The sound stunned Evans. The ache, the longing, dying but sweetly pleading, like a happy memory drowning in truth. It was what he had been searching for, not just for Chinatown, his love story in need of love, but for those long Woodland nights he waited out alone in bed, flipping through old photograph albums, the pictures of Ali, whom he had let go, pictures of Ali and his son Josh, the family he had traded, one night at a time, for The Godfather. He knew he had fucked up. Goldsmith’s music was scant consolation, only magic, but where love and real life failed his foolish cravings, the music ennobled them in brass and piano and harp. Their glissandos were running water, growing in him the feeling, easy to forget, of why he was right, despite all the shit, to love Hollywood in the first place. The feeling was that word he lost so much trying to find and hold on to—now he had it—a word, in the time of Nixon, almost embarrassing to speak—“romance.” For Evans it was more than moonlight and ocean winds and Gatsby’s green flare across the bay; it was not fantasy but palpable evidence of a dream becoming true, the rare and shivery threshold of immeasurable pleasure, the promise imagination grants the mundane, and the mountain stream through which beauty and goodness, against all probability and reason, flow down into the world as art.
It was, out of the darkness, a faith. Like Polanski’s crane, a lift, redemption, grace. True or false, it didn’t matter; as long as it was felt once, it could be felt again.
Hearing that music for the first time, thinking of his father, he cried.
* * *
On the night of Chinatown’s New York premiere, Bluhdorn called his warring sons, Evans and Yablans, to Pietro’s for a steak dinner intended to heal the family wounds. By then, May 1974, there were too many: Yablans’s jealousy of Evans’s celebrity; Evans’s distaste for Yablans’s brashness; Evans’s continuing retreat from the studio, the result of the “back pains” Yablans put in quotation marks; Yablans’s contention that Chinatown presented a conflict of interest for Evans; Bluhdorn’s discovery that Evans, exercising his right as producer, had taken points in Chinatown, further supporting Yablans’s argument against him; and most recently, the contentious end to Paramount’s richest beau geste, the Directors Company. Originally the deal entitled each director (Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Coppola) to a financial interest in the others’ films, a happy arrangement when the pictures hit, like Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, which paid all nicely, but Bogdanovich’s second Directors Company offering, Daisy Miller, had bombed prominently in May, spurring a cross fire of blame, beginning with Friedkin, who had always thought it a vanity project to begin with. But Friedkin, Bogdanovich argued, had no leg to stand on; he had made a grand total of zero films for the Directors Company (Coppola made one, The Conversation), and the dream exploded in rancor. Yablans said I told ya so—another excuse to dump on Evans.
Coursing with bad blood, Paramount, Bluhdorn knew, needed a thorough cleaning if it was to return to the good old days of commerce, art, and camaraderie. The latter was an element of great consequence for Bluhdorn. Joined with his failure to install his own son, Paul, in the line of studio power, Bluhdorn’s “almost dynastic need for a surrogate son,” according to Bernard F. Dick, had informed the chairman’s impulsive hirings as far back as Evans. “Charlie was a father to me,” Evans said, and the feeling was returned. Of his two “sons,” Bluhdorn favored Evans, his way with women, his glamour and élan. Yablans knew it.
At Pietro’s, Bluhdorn raised a glass and toasted the partnership.
“Charlie, we’re not a partnership!” Yablans screamed. “I’m an employee and Evans is an employee, even though Evans won’t open his mouth ’cause he ain’t got the balls to open his mouth.”
There was little talk that night about Chinatown.
* * *
A screening of the final release print was held at Paramount. Sylbert, Alonzo, Nicholson, O’Steen, Towne, Evans, and certain select others would have their last looks at the finished picture complete with Jerry Goldsmith’s new score.
As expected, the music thrilled them. But what they saw on screen horrified them.
For one thing, the print was brighter than anyone had remembered, far too bright.
With Polanski out of the picture—he hadn’t much communication with Goldsmith and left the supervision of the score to Evans—suspicion turned to the producer. Had Evans pressured Alonzo into submission, the way he had Lambro, or had Alonzo willingly agreed to the change?
The lights came up.
“Is there anything anyone would like to say?” Evans asked the gathering.
Nicholson rose. “I’ll disown this movie if this print is used.”
Sylbert smelled a fight; he could see Nicholson holding in rage as he explained how he had tried hard to “stay in the shadows as an actor,” no easy feat when he also had to act. Turning to Evans, Jack demanded he restore the print to the darker, more mysterious incarnation Polanski had had in the dailies.
As he always did, Evans consented, but so close to the release, there was no telling if he would, in the final hour, hedge and hold them off until it was too late.
* * *
The first public screening of Chinatown in Los Angeles was held at the Directors Guild Theater on June 17, 1974.
“Evans is nervous,” Robert Towne warned Julie, “and he doesn’t want you at the screening.”
“He doesn’t?”
“He doesn’t know what you’re going to say.” At Woodland, she had told him, quite plainly, what she thought of the score.
“I’ll stay home.”
The theater that night was packed with critics, industry professionals, and members of the Chinatown cast and crew. “Evans was a great marketer,” Hawk Koch explained. “He knew how to fill a house.” ABC executive Barry Diller sat with Towne; they had grown up together in Brentwood. But the presence of a familiar face did not lessen Towne’s worry. The last time he saw Chinatown it was too bright, and of course there were Roman’s changes, the love scene, the ending he still vehemently opposed.… Surrounded by discerning peers and the covert jealousies consequent to any industry screening, he could foresee public humiliation of the worst sort, pity plus gloating par excellence.
He was also personally vulnerable. For Chinatown, the first big studio picture to bear his name and only his name as writer, represented a thing more formidable than an original screenplay produced; it was the agonized flowering of a mission, a vocational piece of himself that, for all Roman had done to it, contained, in seedling, his long friendship with Jack, with the city, and his enmity toward environmental destruction—the very best of his good intentions. There simply was nowhere to hide.
But when the lights went down and the picture came up, Towne found he no longer entirely hated what he saw. Of course he still hated Polanski’s nihilistic ending, but the new music somewhat softened the blow, and the old shadows—returned, courtesy of Jack—helped.
Well, Towne thought, maybe we’ll get away with it.
“This is a great fucking movie,” Diller whispered in his ear.
Was Diller full of shit?
Elsewhere the mood was mixed. About forty-five minutes into the picture, Koch overheard one high-ranking executive gleefully remark to another: “Evans has a bomb.”