Flashback, August 1990: ‘Chinatown’ Sequel ‘The Two Jakes’ in Disappointing Release

The Two Jakes, the long-awaited but troubled follow-up to the detective film Chinatown, premiered 35 years ago this month. Unlike its Oscar-winning predecessor, it did not enjoy widespread critical acclaim, nor has it achieved cult-classic status since then. 

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.

This Day in Film History (Film Noir Par Excellence, Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” Released)

June 20, 1974—While Lou Escobar might have advised heartbroken private eye J.J. Gittes, “Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown,” fans like myself can do nothing of the kind when it comes to Roman Polanski’s brooding meditation on corruption and loss.

Ostensibly a tribute to the gloomy, black-and-white mystery genre of the Forties and Fifties known as film noir, Chinatown was recognized, immediately upon its release on this date, as a distant mirror of the growing disillusion with American institutions.

It was hard to miss, in the final weeks of the Watergate scandal taking down an American President, that Gittes had discovered a link to a murder involving the water supply of the city of Los Angeles. 

(The real L.A. water supply scandal—the city’s original sin against nature, if you will—had occurred not during the 1930s decade lovingly recreated in the film but early in the 1900s, and it involved William Mulholland—but that’s a post for another day.)

Like the Francis Ford Coppolo epic that beat it out for most of the major Oscars the following year, The Godfather II, the primal source of wealth, corruption and violence was the family. 

That eternal wellspring of conflict, as ancient as the Old Testament and Greek tragedy, might account for why, though the original personalities and issues underlying both films have faded, these meditations on crime American-style have endured for two generations of subsequent movie fans, continually to be rediscovered and marveled at.

Now, we can see the sterling work of all hands involved with Chinatown. (For one of many examples, notice how the subtle set design by Richard Sylbert underscores the theme of the difficulty in extracting the truth. Gittes is always walking up countless steps and through endless doors, and mirrors abound—all cues that, as John Huston’s Noah Cross character warns him pointedly, he doesn’t know what he’s getting into.) But the product almost didn’t gel.

Jack Nicholson and Polanski butted heads sometimes over conception of character, but the real fracas occurred between the director and Faye Dunaway. 

Polanski, accustomed to a Hitchcockian style of total control over his product, didn’t appreciate the actress’ input, and eventually saw her as “insane.” He didn’t help matters, though, by yanking a stray hair from her scalp because it caught the light and ruined a prize shot. 

Dunaway can still go ballistic when asked to respond to the rumor that she retaliated for being denied a bathroom break by throwing a cup of urine in Polanski’s face.

Also contributing to the atmosphere of intrigue and tension (perhaps helpful, after all, to a thriller) was producer Robert Evans. Dunaway was able to land the role to begin with only because Evans’ first choice, his then-wife, Ali MacGraw, left him for Steve McQueen. 

Just before the film was to premiere, Evans stirred the pot again, jettisoning the original score by composer Phillip Lambro and giving replacement Jerry Goldsmith only 10 days to come up with a better one. (Fortunately, Goldsmith delivered.)

More consequentially, Polanski felt that Robert Towne’s brilliant, twisty screenplay failed in one respect: its happy ending. As a childhood survivor of the Holocaust and a widower (wife Sharon Tate was murdered by followers of Charles Manson), Polanski believed that, even when it receded, evil left an indelible stain.

And so, Gittes—a cynical marital investigator more blessed with doggedness than with smarts—at last solves the mystery—and is unable to bring to justice the powerful criminal at the heart of it. 

Worse, as he walks disconsolately away from the final killing, he knows that the evil will contaminate yet another generation--and that he inadvertently perpetuated it.

As blogger Tony Macklin notes in an extremely perceptive post, dualities abound throughout the film, including “light and darkness, vision and blindness, wholeness and imperfection, innocence and corruption.”

The most significant parallel, however, concerns rape. Rape of the land is analogized to rape of a daughter. The man responsible for both is sinister businessman Noah Cross.

The casting of John Huston in that role is completely apropos. His presence is not only a tip of the cap to Polanski’s seminal influence in making the film, the Huston-directed The Maltese Falcon, but also a reminder of the ark-building Biblical character he played in a film Huston himself directed, The Bible.

Unlike the Biblical patriarch, though, Noah Cross is not escaping water but cornering the market for it. When angrily prodded by Gittes, “What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”, Cross replies, “The future…the future.”

Everyone has his own favorite scene in the film. Mine is the love sequence between Nicholson and Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray. Suddenly their characters, unable to maintain their former veneers any longer, are seen by the other up close and vulnerable.

As Dunaway dresses the painful wound to Nicholson’s nose (cut off in a famous scene featuring the director himself as the principal thug), she discovers that he’s less a sleazy, wiseguy divorce detective than a world-weary idealist. 

He, in turn, upsets her precarious balance -- and begins slowly to discover that she's not really a scheming femme fatale but a damaged victim--by observing “something black in the green part of your eye.”

What Dunaway haltingly calls her “flaw in the iris” initiates moments of tenderness completely isolated from everything else in this bitter film. 

But even as it makes us care for the characters, the scene also hastens the tragic ending. What makes us touchingly human also renders us weak enough to become ensnared by the vast net of money and power.