The '80s found many of the young turks that revolutionized Hollywood in the '70s desperate and adrift. A love and grief-stricken Peter Bogdanovich stopped sobbing uncontrollably while curled up in a fetal ball just long enough to direct one good movie (Mask) and a whole bunch of flops. Producer Julia Phillips bullied and bad-mouthed her way out of Hollywood. Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studio was floundering under the weight of bloated budgets and good intentions gone awry. Terrence Malick went AWOL. A coke-addled Hal Ashby was immersed in an interminable, drawn-out act of professional suicide. William Friedkin, George Roy Hill, and Michael Ritchie were all reduced to directing Chevy Chase vehicles while Robert Altman went from the giddy '70s highs of M.A.S.H. and The Long Goodbye to the soul-crushing '80s lows of O.C. And Stiggs and Beyond Therapy.
But few of the decade's icons had fallen as far as actor-turned-producer-turned-studio-head-turned-audio-book-king Robert Evans, that sultan of self-mythology, that peerless poet of purple prose. By his own humble estimation, Evans reigned over the '70s like a Greek God, but in the '80s his name popped up in the papers for all the wrong reasons. He was busted trying to purchase liquid cocaine. Cotton Club, his big, gaudy comeback vehicle, flopped and Evans found himself embroiled in scandal when one of the film's financiers was murdered.
In the midst of this personal and professional downward spiral, Evans' good buddy Jack Nicholson offered to lend a hand. He agreed to star in a sequel to Chinatown called The Two Jakes, written and directed by Robert Towne, who hungered for a chance to establish himself as a true auteur and not just a great screenwriter who sometimes directed movies. Evans was on board to produce and, in a twist worthy of a melodramatic ham like Evans, return to acting after a multi-decade absence as the second male lead.
Was Evans back? You bet your ass he was! It was goodbye Chumpsville, hello A-List, population: Robert Evans. Kid Notorious was raring for another shot at the limelight. Evans must have felt like Lady Luck had showed up at his front door with a truck full of liquid blow and a school bus full of 18-year-old hookers in cheerleader outfits. If, as Evans humbly asserts in his wonderful autobiography The Kid Stays in The Picture (if you haven't read it yet, for the love of God run out and purchase it immediately. You won't be sorry), the anti-drug PSAs he, um, was ordered to produce after his drug bust were "the Woodstock of the '80s," then clearly his return to the screen in The Two Jakes would be nothing less than the V-J Day of acting comebacks.
Then everything fell apart. Evans was fired not long into shooting and the plug was soon pulled on the whole operation. After Batman, however, Nicholson could probably get a big-budget feature-film adaptation of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music green-lit. The Two Jakes was officially back in business, but Towne was out as director and Evans was a producer in name only.
Nicholson took over as director for a follow-up that found Nicholson's cynical shamus fat and complacent–much like the actor playing him– but still working the divorce beat. Nicholson's fortunes begin to change when he's lured into a seemingly simple adultery case that spirals into an elaborate quagmire involving murder, betrayal, black gold, and, inevitably, the case at the heart of Chinatown. The memory of John Huston and Faye Dunaway haunts Nicholson in the same way the legacy of Chinatown casts a long, gloomy shadowy over its tepid follow-up. Richard Farnsworth and Ruben Blades turn in juicy supporting turns, but the film feels the absence of a supporting player as towering and iconic as Huston like a phantom limb.