In Towne’s first drafts, Gittes’s motivation is blurred in the smokescreen of twisty misdirects. After Evelyn drops the lawsuit against him, what does the water scandal matter to him personally? In the Polanski rewrite, however, an answer is offered as an outraged Gittes, in the barbershop, defends the integrity of his profession, an indication that for all his sleazy divorce work, a nobler detective is waiting to emerge. The water mystery is his opportunity to do good—which, in a flourish of chilling irony, he will blunder by hindering rather than helping, near the climax of the Polanski revision. In the original, Evelyn masterminded the showdown with her father; in the Polanski revision, Gittes instigates it, creating a new scene that further demonizes Cross. Rather than tremble and repent when confronted or wither under a narcotic haze, as he did in Towne’s early drafts, Cross here stands firm and fully justifies his crimes: “You see, Mr. Gittes,” he growls in the new scene, “most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.” The line suggests his is an evil beyond even those evils he has already committed and echoes an oft-pondered query of Polanski’s. “I often ask,” he said many years later, “is it possible under the right circumstances for anyone to be capable of any act, however evil?” He had reason to wonder.
At long last, and in only a few weeks, the script was in order. The mystery plot, reduced to its core, dominated; it was, finally, coherent. And yet, still—to Robert Evans’s consternation—Chinatown had no ending.
* * *
Howard Koch Jr. and Dick Sylbert squeezed into Koch’s little brown Audi and took off to look at Los Angeles, Koch behind the wheel, Sylbert in the seat beside him, turning his Minox through open windows as they scouted locations. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Koch was the ideal coscout and driver for Sylbert. As a boy, working as a one-man liquor delivery service, he had scoured the city with his Thomas Guide of maps, acquiring Los Angeles one secret at a time.
They found that much of Hollywood proper wouldn’t work. “Hollywood Boulevard was in bad shape,” Koch said, “and we needed to bring back a little of the romance of what the city used to be like.” Every day for weeks, Koch brought those memories to the Chinatown scout, suggesting throughout this or that street, alternative routes, buildings he had passed many times but never had an excuse to examine, like the row of courtyard apartments between Fountain and Sunset on Havenhurst, an ideal setting for early in the film when Gittes, perched on the rooftop, snaps a few shots of Mulwray at the apartment Sylbert would name El Macondo—after the city in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Just to be sure, Koch and Sylbert climbed the red-tile roofs at 1400–1414 Havenhurst Drive to examine the view themselves.
In a city famous for erasing its history, it was a particular challenge to find locations that predated the film’s period. Sylbert said, “You’re always looking around to get rid of a television antenna when you should be thinking about something else.” But even more than era-appropriate, Sylbert-approved locations had to “rewrite the script in visual terms”: They had to correspond to what he called visual structure. “You cannot write music without structuring it,” Sylbert said. “You cannot write a play without structuring it. Why should you be able to design a movie without structuring it?”
Long before the scout, Sylbert began by making up a set of aesthetic rules for Chinatown. They would foretell the visual experience of the entire picture. “You say to yourself, Okay, Chinatown is about a drought, so all the colors in this picture are gonna be related to the idea of drought,” Sylbert explained. “And the only time you’re gonna see green is when somebody has water from the grass.” He added, “The reason [the buildings are] white is that the heat bounces off them.” This white/heat dialectic Sylbert would call his “home theme,” the notion from which all subsequent visual concepts would emerge. “And not only will they all be white, they’ll be above the eye level of the private eye. Above eye level means for the private eye that he has to walk uphill. It is always harder emotionally to walk uphill—you know the old expression, ‘Man, this is really uphill.’ You then decide what the colors are going to be and why they’re going to be that way, and what the range should be. Let’s say, from burnt grass, which is a terrific color, to white, which you know you’re already gonna deal with, to umber. Umber is interesting because it’s the color of a shadow. And in a movie like this, the more shadowy the better. And then you’re gonna use certain kinds of repetition: Spanish building, Spanish building, Spanish building.… And you use all architectural space for what you want to do. You use the layers, the planes … use everything you can. All these things are available to you to structure a movie. Even opaque glass. You know what’s interesting about opaque glass in a mystery? You can’t quite see who’s behind it, and it looks like frozen water,” which Sylbert would correlate to Chinatown’s power structures: the coroner’s office, the morgue, the Hall of Records. All of these Sylbert would re-create in the studio. The sky would never have clouds; that might indicate rain. In keeping with the drought, the sky would be as white as a Spanish building, except when Gittes is out at sea, surrounded finally by water. Then, Sylbert decided, “It should then be the most intense cerulean blue imaginable.”
Sylbert would keep the secrets of his visual structure from Polanski. It was not his custom to trouble the director, who would be consumed with the manifest content of story. If Sylbert did his job right, as he had on The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, Carnal Knowledge, and the others, all Polanski would have to do was place the camera and direct the actors. Sylbert’s work would be only subconsciously experienced—“My whole philosophy of production design,” he said, “is that what I do is so real that you can’t tell the difference”—in the many subtle shifts of color, texture, shape, tone, and contrast that were, like phrases of a symphony, visual variations on a theme, in this case, drought and its ancillaries, water, flora, sun. There were zero accidents.
“What kind of ointment is that?” Elia Kazan, Sylbert’s first feature director, had asked of one of Sylbert’s sketches for Baby Doll. Sylbert had drawn a fluted column beside an old rocking chair, and on the floor a squeezed-out tube of ointment.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Sylbert answered the master. “What kind of ointment is that?”
“It’s pile ointment,” Kazan improvised.
Lesson learned—and never forgotten. In a Sylbert film, if something was in the frame, it was either because Sylbert put it there or because he allowed it to be there. All other design departments on the picture reported to him.
* * *
Koch drove Sylbert east—the farther east they drove, the older Los Angeles got—to Echo Park Lake, unchanged since the thirties, where Gittes would spot Mulwray and his “girlfriend,” and then on to a hilly neighborhood above Echo Park, to 848½ Kensington Street, a lime-green apartment split by a central bungalow corridor, ideal for Ida Sessions, the actress posing as Mrs. Mulwray. “It was picked,” Sylbert said, “because it was completely symmetrical and had a long narrow passage in the middle of it, so that you looked at it and said, ‘There can’t be any problem here.’ But once you got into that narrow corridor, the opposite happened, because narrow corridors produce anxiety. And then, of course, you get to the door and the glass is broken.”