Worse, it committed a crime worse than murder in Hollywood: it lost money ($10 million in its theatrical run, even on a not-exorbitant $25 million budget).
What went
wrong with the sequel to perhaps the greatest example of neo-noir, and by any
standard one of the seminal movies of the Seventies?
To some extent, critics were poised to slam a production that had short-circuited five years before—and, though several actors were carried over from Chinatown, it was missing one crucial creative contributor: Roman Polanski.
The director, who had
fled to France to avoid a statutory-rape sentence, was in no position to take a
firm hand, as he’d done before in editing screenwriter Robert Towne’s vivid,
sprawling dissection of L.A. corruption in the 1930s from 180 pages (enough for
a three-hour movie that would have tested audiences’ patience) into a form that
won its eventual Best Original Screenplay Academy Award—and in insisting on its
tragic denouement.
This time,
Towne, hoping to avoid similar interference with his script, planned to
fill the director’s chair himself. Though it was a given that Jack Nicholson
would be back as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, Towne made the mistake of casting producer
Robert Evans as the “other Jake,” charming mobster Jake Berman.
Then, days before production began, Towne—feeling jittery already, courtesy of his growing cocaine problem and lack of a finished script—got a look at Evans’ thinning hairline and awful plastic surgery.
The director should have realized that
Evans, not a good actor to begin with 30 years before, would not improve with
no opportunity to practice the craft and time now working its inevitable
ravages.
Evans,
terrified that he would never regain his exalted Hollywood position after his
recent Cotton Club disaster, refused Towne’s request that he withdraw
from the project. The picture collapsed in a blizzard of threats and lawsuits.
By 1988,
Nicholson was ready to revive the corpse of The Two Jakes, with
conditions meant to forestall another catastrophe: Towne was obligated to
submit a completed screenplay to Paramount Pictures, yielding effective control
of the project, and Nicholson agreed to direct “for scale”—i.e., using
techniques to make the film appear bigger than its financial resources would
typically allow.
The new arrangements only solved some problems that had aborted the project before. Nicholson didn’t possess Polanski’s skill at tightening Towne’s vision, took on the additional responsibilities of producing while leaving Evans (after so many years, shorn of his self-confidence) the nominal title—and still had to act himself.
Moreover, he had to find several actors to replace those who had
accepted other roles in the interim, including Kelly McGillis, Cathy Moriarty,
Joe Pesci, and Dennis Hopper.
Nicholson’s
attempt to impose coherence on Towne’s first draft, through voice-over
narration (a device suggested by Billy Wilder, who had used it effectively in
one of the key early examples of film noir, Double Indemnity), only
clarified the complicated plot to a limited extent.
The four-year delay in filming had one advantage, in a small way: it made more realistic the passage of time between Chinatown and The Two Jakes. The sequel was supposed to occur in the early postwar period, a decade after the original.
The joke in Hollywood was
that this would be the first sequel not requiring aging makeup, as the actors
had done so naturally. (I was stunned, for instance, when I saw Perry Lopez
reprising his role as Lou Escobar, but this time walking with a cane.)
Upon its
release, The Two Jakes received criticism as convoluted and confusing.
That is hardly a disqualification for film noir or neo-noir—when Howard Hawks,
adapting The Big Sleep in the 1940s, asked Raymond Chandler who had
killed one of the victims, the novelist replied that he didn’t know! But there
were few memorable scenes, and no compelling villains like John Huston’s Noah
Cross in Chinatown.
Nevertheless,
though not as great as Chinatown, The Two Jakes is far from a terrible or even
subpar movie. It is well-acted and stylishly filmed—well worth viewing again,
if you can ever find it on TV or on DVDs in libraries.
(My blog post from 16 years ago lays out the case for the greatness of Chinatown. But if you
want to read an eloquent defense of the sequel, read Jim Hemphill’s
contention in Indiewire last year that it’s not only “better than
its reputation, it’s better than the classic that inspired it — broader in its
tonal range, subtler in its observations, and more adventurous in its narrative
structure.” For a two-thumbs-up from its time of release, see this Siskel and Ebert segment.)
The Two
Jakes would not be
the only sequel that found it impossible to measure up to the expectations
aroused by its 1974 predecessor. The Godfather Part III would suffer a
similar fate by the end of 1990.
In both
cases, negative pre-release reports of on-set difficulties (in the case of Godfather
III, Winona Ryder’s exhaustion-induced departure led Francis Ford Coppola
to replace her with his untested daughter Sofia) predisposed many to review and
judge it by its turbulent backstory as much as its admittedly problematic
product.
Nicholson
would move on to other projects that kept him in the Hollywood stratosphere,
even if he has never directed another film. But the damage to his personal life
because of his involvement with The Two Jakes was more lasting.
His
admission that he had impregnated Rebecca Broussard, the actress who played his
secretary Gladys, led to the painful breakup of his 16-year relationship with
Anjelica Huston, who had at last run out of patience with his constant
infidelity.
(Nicholson
gained so much weight for his role that my late friend Ann chuckled to me when
we saw the film, “Looks to me like he’s the one who’s pregnant!”)
BTW: for the entire astonishing production history of Chinatown and The Two Jakes, I recommend that you read The Big Goodbye, by Sam Wasson—who makes this a very worthy successor to his prior accounts of Breakfast at Tiffany's and the lives of Bob Fosse, Paul Mazursky, and Blake Edwards.
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