“Nobody’s getting me dinner…,” Lou would whine at home. “Helen…”
When he got too drunk and stayed drunk, Helen left town. But she always came back. “What can I do?” she confided to Julie. “I have no place else to go.”
* * *
By the fall of 1971, some six months after he had begun, Towne was still writing outlines. Some he discarded incomplete. Others ended unsatisfactorily.
“‘Chinatown’ by Towne’” one began:
“Only a few years back, when Gittes was working for the D.A.’s office, he got involved in the tong wars. He had been forewarned by his superior, Leon Whitaker, not to fool around with any of the goings-on in Chinatown.” If you had to go into Chinatown, Whitaker had told him, “do as little as possible.”
Gittes had, to his lasting regret, ignored the warning. In the past he had discovered that one of the tongs was selling Cherry, a beautiful slave girl, to a rival faction. One faction enlisted Gittes to rescue Cherry. Gittes agreed, and Cherry was delivered to safety. Later, when Cherry died, tong wars broke out—first in Los Angeles and then the country. Whitaker was shot, and Gittes only barely got by, though not without injury—an ax chopped off the pinkie finger of his right hand. In the years since, Gittes left the D.A.’s office for his own private practice, but the lessons remained: “For Gittes,” Towne typed, “Chinatown has come to mean any place where he’s on unfamiliar ground, a case, a country, any place where he can be taken by appearances.” He vowed never to make that mistake again.
Cut to L.A. in 1937, a city in drought.… Citizens are pressured to approve a thirty-seven-million-dollar bond to divert dam water from the north.… The water commissioner is found dead, drowned in an empty reservoir.… Meanwhile, Artemis Samples comes to Gittes with the suspicion that his wife is having an affair with Julian Cross.… Gittes tracks the wife to Cross’s place, collects the proof.… Later, at a poker game, he learns Samples and his wife have been murdered—except they weren’t husband and wife.… “Mrs. Sample’s” real name was Olive Day—and Day’s roommate, Marian (or should Towne name her “Marion”?) Welles (or “Wells”?) is missing.… At the Albacore Club (or Petroleum Club? Polo Club? Canyon Club?), a prominent judge asks Gittes to convince Cross to sell them the Deep Canyon portion of Cross’s ranch. Gittes asks, Why me? On his way out, Gittes notices he’s being trailed … He runs into his old pal, Luis Escobar, who’s looking for Marian, claiming she’s a sister of a friend, but smelling another Chinatown, Gittes declines to help him.… He returns home to find, of all people, Marian herself waiting for him, afraid that whoever killed Artemis will kill her. “The girl’s Chinatown,” Gittes thinks, and hands her off to the police.… Later that night his phone rings. It’s Marian. She’s been bailed out. By whom she doesn’t know.…
Once again Towne stalled out.
Forget it.
* * *
Dextroamphetamine. That had always helped. Ever since Towne was eighteen: One quarter of a 5 mg tab just to get a “jump start” in the mornings.
On October 4 he started not with Gittes, but Mulwray:
It begins as chief engineer of the L.A. Water and Power Company Hollis Mulwray finds out the truth about the water.… Later, Gittes is hired his wife, by Evelyn Mulwray. She thinks her husband is having an affair.… Then Hollis Mulwray is found dead. Looks like suicide, but Evelyn suspects he was murdered by whoever wanted the dam. Unlikely, Gittes replies; the whole city wants it.… At the city morgue Gittes inspects the body of a drunk, drowned in a storm drain. How is that possible? There’s a drought.… At night he checks the river. Water is flowing in from somewhere. Where?… Evelyn tells Gittes she’s being watched. Maybe they’re afraid she knows what her husband knew.… Gittes, undercover as a dry cleaner, enters Julian Cross’s compound, and finds out that Cross, Mulwray’s closest friend and Evelyn Mulwray’s father, did put the watch on Mrs. Mulwray.… Gittes questions Cross. Why is he spying on his own daughter? Cross is afraid she’s seeing Luis Ayala, a Mexican convicted of murder whom he believes has designs on his estate.… Later, Evelyn and Gittes decided to confront Cross: When they arrive, he’s is hallucinating in his bathtub. Opium? Morphine? He grabs his daughter, crying. He mumbles something about twelve bloody babies. Mrs. Mulwray translates. He means the twelve months of the year.…
Towne was in agony. Writing Chinatown was like being in Chinatown. A novelist could write and write—and, indeed, Towne wrote like a novelist, turning out hundreds upon hundreds of pages of notes and outlines and dialogue snippets—but a movie is two hours; in script form, approximately a minute a page. What could he afford to lose? He needed to be uncompromisingly objective, but not so hard on his ideas that he ended up losing what may have been good in them—that is, if there was ever anything good about them to begin with. Was there? The question had to be asked. Was any of this good, and if so, would anyone care? A civics lesson on water rights and the incestuous rape of a child? From one vantage point, it was dull; from another, obscene. Who would even make such a movie? Columbia wouldn’t even let him write forty fucks.
Maybe he was wrong to attempt an original screenplay. Acting as both creator and executioner of this swiftly expanding entity, surging and swirling its squelchy way to incomprehensibility—it was almost too much for one mind to hold, let alone master. And then—worrying ahead—there was the dialogue. When—if—he nailed his story and its structure, he still had to write the actual scenes. Who says what to whom? And how do they say it? Precisely what words do they choose to speak? Moreover, what don’t they say? (This was writing for the screen, after all.) A screenwriter had to ask: what faces, behavior, gestures, clothing, and scenery can say that can’t, or shouldn’t, be put into dialogue? And as for that dialogue, how to be witty without being arch, wise without pretension, emotional without sentiment, principled without pedantry?
In 120 pages?
He would have to borrow money. From whom? Not his father—he had borrowed enough already. If only he were a faster writer. But Towne knew what he was, and that was slow, and slow was expensive.
Edward Taylor would help.
* * *
After his workday at the University of Southern California, where he taught sociology and statistics and wrote the occasional research grant proposal, Edward Taylor would hop on his motorcycle and head home for a very quick dinner.
“Dad, where are you going?”
“To Robert’s. To work.”
Back on the motorcycle, he’d curl his way up the wide canyons of Benedict to the hill on Hutton Drive, to Towne’s office and his own place, across from Towne at his desk, in a wingback chair Towne had brought back from Spain. Lit by the downglow of an antique parchment lampshade, Taylor propped up his feet on a footstool of tufted red leather and was ready to go. At arm’s length he kept a side table prepped with his ashtray, drink, and yellow legal pads galore for whatever ideas, bits of dialogue, or points for further research he and Towne ignited from their conversation. But by this point in the work, more research was unlikely: Since Towne had begun on Chinatown, he—with Edward’s help—had gathered piles of information on the water wars, the orange groves, the powerful dynasties of Los Angeles’s early years—everything pertaining and remotely pertaining to the story, and more. Too much, in fact: They had amassed a pile of nearly five hundred pages of outlines, notes, and character details. What they needed now was to cut and order, to figure out, once and for all, the plot, the exact structure of Chinatown.