Gittes’ Unfinished Adventures

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia to come out of blogger Scott Montgomery’s recent interview with Max Allan Collins, in The Hard Word. Amid their discussion about the still-new Return of the Maltese Falcon, Montgomery mentions that Collins and film historian Heath Holland provided the audio commentary for last fall’s Blu-ray release of 1990’s The Two Jakes, Jack Nicholson’s oft-derided sequel to Chinatown (1974). In response to Montgomery asking him what he admires about The Two Jakes, Collins says:

Everybody goes into The Two Jakes with a Chinatown chip on their shoulder and [they] don’t drink in the great Nicholson performance, the Robert Towne dialogue, the terrific cinematography and the resonance with the original. I love Chinatown and I love The Two Jakes. After Chinatown’s success, [screenwriter] Towne announced he was doing a trilogy about water, oil, and air. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get the rights to finish the [private eye] Jake Gittes trilogy as a prose novel, Gittes vs. Gittes, in part about divorce but mostly about pollution and the building of the freeways. Not sure whether Towne ever took it to the script stage. Jack Nicholson should be proud, and a lot of people are wrong.

Wanting to know more Towne’s prospective third Gittes story (of course!), I fired off an e-mail note to Collins, asking for details about his pursuit of the rights to the trilogy. His response:

About 10 years ago, I told my Hard Case Crime editor, Charles Ardai, I wanted to see if I could do Gittes vs. Gittes as a novel. My idea was simply to get whatever Towne had worked up on it and go from there—with his input and guidance, of course. How much he might have put together was uncertain—interviews with him indicated everything from a script to just an idea or even merely a title.

Charles thought we should go after the entire Gittes trilogy, including Chinatown, but I thought it was pointless to do Chinatown. Obviously, I’ve [written] plenty of movie novelizations, but I didn’t see any purpose in writing a novel version of a movie that perfect. I was in favor of doing The Two Jakes, however, because I knew Towne's several scripts differed in some ways from the film, and I thought The Two Jakes could use some attention that a novel might spark. I love that movie.

All I know is, Charles made some calls and they were somewhat serious, but ultimately nothing came of it. I’d still like to do it.

I guess we must add this to the “what might have been” file.