The Lies Los Angeles Was Built Upon

When Robert Towne sat down to write the screenplay for Chinatown, he quickly found himself lost in a maze of his own making. He had set out to write a detective story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, one that would pay tribute to the Los Angeles of his childhood—a time before industrial smog choked the city, and before the Manson murders persuaded his friends to buy handguns and guard dogs. He wanted it to star his friend Jack Nicholson, whom he had first met in an acting class in the 1950s. And he planned to borrow liberally from a book on Southern California history that his then-girlfriend, Julie Payne, had found for him at the library.

If the movie was to be about Los Angeles itself, Towne wanted to intertwine the characters’ personal drama with some sordid local scandal—and where better to look for inspiration than the actual history of how the city had stolen water from a valley 250 miles away, ravaging the valley in the process? Towne had found an original sin on which to build his story, but the audacity of the crime and the sheer depth of conspiracy required to pull it off seemed