Water on the Brain, Then and Now

When Robert Towne sat down to write the screenplay for Chinatown, he quickly found himself lost in a maze of his own making. He had set out to write a detective story in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, one that would pay tribute to the Los Angeles of his childhood—a time before industrial smog choked the city, and before the Manson murders persuaded his friends to buy handguns and guard dogs. He wanted it to star his friend Jack Nicholson, whom he had first met in an acting class in the 1950s. And he planned to borrow liberally from a book on Southern California history that his then-girlfriend, Julie Payne, had found for him at the library.

If the movie was to be about Los Angeles itself, Towne wanted to intertwine the characters’ personal drama with some sordid local scandal—and where better to look for inspiration than the actual history of how the city had stolen water from a valley 250 miles away, ravaging the valley in the process? Towne had found an original sin on which to build his story, but the audacity of the crime and the sheer depth of conspiracy required to pull it off seemed impossible to fit into a screenplay. His first draft was about 340 pages.

In the 50 years since its release, Chinatown has helped shape our general understanding of how Los Angeles secured its lifeblood—the fresh water that enabled a booming population to drink and bathe to their heart’s content in a supposed paradise. As California’s water-supply issues have grown even more pronounced in the decades since the film’s release (from 2000 to 2021, the state experienced its driest period in 1,200 years), Chinatown has become a useful shorthand for the flagrant corruption that enabled a major city to flourish next to a desert, distilling the real, unwieldy history down to a more compact myth. Released in the midst of the Watergate scandal and at the tail end of the Vietnam War, the film arrived at a moment when the American public was becoming even more disillusioned with the country’s institutions—a trend directly reflected in many of the era’s films, as studios hoped to lure in younger audiences. A cohort of angsty young filmmakers dubbed “the New Hollywood” seized the opportunity to deconstruct typical American narratives, usually sending the audience out on a downbeat, unresolved note.

True to the New Hollywood ethos, Chinatown asks where it all went wrong. Los Angeles—which had long advertised itself as a utopia where anyone could find a fresh start—was always at risk of forgetting its past, and Chinatown arrived with a grim, clear-eyed version of events: The city was born from corrosive greed, and you’re better off not knowing too much about it. Even now, the film has something to say about the city’s past, while offering a warning for its future.

Almost immediately after the opening credits, the film makes evident that it’s ultimately going to be about water. After being hired to track the city’s chief water engineer, Hollis Mulwray, to see if he’s cheating on his wife, the showboaty private investigator J. J. Gittes (played by Nicholson) finds himself wrapped up in an endlessly convoluted investigation that keeps leading him to various reservoirs around the city. “The guy’s got water on the brain!” Gittes’s partner, Walsh, quips in an early scene. It’s a funny line, but it’s also a reminder to the audience: No matter how the plot twists and turns, everything that happens here comes back to water. Although the film is set in the 1930s, Los Angeles’s actual water scandal occurred three decades earlier, when the city found itself in desperate need of more water amid explosive population growth (driven, ironically, by its image as a place of abundance).

A few of those new arrivals wound up being architects of the city’s future and orchestrators of the complicated scheme that inspired Chinatown—including William Mulholland, an Irishman who came to California in 1877 as a laborer and eventually became to Los Angeles what the writer Marc Reisner called a “modern Moses.” But instead of parting the waters to bring his people to the promised land, Mulholland brought the water to them. A self-taught engineer who worked his way up the ranks at what would become L.A.’s Department of Water and Power, Mulholland understood—sooner than most—just how scarce water was. If the city was to keep growing, it would have to find the resource somewhere, and Mulholland’s co-conspirator, Fred Eaton, had an idea: Why not build an aqueduct to the Owens River up in the Sierra Nevada mountains and let gravity do the work?

Thus began a plot that, although technically legal, employed “chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies,” as Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert, his seminal book on California water history. After gaining access to information on land deeds and water rights in the Owens Valley by getting himself appointed to a federal irrigation project, Eaton posed as a cattle rancher to avoid making locals suspicious and went around buying up the necessary land, and Mulholland talked L.A. politicians into backing their plan. When it came time for L.A. voters to weigh in on the project, they ignored the whiff of scandal and approved it because Mulholland had led them to believe that the water crisis was even worse than it was—partly by dumping reservoir water into the ocean, a tactic that Towne later incorporated into his screenplay.

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As if it wasn’t already the stuff of a great film-noir plot, Mulholland’s scheme ballooned into a conspiracy that many of the city’s wealthy power brokers were in on. In an effort to fund the project by growing the city’s tax base, Mulholland lobbied to expand L.A.’s borders to include the San Fernando Valley, which would—unbeknownst to the public—receive water from the aqueduct before the rest of the city would. Wise to Mulholland’s plan, a syndicate of wealthy Angelenos supported the expansion and bought up soon-to-be-valuable land in the San Fernando Valley for pennies. When the aqueduct was completed, in 1913, Mulholland pointed to the initial stream of water and spoke some words that would define L.A.’s relationship to water for decades: “There it is. Take it.”

At the time, a number of critics saw Mulholland’s plan for what it was. The writer Mary Austin—who had spent time with the Indigenous Paiute people, whom settlers had murdered and displaced from the Owens Valley decades earlier—knew that L.A. wouldn’t stop until it had bled its source dry. (As she lamented in her novel about the water scandal, The Ford, “So much is forgiven as long as it is done in the name of the Good of the Town.”) Overall, though, Mulholland was hailed as an American innovator by newspapers and by workers who built the aqueduct. Apart from Owens Valley farmers periodically revolting by dynamiting portions of the aqueduct, Mulholland’s comeuppance didn’t arrive until 1928, when one of his projects, the St. Francis Dam, burst because of an engineering failure (an event that Mulwray alludes to early in the film). The resulting flood killed more than 400 people and ended Mulholland’s career.

Another movie might have focused on Mulholland’s tragic rise and fall, but Chinatown is more interested in the nature of evil—and the inevitability of its triumph. The film’s villain is not a simple Mulholland stand-in, but Noah Cross: an industrialist who more closely resembles the wealthy men who quietly bought up land in the San Fernando Valley. Portrayed by John Huston as greed incarnate, Cross embodies every ugly American impulse that conspired to make L.A.’s rapid expansion possible—an aged titan of industry just barely concealing his endless appetite for power. (“’Course I’m respectable,” he growls to Gittes. “I’m old.”)

Having conquered Los Angeles by the start of the film, Cross has retired to nearby Catalina, where he dresses the part of a wealthy rancher and welcomes Gittes with a feast, hoping to buy his loyalty and persuade him to track down a mysterious girl. (Cross is also, notably, a little too eager to suss out whether Gittes has slept with his daughter.) Far from representing his contentment, the island outpost only underscores Cross’s restlessness—if California signifies the end of manifest destiny, then he’s the victorious conqueror desperate for a new frontier. By eliding his backstory, the film frames Cross as the embodiment of a malevolence as pure and elemental as the water he seeks to control. With nothing left to buy in his own lifetime, Cross has decided that he’ll violate every inch of land in California just to dictate the course of a future he’ll never see.

According to Sam Wasson’s book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, Towne’s original draft had gotten lost in various subplots, and it required a final pass from the film’s director, Roman Polanski, to refocus the screenplay on the parallel horrors at its center: not just Cross’s murderous plan to control the city’s water supply but also his rape of Evelyn, his daughter (Faye Dunaway). Although plenty of references to Mulholland’s real-life schemes remained, the final script trapped the audience in Gittes’s perspective as he becomes stuck in a labyrinth of Cross’s avarice. It was Polanski, too, who insisted on the film’s violent, unshakably bleak ending. His wife, Sharon Tate, hadn’t survived Los Angeles, so how could Evelyn Mulwray? (A few years later, Polanski’s argument that the bad guys in real life go unpunished was given ghoulish off-screen resonance by the director’s own horrific crime and subsequent escape to France.) Evil wins in Los Angeles, the film contends—a conclusion made all the more deflating when accepted by Gittes, given Nicholson’s image as the great rebellious everyman of ’70s Hollywood.

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If Chinatown’s ending forces the audience to sit in a feeling of hopelessness, it should also disturb anyone invested in Los Angeles’s future. The history of water in 20th-century California was defined by mammoth feats of engineering and an enduring belief that someone like Mulholland would eventually come along and enable the impossible. Each new dam or aqueduct only guaranteed the arrival of the next one—the population growth allowed by Mulholland’s aqueduct, for example, later resulted in L.A. tapping other water sources, such as the Colorado River. California has had a few good years of rain recently, but the long-term sustainability of the state’s water supply depends on collective conservation efforts: drastically reducing the amount of water used by Big Agriculture, moderating suburban tasks such as watering lawns, regulating the state’s groundwater.

“There is no more water to capture with big projects. There just isn’t. The future is really about much smarter water management,” Stephanie Pincetl, a UCLA professor who specializes in urban policy and the environment, told me. Conservation measures, she argues, are the way forward even if politicians wish they could stump for some grand technological innovation the way their 20th-century predecessors did: “The approach to the 21st century has to be a lot more subtle, a lot more place-based, and a lot more guided by the realization that water is a scarce resource, and so we need to treat it like a scarce resource.”

Sorting out L.A.’s water future, then, will require fighting the gravitational pull of inaction. Throughout Chinatown, Gittes vaguely refers back to his time as a cop in the titular neighborhood, hinting at a tragedy that he failed to stop. When asked what his work there consisted of, he says, “As little as possible”—his implication being that involving yourself in something you don’t understand will only make it worse. By the film’s end, Gittes is proved correct: His involvement leads directly to Evelyn’s gruesome death, yet another inevitable outcome in his Sisyphean struggle against the darkness at Los Angeles’s core. The city’s water future is not quite so hopeless, thankfully, even if indulging in optimism can feel like rewatching Chinatown and hoping—just as Gittes does—that this time, the outcome will be different.