The Whole Equation

My favorite film writer (David Thomson) takes Chinatown (my favorite movie) and jumps into a book about "America in the time of the movies."

This book was written for me. It converges my interest in things - American History was my favorite class in high school and I went into college as a History major. But it talks deeply about film, it's appeal and effect on our culture, our love and hate affair with the movies, with Los Angeles, the concept of the West versus the East, about writers and businessmen and artists and poseurs and mixtures of all of the above. He writes about Chaplin and Thalberg and Mayer and Robert Towne and Noah Cross and John Huston and Nicole Kidman and King Vidor and Quentin Tarantino and Eric Von Stroheim. There's so much good stuff in here, but one thing keeps nagging me.

The first chapter is all about Chinatown, Towne's story, perfected by Polanski (who changed the original Towne ending) - about the history of Los Angeles. It was originally conceived as a triology...the Two Jakes was later made, but was a production disaster,

The picture turned out to be a dog. Nicholson has never directed again. And Towne's contribution to the rewriting was impeded by his commitment to Days of Thunder, the film on which he met the actor who would become his new patron, when the friendships with Nicholson and Warren Beatty were sundered - Tom Cruise.

And that's how someone who was once among the best writers in Hollywood, and who might have written a fine novel about the life and times of Jake Gittes and Los Angeles, became the man who made a small fortune writing two Mission Impossibles pictures.

The gap between Chinatown and umpteen possible future Mission Impossibles is the lament of this book.

That just gets me wet between the legs. But the thing that irks me is this:
"Towne's parents were well off, but he attended Pepperdine College, up on the way to Malibu."

NO! Wrong! Towne attended POMONA COLLEGE, my alma mater, on the way to San Bernerdino, the school where Kris Kristopherson, Frank Zappa, John Cage, Jim Taylor (co writer, Sideways), Nora Ephram, and Bill Keller (editor of NY Times, I admittedly don't care all that much about his celebrity, but he was a bigshot at alumni weekend) attended.

All Pomona folks have heard it a hundred times - Cal Poly Pomona? No, you dope, Pomona College, one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country! Liberal arts? So, it's like an art school? But Pepperdine - what the fuck, you just remembered it was a small school in LA that began with a P, huh. Come on, this is a history book, get that one thing right.

I'm writing Mr. Thomson, who incidentally lives in my other home - San Francisco, and who I'm willing to bet attended Cambridge, merely because I spent a semester there...there are too many connections to be otherwise.