Just a Fish

Except in Chinatown

For me, the quintessential Los Angeles movie is Chinatown, released in 1974, set in 1937, written by Robert Towne, and directed by the now disgraced Roman Polanski.

Chinatown is a movie as much about water as it is in Los Angeles. While nearly all great cities rise near water, LA's complicated relationship with water reflects the City's complexities. The ocean defines us, yet we can't drink it. We have swimming pools everywhere, but we can't water our lawns. The Los Angeles water supply is like all those movie stars you might find spot at Nobu up in Malibu; there are many, but are they even real?

It's a simple detective story; Jack Nicholson (Jake Gittes) plays a private detective hired to investigate a cheating husband. Faye Dunaway played the wife. The husband turns up dead. What follows is a story of dirty and dark secrets - those of a powerful family and the City itself. Much of the plot of the movie is taken from LA's actual origin story - William Mulholland, the powerful head of the LA Department of Water and Power, built a dam that engineers said couldn't be built and diverted water from Owens River Valley to the newly constructed Los Angeles Aqueduct. Lala Land thrived. The farms of the Owens withered.

American cinema in the 1970s was a heady time. Filmmakers and screenwriters were deep thinkers, and they attempted to layer meaning into their films. Chinatown layers meaning and symbolism on top of each other so often that I see something new each time I rewatch it.

In Chinatown, the allusions to water also include fish.

In a critical scene, Jake is summoned to Catalina Island (26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles) to have lunch with his client's father, one of the most powerful men in LA.

The meeting is set at the fictional Albacore Club on the Island. In reality, there is a Tuna Club on the Island, founded in 1898, with as exclusive a membership roster as the fictional club.

The scene was filmed outside, and the location is listed as Rancho Escondido, the real-life estate owned by the Wrigley family, the founding family of Catalina Island. The scene was actually filmed on the mainland in the Portuguese Bend Riding Club, a few miles from where your humble writer now sits.

The story unfolds around this area, which is owed to screenwriter Robert Towne, who grew up in San Pedro.

Towne would move to the gated community of Rolling Hills and attend the very private Chadwick School, but he has spoken often of the port town of San Pedro and his upbringing there. I once heard him speak at a screening about struggling with the Chinatown script and returning to San Pedro for inspiration.

Jack Nicholson's character (Jake) returns to San Pedro and the coast throughout the film. On a stakeout, parked in front of Walker's Cafe, he follows the husband down to Sunken City, where a landslide washed everything away in 1929. Jake recognizes that the storm drains also open to the ocean there.

Unsurprisingly, some of the crew would find their way around San Pedro while filming. I don't know who, but some production staff ate in our family restaurant sometime in 1973. They asked for a cook to come to the set and cook them a fish for the film. My father, who cooked in the restaurant by day and helped manage it by night, reluctantly agreed. He recounted being perplexed that the caters who fed the cast and crew couldn't just have cooked the fish instead of paying him.

So my father spent the next day in Palos Verdes.

The scene features legendary John Huston, playing Noah Cross, grilling Gittes, the investigator, about the death of his son-in-law.

A server places a plate in front of each man - each with a whole fish on it. The camera holds on the fish. Looking it in the eye.

When the camera returns to Gittes, he may as well be staring the fish in the eyes.

"I hope you don't mind. I believe they should be served with the head," Cross says.

"Fine, as long as you don't serve chicken that way."

My father cooked around a dozen fish that day and later remarked that this was as close as he'd ever get to the movies.

The fish may have been there to intimidate Gittes. Or it was just a fish. But I think that serving the whole fish was a symbol of the whole story that Cross alludes to when he says, "You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't."

Watch.

Where’s My Reading At?

I promised you change this year; here it begins. The reading list I normally put together will now arrive under its own email on alternating weeks. I recognize that some of you actually have lives and can’t just read all the time. Hopefully, this makes my original pieces less overwhelming to read when you get them.

xAP