The story of the making of the movie Chinatown, told, more or less, as disorganized often sordid biographies of the movie's producer, screenwriter, lead actor, and director (Robert Evans, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and Roman Polanski). This is a tough book to rate. I enjoyed it a lot, it has many great anecdotes, but it has its problems. The text isn't well-organized, jumping around and leaving some holes in the storyline - Didn't Polanksi realize that his producer had completely replaced the composer and score of his movie? The author always seems to be looking around for new scandalous details, even when they concern secondary or tertiary characters, and the whole shape of the story seems to be guided by the decadent and miserable stories that are available. So, for example, Roman Polanski's statutory rape case is described in great detail, but it postdates the movie. Also, it still isn't clear to me how Chinatown represented the last years of Hollywood, there have been many great movies of all kinds made in the U.S. since then, and it's not like the old studio system was still active in the mid-1970s.