Back at Paramount, Polanski set up a screening for Lambro, waiting an hour for Frank Yablans to arrive before finally deciding to run the picture without him. Several scenes, Lambro saw, Polanski had mixed with some of his music, and for those scenes, the combination worked. That wasn’t the problem.
“It’s the story, Roman,” Lambro protested on their way out of the theater. “The story’s weak; but maybe with more editing…”
“You think this piece of shit story is bad now? I’ll show you the original script. Do you want to see it? It was the biggest pile of crap you ever saw.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Robert Towne; but what you see here today on the screen, I actually wrote, but I’m not taking any credit for it. What do you say?” He smiled. “Do you have any musical ideas?”
In fact, he did; music, he said, should work contrapuntally with the images. Why reiterate what’s already on screen? Perhaps they should try a sound layered with Chinese flavor. It would bolster the title, whose literal influence still seemed oddly absent from the film.
They began the process of spotting Chinatown—deciding where in the film to place the score—for four days, a long time, but Polanski was deliberate, wanting to analyze, as he had with Towne, every idea for its creative contingencies. At last, Lambro decided on ten first violins, eight second violins, eight violas, six cellos, two basses, and a battery of percussion, and midway into March set about the actual work of composition. He produced a score squirming with atonalities, fearsome percussive walls, lazy midnight horns, and trembling pianos—a jazz-classical atmosphere evocative of Kurt Weill, soaked in exotic mystery and menace—Polanski loved it. “That was wonderful,” he told Lambro after a recording session. “Really great. It’s just what I want.”
The phone rang in Lambro’s apartment. It was night, late.
“Hi, Phillip, this is Bob Evans. How are you?”
“Fine. How are you?”
“Phillip, you’ll be receiving a $1,000 bonus check for doing such a good job on the score. Everybody’s very high on your work, and I want to show our appreciation by giving you this extra bonus; it’s never been done before at Paramount.”
There was something remote in Evans’s voice, a vacancy Lambro couldn’t quite place. “Thank you very much.”
“I want you to promise me one thing, Phillip. Can you keep a secret?”
He didn’t respond.
“I want you to promise me that you won’t tell Roman that I telephoned you. Everything now is just between you and me, all right?”
Lambro hedged. All right.
“Chinatown needs more of your music, Phillip”—he kept saying his name—“Phillip, this picture just needs more of your music. Give me ten more minutes of music and I’ll get you an Academy Award. Would you like an Academy Award?”
Evans was, in effect, asking for them to respot the picture. Adding ten minutes of music would prompt more than ten minutes of music: It would effect changes to the entire score. And they already had a completed score. Lambro resisted.
The love story, Evans persisted. It needed a more romantic melody.
There was no love story, Lambro countered, so why have a love theme?
“Phillip, I’ve made a hundred and ninety-seven pictures. Do you know what a hundred and ninety-seven pictures are, Phillip?”
Lambro heard a freaky lethargy in his voice, a blur of seduction and disarray, but even that didn’t account for what he was saying.
“Phillip, I want you to tell Roman—do not, under any circumstances, tell him I told you—that you want to write more music for Chinatown.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Is there anything else I can get you, Phillip? Is there anything else you need?”
Stalling, Lambro said nothing to Polanski, but Evans persisted, checking in about the ten additional minutes of score, calling for Lambro, it seemed, just at the right moment, whenever Polanski disappeared from the soundstage or the cutting room, to remind Lambro of their deadline, which was to be the San Francisco test screening of Chinatown in May. How Evans knew exactly when Polanski left Lambro’s side—that is, when to call—baffled Lambro to such an extent that he began to suspect he and Polanski were under some kind of surveillance.
Finally, Lambro burst. In the dubbing theater he told Polanski everything.
“Listen, you leave Evans to me,” Polanski advised. “I’ll handle him. You just be polite and pretend you’re taking his suggestions seriously.”
Evans’s maneuvers were unseemly, but his concerns were founded: Chinatown would benefit from a stronger love story. It was what Evans originally wanted from Towne and, in his early drafts, what Towne had written. But to keep the water mystery moving, Polanski had reduced Gittes and Evelyn’s courtship—originally a protracted dance of suspicion, attraction, and jealousy—to a few meaningful glances and a brief bedroom scene.
And there was a more mercenary factor:
“If you give me ten more minutes of music,” Evans whispered to Lambro in April, three weeks before the preview screening, “I can get an album out of the score. There was an hour of music in Love Story and we won the Oscar for that.”
Prestige.
Evans would remember, thirty years earlier, his father riding the elevator down from rich Uncle Abe’s apartment: “The wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die.” His father, the piano-playing dentist.
“I’ll live.”
* * *
A week before the big preview, a small screening of the uncorrected print was held at Woodland. On the day, Evans was detained from welcoming his guests by a bullying call from Frank Yablans—they were becoming more frequent—but those who had already arrived, Nicholson, Polanski, Dick Sylbert and Susanna Moore, and Sam O’Steen and a handful of others, needed no hosting. Only Lambro could have used an introduction. New to Woodland, he stepped into the projection room somewhat unsettled. All this Hollywood—they weren’t his people.
Evans’s circle gathered in the screening room and took their seats, and Robert Towne and Julie Payne dashed in just as the lights were dimming.
They watched the movie.
The story tottered. The score was harsh.
When the lights came up two hours later, all were discreet. Standard praise was handed to Lambro for his score, which he accepted credulously.
Attuned to the timbre of lies, the sound of kid gloves slipping over fingers, Evans knew to approach his guests individually before they sat down to dinner, the classic hot dogs à la maison, and get the truth.
The score wasn’t bad, Sylbert whispered to Evans; it was just the wrong idea.
Susanna Moore, the youngest of the group, was not one to comfortably volunteer her opinions to Bob Evans (though Sylbert, chortling, had told her Evans needed others’ opinions to formulate his own), but when pressed, she humbly suggested more period music. Jazz standards. She loved, for instance, Bunny Berigan’s version of “I Can’t Get Started.”
The score was an abomination, Towne thought. But that was nothing compared to what he thought of the film itself. He hated the movie. It was cold and cynical, just like Polanski and his hopelessly despairing finale.