The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

He read Ask the Dust by John Fante—an L.A. novel he had never heard of—which his assistant got from the public library downtown—and finally found what he was looking for: “I just knew that was the way those kids talked to each other—the rhythms, cadences, racism.”

Of course he read Chandler: The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. He read The Day of the Locust and Double Indemnity, and though they gave pictures to his memories, the quotidian evaded them.

Scylla went into heat and “[neighbor] Quincy Jones’s dogs were barreling under my gate,” Payne said, “and the next thing I knew Scylla’s pregnant.” Seven puppies later, Mike Nichols called. “Puppies?” he asked. “Killer puppies? I’m coming right over.” (He picked one, named it Louis, and took it home.)

“I’m a romantic,” he confessed, “because I allow myself to believe that things could be better, could be more than they are. Because I allow myself to want that.”

Nicholson was playing tennis at Quincy Jones’s when Towne first proposed the idea. “Look,” Towne said. “We can’t get The Last Detail going right now. What if I write a detective movie for you? It’ll be L.A. in the thirties.”

she was a pistol, utterly unafraid to speak truth, no matter how ugly, to anyone, no matter how powerful.

To believe in the viability of the dream, a little bit of forgetting was required. Maybe that’s what a dream was.