"Chinatown": Ben Affleck makes a film about the making of the Polanski novel

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Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in "Chinatown"

The film is considered a milestone in New Hollywood - and one of the most difficult productions of that era. The main actors Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway finally became the megastars of the time thanks to "Chinatown", and the work appears again and again in top positions in rankings for the best films of all time. But in the creation of the lavish neo-noir thriller, which leads deep into the topography and history of Los Angeles, battle and chaos should have reigned.

The author Sam Wasson, who has established himself as a great chronicler of Hollywood with his books about cinema, traces the difficult development and the grueling shooting of Roman Polanski's classic film in his book "The Big Goodbye. Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood". It now forms the basis for one of the most ambitious cinema projects of the present: As the industry magazine "Variety" reports on its website, Ben Affleck wants to implement a feature film on the background of the "Chinatown" shoot based on Wasson's extensive research.

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Director Ben Affleck

Last year it was announced that star director David Fincher ("House of Cards") was planning a prequel for "Chinatown". In this case, the client is the streaming service Netflix; Robert Towne, who already provided the script for the classic, is to act as co-author.

Affleck is in good company with his "Chinatown" ambitions. The actor ("Good Will Hunting", "Pearl Harbor") has repeatedly excelled in the last few years with ambitious directing projects, for example in 2012 with the political thriller "Argo" about the tricky liberation of US hostages by the CIA during the Hostage-taking in Tehran in 1979. So he is already practiced in fictional processing of real events.

The planned "Chinatown" mirroring should nevertheless be a high-risk project for him too. The old Hollywood nobility is unlikely to get away with it. In his original, Wasson describes how the ingenious director and legendary rowdy John Houston ("African Queen"), who appears in "Chinatown" as the deeply evil patriarch, completed a central scene drunk and how director Polanski repeatedly clashed with his leading actress Dunaway .

The exciting question: How does Affleck, on the one hand, stage all the human abysses that opened up during the creation of "Chinatown" - and how does he also celebrate the film as a Hollywood masterpiece?

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