The Big Goodbye, Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film, is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie.

Sam Wasson...[has] a novelist’s eye for complex characters and a natural storyteller’s feel for scenes, dialogue and richly revealing details.

...as Sam Wasson shows in compelling detail in his fine new book The Big Goodbye, the makers of Chinatown were simply too young, too ambitious, too controversial, and their movie, while undeniably brilliant, was like a brash finger stuck in the eye of the Hollywood establishment.

Anyone expecting an uplifting tale of collaborative striving for artistic purity is in for a shock.

... fascinating and page-turning.

Wasson...delivers a vivid narrative, weaving together portraits of four seriously flawed men.

Social historian Sam Wasson's The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, beautifully and smoothly evokes the era...while carefully weaving in the stories of the Chinatown creators: writer Robert Towne, director Roman Polanski, stars Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, and legendary producer Robert Evans.

... takes the story of the movie’s making and significance to the next level. It is a feast for those of us who consider Chinatown one of the great works of (the first) New Hollywood. It might even pull in new viewers who have somehow missed out on this classic about pre-World War Two Los Angeles, water, power, and good intentions from 'back in the day'.

Wasson, I think, overstates the effect of the Manson murders, if not on Polanski (for whom such a gloss may be unavoidable), then on the larger Hollywood community. In The Big Goodbye, the killings take on the weight of another creation myth, a driving motivation for Polanski, pushing him ever more deeply into his art.

... Wasson swims in the muddy making of the 1974 film, the messy lives of its four main players, and the murky chronicles of L.A.’s studio system and the municipal water wars to produce a page-turner as suspenseful and spellbinding as the Raymond Chandler novel from which the book takes it name..

The reporting Mr. Wasson deftly weaves into his densely populated narrative only makes the actors, producers, writers and director more elusive. People go to movies in part to find a coherence and resolution lacking in everyday existence; The Big Goodbye suggests that those who make them are similarly motivated.

... perhaps too narratively stylized.

Much will be familiar territory to anyone who has read Evans’s entertaining memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture (1994), Polanski’s fine autobiography Roman by Polanski (1984) and Peter Biskind’s magisterial study of the 1970s Hollywood generation, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998).

The book bemoans lovers of the bottom line while offering glowing portraits of the four men most responsible for Chinatown’s success.

Wasson tells the story of its making with pace and verve, though his prose can sometimes be portentous. He keeps noting any spot of bad weather as though it were an omen, and he finds it hard to resist a bit of purple prose..

... great style and lyricism.

Couldn’t help thinking this one might be about a bunch of grumpy old men with cigars bemoaning how much Hollywood has changed.

As I read Sam Wasson's breezy, cocaine-dusted history, roughly two-thirds of which is about director Roman Polanski's Chinatown, I kept wondering: How would it be different if Faye Dunaway had agreed to talk? Dunaway, an easy target in recent years, continues to be in Big Goodbye, which emphasizes her tardiness and unpredictability. But, reading between the lines, it's hard not to wonder what it was like to be virtually the only woman on set, one whose director disliked her and whose key scene is of her being smacked in the face repeatedly by her co-star, Jack Nicholson. Wasson didn't speak with him, either.

Sam Wasson’s book...is awfully good.

Inimitable Wasson...examines the development of the iconic film.

...a multifaceted dissection of the infamous noir film.