Journal # 3

Behind the Scenes

I saw the movie “Chinatown” for this journal, and I liked it. It was a mystery and it had some surprises. There were some shocking situations because one of the characters found out that her grandpa was also her dad. The film was made in 1974, and was 130 minutes long. It was directed by Roman Polanski. It stars Jack Nicholson as Jake, a private detective who spies on guys who are cheating on their wives and wives cheating on their husbands. While doing so, he gets mixed up in a murder case, which ends up to be complicated. It all is involved with the water supply for the city of Los Angeles. I liked the fact that it was in color, for a change. I will talk about some of the things that happened while this movie was being made and while it was being written.
At first this film was going to be a trilogy about the private detective J.J. Gittes and the history of Los Angeles. The second part was called “The Two Jakes” and it didn’t do very well at the box office. It was about the natural gas business in the 1940’s and it came out in 1990. They never did the third one. Nicholson never took another detective role so the only detective he ever played was Jake Gittes. I thought it was a great character who knew how to get things done and wasn’t afraid to get into fights if he had to. Gittes name came from one of Nicholson’s friends, Harry Gittes, a producer. The movie was originally a lot longer and it would have had voiceover narration but Polanski decided not to use it. He wanted the audience to find out the clues at the same time as Jake.
They decided to call the film “Chinatown” because the ending took place there and because lots of bad stuff had happened there in the past. Chinatown is another word for a place you can’t understand or control. Every character in the movie that Jake runs into has a messed up past. Robert Towne, who wrote the screenplay, wanted it to have a happy ending and he argued with Roman Polanski, but Polanski won and it’s a tragic ending. I thought it was a strange and unnecessary ending. I wish that Towne had won, because most likely the sister/daughter is going to go to the Grandpa/dad. I thought it was disturbing.
The plot is based on true things that happened in the history of Los Angeles and the water department. It was the last film made by Polanski in the United States because of his bad decisions to sexually assault a minor which meant that he couldn’t come back here anymore. This was a good film to see and a good detective movie with a lot of twists. The writers deserve two thumbs up.