Payne declined Evans’s “generous offer,” knowing that when Towne was released, he would tell Katharine it was her mother who sent him away.
Evans had a message, Payne recalled, he asked her to give to Towne’s lawyer: “The money men wanted [The Two Jakes],” she said, “and they would hurt him if he didn’t sell.”
Fearing for her daughter’s safety, she called the court psychiatrist, Dr. Gary Chase, “who didn’t care.” Chase—who would serve as court psychiatrist in a trial that awarded custody to Dr. Khalid Parwez, later tried and acquitted for the killing and dismemberment of his eleven-year-old son, and who would be put on probation in 1993 for gross negligence and sexual violations with a patient and named as defendant in a 2014 wrongful death suit—was still waiting for his visit to the set of Two Jakes.
* * *
In 1986, Paramount had a dream year, an eighties dream. Top Gun was the year’s number-one movie. Crocodile Dundee was third. Star Trek IV was fourth. That year, Paramount’s entire marketing team, formerly housed away from production executives in New York, was relocated to Los Angeles, a more than symbolic reconfiguration. “I’ve never separated production, distribution and marketing…,” chairman and COO Frank Mancuso said. “For me it’s one continuous process designed to get your film before as large a public as possible.” Stanley Jaffe, a former Evans-era executive at Paramount, felt it was a mistake: “The head of distribution shouldn’t be reading scripts and telling people to make movies.… I don’t get that, truthfully. I just don’t get it. I will never get it.”
* * *
John Huston died in August 1987. At the funeral, a private gathering of twenty at Hollywood Memorial Park, a sprawling sixty acres of Los Angeles abutting Paramount, Maricela Hernándes, John Huston’s last romance, watched as Nicholson, holding on to Anjelica, “wept and wept and wept like a little boy.”
* * *
Polanski took pains not to reason with his unconscious; he staunchly refused to study his dreams, but he dreamed. He dreamed regularly of flying over the English Channel in an old man-powered airplane, pedaling hard against gravity to keep the machine aloft. It is either dawn or dusk and he is trapped in the cockpit and the plane is falling and he pedals harder, pedaling for his life, knowing that if he slows down, even a bit, he will crash into the sea. He falls, and when he wakes, his legs ache.
It never goes away. It only hides.
In 1987 Towne flew to Paris to help Polanski with the script for Frantic, a film about a man whose wife vanishes.
Polanski dreamed once of a strange cinema somewhere, a precarious structure on pillars, like a house perched off the Hollywood Hills. Someone was telling him it was the largest cinema in Warsaw, and beside it was a building in ruins, missing its front half, seemingly blown apart by war. Moving into the ruins, he dreamed its watery wallpaper, blue with swimming silver fish, or silverfish, took him to Beverly Hills, and from the building’s second story, walled all in gray, he could look out on the endangered cinema next door.
* * *
“No one at Paramount wants to do business with you,” head of business affairs Richard Zimbert told Evans. It was his commercial failures, the lingering stench of the Cotton Club murder, and, some whispered, his playboy reputation, formerly an asset, now adverse to the new family image of Mancuso’s Paramount.
“Been expecting it,” Evans conceded. “When it’s over, it’s over.”
* * *
Drive across America, Nicholson said.
“Our country is becoming corrupted little by little by conglomeration and conglomerative thinking,” he said in 1986. “And, baby, you or I ain’t going to change it.”
Drive down to Kansas City, he said, and question all those elevated light boxes along the highway, the signs for Radio Shack, Chicken-Bicken, Roller Skate World, sky stains of the fast-food epidemic, “blockbuster city,” Jack called it, the future.
“When I started,” he said, “if a movie made 8 or 10 million dollars it was considered an enormous success. Today, that sort of money doesn’t mean much.”
Nicholson turned fifty in 1987. Filthy rich, as popular as ever, approaching legendary status, and a king of California enthroned on dreams come true, he had no need for nostalgia, and yet: “I was always attracted to older people [who] were already [in Hollywood], like Sam Spiegel and Billy Wilder. I just got there in time to know them and have a chat or two with them. And they talked about class a lot. This was an important thing to them and you don’t hear it so much anymore.”
“The world,” Nicholson predicted, “is going to miss the movie-going experience.”
There was still a pull, John Huston’s voice cannoning through his memory: “The one thing you must not do,” it said, “is lose interest.”
And then his own voice: “Dream on, dream on. I can’t do nothing about it.”
Back and forth. Round and round. “A few years from now,” he said, “if you can still portray a human being, you’ll be quite a valuable commodity. I intend to be there. It’s where my hopes as a director lie.”
Back and forth. “I still make the movies I want to make. I’m just talking about—where’s the soil for them? Where’s the informed intelligence?” He had signed to play the Joker in Batman, “the Trump Tower of movies,” per producer Julia Phillips, but he still lived in the same house on Mulholland with the same view of L.A.; he still had the same friends, the same allegiance to Evans, Bob Rafelson, Mike Nichols, and others. They all had new movies for Jack.
But Robert Evans was in the dumps.
Bob Rafelson had directed two features in the last ten years.
Mike Nichols had gone to fluff.
He had to do something. But to think about making art in what had become of Hollywood was contemplating a Chinatown “so huge,” he said, “that you begin to dysfunction. But I have to whip up a foam in my spirit, or I’ll stop seeing where it’s at, too.” To believe in the viability of the dream, a little bit of forgetting was required. Maybe that’s what a dream was.
He would strike out against all those elevated light boxes along the highway and take another shot at The Two Jakes. After Jakes, there was still Gittes vs. Gittes, part three of three, set in 1959, when no-fault divorce becomes California law and Gittes—“a detective,” Towne explained, “who’s spent his whole life in matrimonial cases getting sued by his wife”—loses almost all of his business. Gittes vs. Gittes was only just a dream—a few notes, a paragraph synopsis in Towne’s drawer—but, since Towne’s divorce and custody entanglements, it was gurgling hotter underground, lava on a low flame. The trilogy, once completed, would be the most ambitious work of their lives. For Nicholson, who had achieved everything else, it was a last paradise.
In September 1988, before heading off to shoot Batman, Nicholson drove, once again, through the old gates of Paramount and reintroduced the subject of The Two Jakes to Frank Mancuso. Nicholson had earlier rescued Heartburn at the last minute, and it was Mancuso’s chance to return the favor. This time, though, they would do Jakes the old-fashioned way, the secure and plentiful way, the way they did Chinatown—with Paramount’s support. Towne would finally sell his script to the studio—grandiose spending had drained his cash flow—and with it the right to control the project; Nicholson would take his usual actor’s fee but direct the picture himself—for scale—a necessary concession to bring The Two Jakes home to Paramount. Robert Evans would produce.