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.
And there are other gaps in the book, which bases an analysis of the 1975 Oscars on "Cabaret" having beaten "The Godfather" for best picture in 1973 (it didn't), which gives "Chinatown" screenwriter Robert Towne's ex-wife an oversized role because she agreed to talk and which seems to have been overhauled in editing - so that, for instance, a punchline about Polanski's skiing only makes sense when you get to the setup for the joke 50 pages later. Wasson, whose biography of Bob Fosse is riveting, makes interesting observations about 1970s moviemaking, but "Big Goodbye" reads like a book by a writer/researcher who too often was forced to write around missing material and say, "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."