We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.
--Michael Eisner, quoted in The Big Goodbye (Flatiron Press, 2020).
Wasson's fascinating book is really of two parts: the main and best part is a detailed history of the making of Chinatown (1974), which makes it quite clear that the movie was in every way Roman Polanski's view of America after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate. Producer Robert Evans and writer Robert Towne played significant roles in making the film but it was obviously Polanski's own vision and his own long goodbye after he had to flee the United States in 1978 in the wake of statutory rape charges. The second part of Wasson's book is a perpetuation of the myth of unbridled creativity in the late sixties and early seventies by director such as Coppola, Friedkin and Bogdanovitch, who together formed The Director's Company in order to make their movies with relative independence. Few of these movies were any good and these directors quickly burned out, as the marketing of films changed in 1975 with the release of Jaws in 400 theatres.
Wasson feels that in order to make his case he has to mock some of the films that came out just before Bogdanovitch's The Last Picture Show in 1972 and Coppola's The Godfather in 1974. Among the films he mocks are Howard Hawk's El Dorado (1967), Otto Preminger's Skidoo (1968) and Blake Edwards's Darling Lili (1970). As far as I'm concerned all of these mocked films are as personal as anything by Coppola or Bogdanovitch and benefit immensely from the professionalism and vision of their directors.
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