Dick Sylbert, though, snickered. His good taste inviolate, he openly derided the pretension he gleaned from the sense of grand style Evans bought, not loved. But in private even he was induced to reverie by Woodland’s opulence, and let himself dream of the glamour not yet gone from Beverly Hills.
* * *
It was winter in Los Angeles, but in the houses off Benedict Canyon, fireplaces warmed big rooms of white orchids and, Joan Didion noted, improbably open windows. These evenings ended early, after a preview screening and a vigorous but polite discussion of its merits, with the tentative feeling that all present had been careful not to risk too much of their opinions, “since there are enough imponderables in the business of Hollywood,” Didion wrote, and no one knew who would be working for whom next. A gambler’s town—entirely opposed to the East’s picture of Hollywood as Gomorrah—its people played it safe. They went to bed early. As Didion put it: “It is in this tropism toward survival that Hollywood sometimes presents the appearance of the last extant stable society.”
“The action is everything,” she wrote, “more consuming than sex, more immediate than politics; more important always than the acquisition of money, which is never, for the gambler, the true point of the exercise.” There was more money to be made on Wall Street, more sex and drugs in rock and roll. In 1973 in “the last extant stable society,” the lure was still pitched to the gamesmen, to the companionable thrill of putting together and making the deal, and where the casino was still too intimate for indiscretion, it was not yet big enough to score at anyone’s expense. “It’s a very small group of people,” agent Sam Cohn said, “and we can’t afford to euchre each other too badly.” Relationships, once built, had to last. To keep a place at the table, you needed to play fair rather than knock the elbows greedily raking in the chips.
For the moment.
Didion was at lunch in Beverly Hills eavesdropping on a director and agent at a neighboring table. Dissatisfied with the script in hand, the director wanted out of his deal, and the agent, who represented many involved in the project, naturally wanted to keep the director in. But he also represented the director.
“You pull out,” the agent said, “it dies right here, not that I want to influence your decision.” He picked up their bottle of Margaux and examined the label. “Nice little red.”
“Very nice,” the director said.
There would be other deals.
“February,” Didion wrote, “in the last extant stable society.”
* * *
In his Mercedes, Polanski curled down his own driveway at nearly fifty miles an hour, stopping short an inch before the slowly opening gate, gunning for it to spread, and racing through, eyes dug into the windshield. He was going to Chinatown.
It was late and it was cold and he had only a day before he cobbled the ending together, typing it up in his trailer and walking it into Jack’s. “Put it into your words,” Polanski had said. Producing a pen, Nicholson obliged, and in a matter of moments, crossed out and added back in a line Polanski had taken from Towne: “As little as possible,” as in, what you’re supposed to do in Chinatown. “As little as possible”: The line appears earlier in the movie, as Gittes and Evelyn, drawing closer, circle their way to the love scene, resisted by Towne, that Polanski had insisted on:
Evelyn: Tell me, Mr. Gittes, does this often happen to you?
Gittes: What’s that?
Evelyn: Well, I’m judging only on the basis of one afternoon and an evening, but if this is how you go about your work, I’d say that you’d be lucky to get through a whole day.
Gittes: Actually, this hasn’t happened to me for a long time.
Evelyn: When was the last time?
Gittes: Chinatown.
Evelyn: What were you doing there?
Gittes: Working for the district attorney.
Evelyn: Doing what?
Gittes: As little as possible.
Now, in the ending, set in Chinatown, the line would reappear, echoing a note of terrible irony.
Polanski met Sylbert at the location, a few blocks of actual Los Angeles Chinatown between North Spring and Ord Streets, hastily arranged, as the particulars of the scene were virtually a last-minute development, without the customary benefits of preproduction. Sylbert had already painted in mouthwatering rows of Packards, red-and-gold neon signs, David Yee Mee Loo’s Cocktail Bar, the Fing Loy Café, a swarm of extras, the hot glare of movie lights.
Sylbert was tense himself. Tonight was about fate, a murder impossible to stop. He knew there would be gunshots, there would be shrieking. What had happened before would happen again. It was Polanski’s story. “The point is the girl dies,” Sylbert explained. “That’s his whole life.” Polanski wanted to end the film like an opera, in which the full company reappears in a burst of horrific communion.
Polanski congressed with Alonzo. The visual idea here was darkness, the darkness not of place but metaphor and mind; only enough visibility to follow the action, no more. “Okay, Earl,” Alonzo had instructed his gaffer. “Just put a splash of light on that building over there and another splash on that other building, and be very subtle about it. Don’t try to light the whole street.” Earl Gilbert had gone to great pains to “reconfigure” the mercury streetlamps, which didn’t exist in the thirties, illegally cutting the wire of every light. Additionally Alonzo directed Gilbert to hide lights under awnings and had Howard Koch Jr. station those extras, dressed in the lightest colors, in the deepest darkness; they would be their own illumination. The rest: black as empty space.
Polanski studied the atmosphere, Alonzo’s work, Sylbert’s work, the cold midnight sky. “I want a crane,” he said.
“You want a crane?”
Roman Polanski knew what it was to be a detective, to fix all of one’s purpose on a solution, studying friends’ prescription glasses, stealing into their parked cars and dusting them for blood, finding something, maybe a clue, and holding its image under developing fluid, watching it lose its hoped-for meaning and turn to nothing.
“Yes. I’ve just figured out how to end this picture.”
It appeared to Alonzo that indeed he had, and at just that moment, too.
“In the sequence, up to this point, Faye Dunaway has been shot,” Polanski improvised. “You see the police officer fire a shot and you hear the car stop and, obviously, Faye Dunaway is dead, because you hear the horn blowing. Now, where do we go from there? Well, here’s the idea: We go hand-held and all the actors come toward the camera and you do a news-documentary kind of thing. You whip-pan over to show Faye for just a brief moment. I want to see the destruction of her eye”—makeup artist Lee Harmon was somewhere close, using the inside membrane of an egg to simulate dripping flesh—“Then the police detective sits her up and you pan around onto him, then onto Nicholson, then back to the detective, then back to Nicholson as he’s pulled away by his two friends. Then I want the camera to climb twenty-seven feet into the air—hand-held.”
Alonzo hesitated. This flourish didn’t fit. It contradicted the visual simplicity Polanski had maintained throughout. “Roman,” Alonzo told him, “you’re contriving a shot. You’re contriving it because you don’t know how to end the picture. You’re performing cinematic gymnastics.”