Chinatown (with guest Hadley Meares)

We’re back, and the “L.A. Trilogy” is finally here! Joined by Los Angeles journalist and historian Hadley Meares, Sean and Cody delve into the environmental history of L.A. by examining this classic 1974 film noir thriller, generally regarded as one of the finest pictures ever made. In Chinatown, private gumshoe J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired by a mysterious femme fatale to stick his soon-to-be-sliced nose into a grubby affair involving L.A.’s water commissioner. The case soon takes a nasty turn as Gittes and his moll Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) find themselves in the mist of a labyrinthine conspiracy to steal water and prime real estate in the biggest swindle of all time. Environmental issues discussed include the real-life “water wars” of L.A. vs. the Owens Valley in the early 1900s, the St. Francis dam disaster of 1928, the Los Angeles river, and ethnic cleansing by Los Angeles authorities in the 1930s, especially involving the power of eminent domain.

How true is the Bond villain-like conspiracy at the heart of Chinatown’s plot? How close is it to the real conspiracy, engineered in the early 1900s, to inflict a deliberate drought on Los Angeles’s prime crop land in advance of a vote on a bond measure to fund water infrastructure? William Mulholland: hero or villain? Why did Owens Valley farmers go full-on terrorist in the 1920s, attacking aqueducts with dynamite? How did the Chinese-American population of L.A. get shafted by their white neighbors, not once, but twice? How does this film exemplify the genre of film noir? What does this picture have to do with the Manson murders and Roman Polanski’s own monstrous crimes? How does Chinatown lead into the next film in the L.A. Trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? All these questions and more are shadowing you in a ‘35 Packard in what may prove to be an iconic episode of Green Screen.

Content warning: the director of this film, Roman Polanski, is a convicted child rapist; there is brief discussion of his crime in the episode.

Chinatown (1974) on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/ Chinatown (1974) on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/chinatown/

Next Movie Up: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Additional Materials About This Episode