Chinatown - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Chinatown or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Chinatown

[sara]

Katherine Mulwray is raised believing that Evelyn Mulwray is her sister, but it is later revealed that Evelyn is her mother (or rather, both mother and sister). Shortly after the film was released, Jack Nicholson discovered that the woman he was raised to believe was his sister was, in fact, his mother. He also learned the people he was raised to believe were his parents were actually his grandparents.

[jeffrey]

The Van der Lip Dam disaster is a reference to the collapse of the St. Francis Dam in 1928, forty miles northwest of Los Angeles, which had been designed by self-educated engineer William Mulholland. The consequent flooding killed at least four hundred fifty people, a loss of life that remains second only to that from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire in California's history.

[kyle]

When Evelyn is treating Jake's nose wound, he asks about her flawed eye. In the end of the film, Evelyn was shot through that same eye.

[phyllis]

The orange grove scene was filmed at Triad Ranch, 3240 Sunset Valley Road, Moorpark, California, the house of John Huston's friend, actor [link=nm0000974,.

[ruby]

At the time of filming, Jack Nicholson had just embarked on his longstanding relationship with Anjelica Huston. This made his scenes with her father, John Huston, rather uncomfortable, especially as the only time Anjelica was on set was the day they were filming the scene where Noah Cross interrogates Nicholson's character with "Mr. Gittes...do you sleep with my daughter?"

[ronnie]

Cinematographer Stanley Cortez was fired soon after production began. His classical style did not match the naturalistic style Polanski wanted for the film, and he proved to be too time-consuming. Polanski had to find a replacement in only a few days and chose John A. Alonzo. As David Fincher and Robert Towne state in their DVD commentary, two scenes shot by Cortez are in the film: the orange grove fight with the farmers (but not the following porch scene with Evelyn) and the drive back to Los Angeles at sunset.

[bryan]

L.A.'s original Chinatown was demolished between 1933 and 1936 to make way for Union Station. The current Chinatown, located a few blocks away, opened in 1938. So the only time L.A. had no official Chinatown was 1937, the year in which this film is set.

[oscar]

Mike Nichols was offered the chance to direct.

[kristen]

For the first screening, Roman Polanski took his old friend, composer Bronislau Kaper. Producer Robert Evans afterwards asked Kaper what he thought of the picture, to which Kaper replied, "It's a great film, but you have to change the music."

[elmer]

Jack Nicholson (Jake Gittes) is present in every scene of the film.

[bernice]

There were many rumors circulating about Faye Dunaway's diva-like behavior during the making of the film. One such was that she refused to flush her own toilet and expected her assistants to do it for her. On another occasion, while filming a scene in a car, Roman Polanski refused to let her urinate so he could finish the scene. She then urinated in a cup and threw it in his face.

[jesus]

The black and white (good and evil) scene of Evelyn wearing a black dress is evocative of Mike Nichols's scene in The Graduate (1967), with Mrs. Robinson wearing a black dress, while leaning against a stark white wall, as her daughter Elaine finds out about her mother's affair with Benjamin. Both films share the same Production Designer, Richard Sylbert

[carl]

When Gittes follows Hollis Mulray to the cliff top (where he leaves a watch under his tire) he passes a bar with an open door. One can hear "I Can't Get Started" by Bunny Berigan, the hit of August 1937.

[russell]

In the original script, no scenes took place in Chinatown at all.

[kenneth]

When Jake and Evelyn are in the car during the scene where Evelyn tells Jake that Katherine is her sister, she lowers her head and accidentally hits the car horn. This foreshadows her death, in which she is shot while driving her head lies on the car horn.

[harry]

Screenwriter Robert Towne based his famous "What did you do in Chinatown?" / "As little as possible" exchange, on a joke an LAPD officer friend told him. This refers to the cultural and social barriers in that neighborhood, which includes a lack of openness of the residents at the time to non-Chinese, particularly in America where the Chinese had historically been at the absolute bottom of the social ladder and been the victims of unending abuse - abuse that would see a serious resurgence when Covid-19 arrived. There are also cultural differences between white thinking and traditional Chinese thinking. The longstanding term "the inscrutable Orient" is an example of this among whites. In any event, the police in Chinatown at that time had a difficult time achieving much of consequence in those circumstances.

[chris]

This film is in the Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films on Letterboxd.

[duane]

The only scene in the film in which Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston appear together is the last scene in the film. This is also the only scene in the movie that was set and filmed in Chinatown.

[claude]

Phillip Lambro was originally hired to write the film's music score, but it was rejected at the last minute by producer Robert Evans leaving Jerry Goldsmith only 10 days to write and record a new score. However, when it was time to put together a trailer for the film, the studio's marketing department decided that Goldsmith's new score wasn't suitable. Lambro was asked if cues from his original score could be used instead. In exchange for allowing his music to be used for the trailer, Lambro asked to retain the publishing rights to his own score. Paramount Pictures agreed on the condition that, if the music was ever released commercially, Lambro could not use the title "Chinatown." An album with Lambro's original rejected score was finally released in 2012 under the title "Los Angeles, 1937".