Patrick wrote:
"Take a look at Polanski's much more successful Chinatown.
Polanski openly stated he was trying for the Chandler
mystique."
A sleazy PI who specializes in divorce cases is hardly
Chandler's noble knight.
"Unlike Altman, though, Polanski didn't have to pay for the
rights!"
I'm sure Robert Towne didn't come cheap.
However, it's interesting that you'd raise Chinatown to
counter a movie that is notorious for changing the ending of
its source material. To Towne's great dismay (although it
didn't stop him from accepting an Oscar for the original
screenplay), Polanski radically changed the ending of
Chinatown, and producer OB Evans backed him. He also rewrote
several other key scenes. Now because this was based on an
(at that time) unpublished screenplay, few had read the
source material, sidestepping readers' expectation of
faithulness, but Polanski did exactly the same thing to
Chiatown that Brackett did to Long Goodbye.
Mark
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