Author Sam Wasson - The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
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Join us for a remarkable evening with author Sam Wasson in conversation with Chinatown's first assistant director, Howard "Hawk" Koch, Jr. (former President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2012-2013).
The New York Times bestselling author Sam Wasson is the author of six critically acclaimed books on show business. In The Big Goodbye, Wasson turns his gaze on the making of Chinatown. Notorious for its twist ending and haunting closing line of dialogue, Chinatown is one of the great films of American cinema. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making. Wasson will tell you why it endures as a work of art and a state of mind.
Wasson has been described as one of America’s “canniest chroniclers of old Hollywood and its outsized personalities” (The New Yorker). With books like Fosse, a definitive account of the director and choreographer that inspired the Emmy-winning FX miniseries “Fosse/Verdon,” staring Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams; Fifth Avenue, 5 A. M., a superb anecdotal account of the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which Entertainment Weekly called one of the best pop-culture books of all time; and Improv Nation, a sweeping history of the comedic art form that the New York Times described as “one of the most important stories in American popular culture,” Wasson is not only chronicling the history of show business, but completely changing the way we understand it, “finding meaning in situations and stories that would otherwise be forgotten if he didn’t sleuth them out, lovingly” (The New Yorker).
In conjunction with this event, we will be screening Roman Polanski's Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, at the Buena Vista Branch Library at 6:30 pm on Tuesday, February 11.