Two Months Before Nixon Resignation
The “Easy Rider, Raging Bull” days were in full bloom. Shampoo had just wrapped, and film rights to the unpublished All The President’s Men had just been bought by Robert Redford. The air was awful. (Catalytic converters had only just been invented a year earlier.) El Cholo and Lost on Larrabee were hip restaurants. The Microsoft Corp. was eight or nine months away from being hatched by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And LexG was…what, four years old? (Photo tweeted by Shawn Levy.)
Redford already was working on All the President’s Men. Jeez, Jeff, even my students know that. Wells to Leydon: “Jeez”? You’re a technically accurate nag, Joe. Redford having recently purchased book rights to a would-be film version doesn’t exactly constitute “working” on All The President’s Men, the movie. It was basically a maybe project at that point. Nothing had really taken shape, as I recall reading.
Very cool shot! That stretch of road is one of my faves and I have that Chinatown poster on my wall.
A Nixon resignation and Chinatown, all in the same summer. Those were the salad days.
Ban his voice, but yet quite his name in your above line?
Cowardly form, Wells. Bring back Lex G. He a’ risked it.
Side note, at the bar tonight, at the sight of a cutely hot 21 and half year old blond waitress, I did shout “LOOK AT HER!”.
C’mon, guys. LexG is gone, but Jesse Crall is providing lots of laughable moments. He’s becoming HE”s Harry Knowles, eager to confirm how everything posted here can somehow relate to Jesse’s own love of film.
“A Nixon resignation and Chinatown, all in the same summer. Those were the salad days.”
My first memory of anything political is Nixon’s resignation on TV. I was eight and didn’t understand why the adults were so entranced.
Nice shot – it looked compositionally cluttered to me at first, but the more I look at it, the more I like it, the way the billboard is framed by everything else. The time and locale too, I’ve recently found myself ogling the locations during ROCKFORD FILES episodes.
I preferred The Bratskeller. Then again, I was 10.
In reality, Chinatown was fairly small potatoes next to THE movie everyone was talking about in 1973: The Exorcist.
I remember being very annoyed at my mother for watching the Watergate Hearings since it seriously cut into my daily cartoon time – before we had color television. I don’t think we got a color until maybe 1975 or 1976.
I do remember my parents going to see The Exorcist however, one of the few times they got a babysitter.
Why did you mention Lex? You’re like someone who mentions an old girl friend while trying to decide on what kind of bagel to order.
Great Pic though. More old L.A. Bring it on!
Jeff and Lex are much more like Howard & Artie than Peggy Guggenheim and Pollock. This shit need to get figured out, I want my boys back.
I just read that the club behind the billboard, which I don’t think was the Roxbury just yet, was built by Preston Sturges in the 1940s, and included a tunnel from the club to the Chateau Marmont behind it, so Hollywood-types could sneak their mistresses around without undue attention.
damn — is that a pinto, lower right? a brown pinto. what a ride. ugly and underpowered. embarrassing even to watch one sputter past
those were the days. summers were hot and muggy and winters were still cold. we watched tv at night. benny and the jets and donna summer on the radio
nice poster. don’t see work that good too often today. nice pic. would love to go back
Apologies to those who already know this, but others might want to look up Richard Amsel, who did the artwork for that CHINATOWN poster. At the same time of the poster, he was doing amazing work for TV GUIDE. Sadly, he was one of the many artists lost to the first wave of AIDS.
I think we should only refer to our age as it relates to LexG. (He’s 39.)
I’m a few months younger than him, but I can’t remember a time before Carter. I mainly remember watching the Gilligan’s Island movie, where they were rescued during the Carter administration but hadn’t heard of him, which made me wonder when their radio stopped working, and I remember coming up with a hilarious joke that kept fellow kindergarteners in stitches: “Carter farter!”
I have to admit that films in that stretch of time, from both recently established (Polanski) and relatively newly minted (Pakula, Friedkin) have a je ne said quoi that makes them truly great.
It’s like a perfect mix of documentary beauty shots used with uncanny eerie effect — I’m referring to Exorcist and Walkabout, f.i. Whereas Klute is all a beautiful exercise in framing and Chinatown is just an actor’s movie, from beginning to end, perhaps besting noir films at their own game.
@Opinion. True, I agree with what you said there
Deaf: Mine was Reagan’s impeachment.
This is really sad. At least they left good memories with their good works. Good job. – Mercy Ministries
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