“No, no, no—it really fits. This is how it has to work.”
Alonzo trailed Polanski to the old yellow Packard convertible, Evelyn’s death car, and Polanski pitched over the windshield. “No, John, no,” he said. “The blood on windshield is not right, blood on the bullet holes, must be much more, try again, spray more.” He knew.
* * *
Every time Dunaway was killed, the crew snickered. Got what she deserved, they said. And every retake tried her patience until finally there was none left. “Roman was on one end of the street,” one extra reported to actor James Hong, “and Faye was down the street where the car crashed, and they were literally shouting at each other as they approached, it was like a gun battle shooting match. None of Chinatown could sleep that night.”
* * *
A day or two later Anjelica Huston turned up at the Chinatown location. As she writes in her book, she entered her father’s trailer to find him with a half-empty bottle of Stoli.
“What took you so long?” he thundered at her. “What have you been up to?”
He was in character, she thought, though the line between Cross and Huston was always blurry.
Huston was called to set and out they went.
Drunk, he fumbled the first take. He fumbled the second.
“Now come on, John,” Polanski encouraged, “we got it right yesterday, come, we try again!”
Lost in himself, Polanski drifted away from Huston, thinking.
Then he found what he needed. “Okay, now—this is important—Jack is to move only to this spot. I want it marked, where’s the man with the chalk? Come on, I’m asking for a simple chalk mark, where’s everyone? Aw shit!”
When chalk was futile, the crew would use a rubber disk, Polanski’s own invention, that actors, without looking down, could find with their feet. The crew called it “Iksnalop,” Polanski spelled backward.
“I want the mark now! Actors, you must prepare before the scene, maintain the internal rage we need here! I want you not wandering off telling stupid anecdotes, I don’t tell you this again!”
This Polanski directed to the entire cast, but it was intended for Huston. When he wasn’t drinking, Huston was, between takes, on the hood of the Packard holding court before a circle of fascinated grips, actors, and assistants too awed to speak, too exultant not to. An ace storyteller, Huston insisted he was no actor—his father was the actor—but he habitually ended up the arbiter of every audience, thrilled to the lure of a crowd.
His father, Walter Huston, dead for a quarter of a century, was vivid to him again. His loss hung over Huston’s next film, The Man Who Would Be King, a picture he had always wanted for his father, and Huston’s recent run of acting assignments (taken to recoup gambling debts), Battle for the Planet of the Apes, Breakout, Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind, and Chinatown—work he pretended not to take seriously—brought back the inevitable comparisons to Walter, long avoided, long denied. Ghosts gathered now in John Huston; they seethed past his decades of protest and evasions, picked up shards of his own biography, and, through the tarantular Noah Cross, pushed out the real actor. It would be the role of his life. “I liked myself in Chinatown,” he would admit later. Still, he drank through it. Whenever he could. “He was very unhappy at the time,” Anjelica said. “He was divorcing his last wife, and he was irascible, and it showed.”
“Where is chair for Mr. Huston to sit?” Polanski called out. “Get one!”
A chair appeared, and Huston sat, falling over.
Polanski helped him up. “Where is Faye?”
In costume, she withdrew from her trailer and crossed to Evans. “Evans, you bastard,” she laughed, an in-joke lost on the crew.
“Blood is still wrong!” declared Polanski from the driver’s seat of the Packard. He smudged it a bit with his fingers and then tried again with a paintbrush. Then he reconsidered the whole thing. “No, wipe it off. It isn’t real, try another color, this one looks like puke.” He called for assistance and a blast of imitation gore sprayed the windshield. “Yes, yes, more! It looks like shot-out brains!”
The spectacular crane shot Polanski wanted would be exceptionally challenging for Alonzo. There would hardly be any room for the focus puller, surrounded in the bedlam of actors and extras (Alonzo, a handheld whiz, would operate it himself); in close-up, it would be difficult to light the actors without casting camera shadows on their faces (Alonzo would mount a small light next to the lens, and, per Polanski’s suggestion, disrupt the camera shadow with a hat over the light); Alonzo would have to whip between Dunaway, Huston, Perry Lopez as Escobar, Nicholson, back to Lopez, follow Nicholson as he’s led away, and—in the same shot—backward-climb the platform of the Chapman crane and head high into the air over Chinatown to watch Nicholson fade into the distant black.
Appearing as a coda, a sweeping flourish, as Alonzo rightly noted, a world apart from Chinatown’s stringent asceticism, Polanski’s crane-up breaks powerfully from the subjectivity he carefully maintained throughout the picture, rising as it does from the ground level of Gittes’s devastation to a more godly vantage point, from despair to a kind of cinema majesty. Though it offers no hope or resolution, ending Chinatown with a grand crane-up evokes a lost Hollywood—most famously the last shot of Casablanca—imbuing the wreckage with a shiver of romantic awe, not just in the movement itself, the feeling of sudden floating, but in a kind of longing for a tradition—dear to Polanski, Nicholson, Towne, and Evans—that might be called classical. At least that they could agree on.
They wrapped before sunrise.
“A film sums up the experiences of my life,” Polanski had said. “You absorb the experience, you assimilate it and you make a decision. A film sums up everything—whom I see, what I drink, the amount of ice cream I eat. It is everything. Do you understand? Everything.”
Racing home against the Hollywood Freeway, Polanski sneered at the concrete everywhere, a raised gutter strangling the city, its crime blurred in the low light of daybreak. “I don’t know who designed this,” he had muttered, “but they should be hung by the neck.” And yet Polanski resolved to return. “This playing of endless children’s games in an intellectual Sahara, a seductive place in which glorious child-toys called movies are made,” as silly as it sometimes was, was Hollywood. Where would he rather be? “Chinatown was the first film where I had no struggle throughout the production because I was totally supported by the producer and had everything at my disposal,” he concluded. “I was really like a racing driver with a bunch of people standing around you and just ready to respond to every gesture. So I know that it is maybe my greatest achievement because of that.”
As Polanski reached home, the gates of Sierra Mar opened to a candy-colored hillside of banana leaves and birds of paradise and, farther in, the sunny blue splashings of waterfall into pool.
Years after fleeing the city in self-imposed exile, he considered selling his London flat and moving back, at least part-time. Maybe more.
* * *
It was Mr. Adolph Zukor’s one hundredth birthday. Zukor—who began as a furrier at two dollars a week, built his turn-of-the-century fascination with penny arcades and nickelodeons into the Famous Players Company, merged his production and distribution business in 1917 into Paramount Pictures, sixty years later the oldest studio in Hollywood—sailed into his birthday party at the Beverly Hilton that night dapper and peppy, a lean eminence, his eyesight failing, decrying the dangers of the small screen with emphatic whips of his cane. “Movies have competition from television,” he opined. “They aren’t a novelty anymore, so the material better be good.” He lived in a modest apartment in Century City in the care of a housekeeper, but was still, to the evening’s twelve hundred guests, their father-founder, the estimable Mr. Zukor. Some said he still kept tabs on every movie Hollywood made.