Home › Books › The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of …
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
by
16/99
Critics' Rating Index
48/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
97/99
Volume of Reviews
78/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
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
Reviews
"Wasson sometimes goes for the California gothic of Ross Macdonald's detective novels, but the way he writes is the opposite of hard-boiled."
"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."
"As I read Sam Wasson's breezy, cocaine-dusted history, roughly two-thirds of which is about director Roman Polanski's Chinatown, I kept wondering: How would it be different if Faye Dunaway had agreed to talk?"
"...a multifaceted dissection of the infamous noir film ..."
"Occasionally, however, he forgets the meaning of 'enough,' conflating information with trivia and drowning us in more facts than we could possibly want ..."
"Still, the problem with Hollywood, as West also noted, is that it is a universe unto itself."
"Wasson concludes his book with several long chapters about the less-than-stellar fates of Chinatown's principals."
"...as Sam Wasson shows in compelling detail in his fine new book The Big Goodbye, the makers of Chinatown were simply too young, too ambitious, too controversial, and their movie, while undeniably brilliant, was like a brash finger stuck in the eye of the Hollywood establishment ..."
"Wasson deftly weaves into his densely populated narrative only makes the actors, producers, writers and director more elusive."
"A lengthy section on the various drafts of the script will interest film students who have heard it praised as one of the greatest screenplays of them all, although the book really comes alive when describing the actual shooting of the film itself."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!