‘Chinatown’ started with a passion for Hollywood, but also a true desire to uncover its roots in corruption and the despoiling of a landscape never meant to support the paradise we imposed on it. Scriptwriter Robert Towne obsessively researched Los Angeles to create this legendary movie; the result was a tangle of interlocking storylines—the politics of water, agriculture, incest, scheming land barons and their victims—that it took Director Roman Polanski to tame. Sam Wasson has done an extraordinary job making sense of his own set of messy stories behind the film, managing to convey the miracle that movie-making is sometimes. He explores the strong friendships among the men behind the movie: Robert Towne, Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson, and (sometimes) Roman Polanski. He doesn’t shy away from their excesses and abuses—neither condoning nor decrying them—but at the same time their real affection for one another and for the work still comes through. Pity the women around them, however; in describing the name-calling, harassment, divorces, infidelity, pedophilia (in Polanski’s case), Wasson makes it clear that women in Hollywood were at a distinct disadvantage. A fascinating look at one important film of the 1970s and the fraught creative process that produced it.