The Big Goodbye: Chinatown And the Last Years Of Hollywood, Wasson - B

                   This is the story of the legendary movie told from the viewpoint of its four principals: director Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, star Jack Nicholson and producer Robert Evans. The film was nominated for and won many of the preliminary awards, and was up for 11 Oscars, but only Towne took one home. The perspective is that it was the end of a brief era, that began in the mid-1960's and lasted barely a decade. The Hollywood of the studio moguls had been tottering for decades and the 60's saw it end, with sales of the legendary dream factories to holding companies and conglomerates. The decade was the time of the auteur young directors: Peckinpah, Coppolla, Friedkin, Bogdanovich and Polanski. They created movies of magic and integrity. The first was Bonnie and Clyde; the last was Chinatown. This time of free-flowing talent was followed by the blockbuster era, epitomized by Jaws and all that followed. In addition to pining for the Hollywood of that era, the book looks wistfully back on the inter-war years of a simpler, less congested and more bucolic LA.