a point,” the audience now doesn’t know what “point” he’s referring to, because the previous piece of dialogue is gone.

“That exchange I miss probably as much as any in the movie,” Towne says. “Because it really foreshadows [the] ‘You’ve got to be rich to kill somebody and get away with it’ [theme]. He’s really foreshadowing the whole movie in a kind of nice way.”

Polanski decided to cut two other sequences altogether to help the movie’s flow: In one, Harry Dean Stanton, playing a seaplane pilot who flies Gittes to Noah Cross’ house, hints at Evelyn’s secret past. In the other, Noah talks about his love of horse manure. “Love the smell of it,” Cross says. “A lot of people do but of course they won’t admit it.”

By the end of the eight-week session, Polanski and Towne had created a final working script. Unfortunately, they were also no longer speaking.

“By the beginning of the shooting [in September 1973] Roman and I had argued to the point where I did not go onto the set. At that point it was just wiser to let him shoot the movie. But that was really largely because of the end scene,” Towne says.

Polanski says that, contrary to rumor, “I never tried to bar [Towne] from the set. He just didn’t come because we weren’t on speaking terms anymore by the time I started the picture.” (Towne now says that Polanski is “virtually . . . the only director that I would willingly work for as a writer.”)

Dunaway’s Suggestions Ignored by Polanski

For the most part, the final screenplay was shot almost exactly as it was written. “Once Roman and I agreed on the script, he held everyone’s feet to the fire,” Towne says. “Whatever disagreements we had, they ended when the script was written. Nobody said, ‘Well, let’s try it another way.’ That was the way.”

During the shooting, changes were frequently suggested by Dunaway--and rejected by Polanski.

“There were a lot of problems with Faye Dunaway,” he says. “Faye always wanted to change something. Some nights I would . . . cross a couple words out. [She’d say]: ‘Why are you taking it out? I don’t want you to.’ I’d say, ‘OK, leave it, leave it. It’s not worth the fight.’ Then she would come a half an hour later: ‘You know what? I thought it over, maybe you’re right, we should remove it.’ It was like this every day. Or she would try to add something. ‘Actually I don’t think it’s a good idea, Faye.’ She would start fighting about it. And it was like that continuously.”

Dunaway did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this article. But she did write about Polanski and “Chinatown” in her autobiography, “Looking for Gatsby: My Life,” by Dunaway and Betsy Sharkey (who is now The Times television editor). In the 1998 edition, she writes: “I thought Roman was thwarting me and not supporting me” and “Roman was an autocrat, always forcing things.” Yet she also calls him “an auteur filmmaker of the first order.”

Early on Jane Fonda was up for the role, but Polanski says she would not have made a better Evelyn Mulwray. “Absolutely not. I thought [Dunaway] was perfect. Nobody wanted Faye,” he says.

“Bob Evans didn’t want her because he thought she was trouble. I knew Faye; she had a fling with a friend of mine. . . . I didn’t expect to have any problems with her. So I fought for her. And I’m still very happy we had her because whatever problems we had on the set--who cares?

“I think she’s terrific when I watch it now. It’s really exactly how I saw the part; she was the right age, she had the right looks, her acting was just perfect for this type of character. I don’t think anyone else would have done it better. Same with John Huston.”

Could ‘Chinatown’ Be Made Today?

Polanski says “Chinatown” probably could not be made in today’s climate of moviemaking-by-committee.

“It would really have to be [made by] someone who has enough muscle to pull through all those things,” he says. “Studios now have an enormous amount of various executives who need to justify their existence by meddling into the creative process.

“And there’s a great rift between the creative branch and the executive branch; [executives] are so envious of not being on the other side. . . . And they call themselves ‘creatives.’ There wouldn’t be an executive then who would dare to say, ‘We are having a creative meeting’ or ‘We’ll send you the creative notes.’ [Imitating a movie executive]: ‘After our creative meeting we came up with these five pages of creative notes which we would like you to read.’ . . . In those times, nobody would actually use this language. The fact that they use it is very meaningful.”

Polanski’s apparent disillusionment with Hollywood, combined with his legal problems, means he won’t be returning here to make a film any time soon. (He continues to direct movies outside the U.S. His next, “The Ninth Gate,” a supernatural thriller starring Johnny Depp, is due later this year.)

And Polanski says he is not close at all to settling his legal problems.

“How can I [return to the U.S.] with the actual state of the media?” he says. “I don’t want to become a product. . . . Can you imagine what it would entail showing up suddenly in Los Angeles? It would take a long time before closure happens. And I don’t think I want it enough. I have family to look after. I don’t want to be in every tabloid.”