Towne and Payne took their seats with the writers, in the back, behind Bert Schneider, nominated for his documentary Hearts and Minds; Jack and Anjelica found their spots in row one, between Faye Dunaway and Fred Astaire, and in front of Howard Koch Jr., whose father was producing the show.
“Hiya, Bullhorn,” Jack greeted Koch.
The show opened with some welcoming remarks from Academy president Walter Mirisch, who turned the house over to host Bob Hope.
“Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’re here at the Music Center, and we’ll soon know if it has any significance holding these ceremonies so close to Chinatown.”
A rumble of nervous applause.
The first Oscar, for Best Supporting Actor, went to Robert De Niro for Godfather Part II, an early indication that the night was not headed Chinatown’s way. Soon thereafter, the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, presented by novelist James Michener, was awarded to Coppola and Mario Puzo for Godfather Part II and confirmed—Evans was right—the likelihood of a sweep.
When the applause died down, Michener took the podium once again. “Why don’t the authors of original books write original screenplays?” he teleprompted to the auditorium. “The sad fact is that most of us do not have that talent for the concise and demanding art form, and tonight we honor those that do have talent. For the Best Original Screenplay, the nominees are…”
When he opened the envelope: “And the winner is Robert Towne for Chinatown.”
The audience yelped, seemingly as relieved as Towne, who pushed up from his chair and calmly walked down the aisle. Accepting the trophy from Michener, he bent forward to the microphone, a very tall deer in the bright lights, disbelieving the glare: “Um … If, uh.…”
He shook out the implausibility from his head. It was happening.
He spoke clinically, like a surgeon in a hurry. “If you’ve ever been on a film that didn’t quite work out you know how much you owe to the people on a film that did, and so I can only reiterate my gratitude toward everybody who worked on the film, toward Faye and Roman and especially to Robert Evans, who put us all together, and to Jack, who’s really magic.” Then, almost inaudibly, “Thank you,” and coolly disappeared.
(Edward Taylor was at home, watching with his family. “He was very excited,” said his daughter, Sarah Naia Stier.)
* * *
From there the night raced ahead. To shorten the show’s running time, the producers had eliminated much of the customary banter, compressing the lags between Godfather II’s wins and enhancing the feel of a sweep. That Paramount kept winning via Coppola was cold comfort to Evans; the Mountain was not his anymore; he was exclusively a producer now, and, after Towne’s win, the swift bleeding out of Chinatown predicted he would go home a loser.
Julie Payne, still waiting for Towne to return to his seat with his statue, came to wonder if something had happened to him. Looking around her for signs, she could see Towne’s wasn’t the only empty seat in the auditorium. Other winners were missing. But the show went on. At an opportune moment she made for the aisle doors and started banging quietly. The man who came for her was—a total shock—her ex-husband, actor Skip Ward.
“Julie—”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m producing the show.”
“You never told anybody that the winners aren’t coming back to their seats!”
“He’s here. He’s here. We’re keeping them for the final bows.”
“Jesus, guys. I was sitting there alone!”
Towne’s was the only Oscar win for Chinatown.
Best Picture went to Godfather Part II. It was Coppola’s third Oscar of the night. In none of his acceptance speeches did he acknowledge Evans. He was crestfallen.
Nicholson was philosophical. That’s how the game was played. Next year he could foresee a win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
After the show they climbed into the limo: Jack and Anjelica; Jack’s agent, Sandy Bressler; Robert and Julie; Evans and Charlie, his brother, who rode up front in the passenger seat. They were losers that night, save for Towne. Semiashamed, he hid his Oscar, Anjelica saw, in the cushion wedge between seats. There followed some embarrassed joking, but if she ever won, Anjelica reflected, “I did not want to do that. I was going to enjoy it.”
They drove onward to the Governors Ball.
The rain slowed.
Rolling down the window to let out his cigarette smoke, Nicholson was blithely tabulating the evening’s effects on Chinatown’s potential box office. Losing Best Picture would surely cost them in the long run, but he wasn’t too worried; he had a substantial 12.5 percent of the gross.
It got quiet.
“It’s not like that, Jack,” Bressler said.
“Whaddya talkin’ about, Sandy?”
There must be some confusion, Bressler corrected him. There were certain contractual conditions, stipulations. Jack got 10 percent of the gross less off-the-top expenses and less 2.4 times the negative cost plus interest and less his $250,000 salary deferment. When the gross exceeded $20 million, his percentage would rise to 12.5 percent, but only then and not until then …
Nicholson, bristling, turned to face the window and exhaled into the rain.
Richard Sylbert took over production at Paramount in April 1975.
He and Susanna Moore moved into a sumptuous house on Outpost Drive up in the Hollywood Hills, a sprawling Spanish built, of course, in 1937—MGM art director Cedric Gibbons had designed it for his wife at the time, the Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio—that Sylbert thought would have been a perfect location for Chinatown. It even had a pond. On just about an acre of hillside green, he planted thirty camellias, rows of fruit trees, and a vegetable garden. Susanna was pregnant.
The high-water mark of Sylbert’s intellect, evident in his designs, open erudition, and smart and fancy friends, branded his administration and conferred on Paramount the pleasant aroma of culture and sophistication. Sylbert’s detractors suspected he was, in fact, too refined for the job, a professor in a whorehouse, but Barry Diller would function as Sylbert’s corrective and vice versa; together they were the balance of counterstrengths: film and TV, art and commerce. “Frankly,” Sylbert said, “most people haven’t the experience to think a picture through—they have never been on a picture from one end to the other.” That is, as a designer, one whose eye guided production from beginning to end, Sylbert was uniquely oriented to the overall aesthetic life of a film: Most others “have never dealt with those day-to-day problems you deal with when you make a picture. When you read a property from the vantage point of fifteen years of making motion pictures, you see it from a very different point of view than when you read it as an ex-agent.”
Every morning, Sylbert would confer with Evans, his predecessor, by phone, sometimes for hours, deepening an association that would benefit both parties, Sylbert gaining from Evans’s decade of experience, Evans keeping close ties with the power. Though Sylbert’s taste was more literary than Evans’s—Evans famously didn’t read; Sylbert read, and wrote beautifully—Sylbert advanced Evans’s policy of people pictures, not event pictures, as early as his first days on the job: “There is still an audience for pictures that have an original idea in them,” Sylbert told the Hollywood Reporter, “that are terribly well-performed, that are based on relationships with people … reactions of people.” Soon after he took office he optioned the challenging Looking for Mr. Goodbar and picked up Robert Altman’s Nashville and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 for distribution. He fell in love with and optioned John Cheever’s Falconer; it was, he decided, worth every risk: “With all the difficulties this book presents,” he wrote to his team, “and with all the areas never dealt with in films before I firmly believe that it is a remarkable and powerful idea for a film. There is more humanity and heart in this piece than I have seen in a long time. More of the truth of our lives and the desire to live—of the essential nobility, and the humor and despair of our collective existence in this story of Farragut and his life both in and out of prison than I expect to find in a small novel.” (He sent the book to Mike Nichols.) Further literary motions followed: Sylbert took A Piece of My Heart, by Richard Ford, and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, the latter a lasting dream for Sylbert, a fly-fisherman. In time he wrote his own screenplay, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.