Ben Affleck to direct movie about the secrets of ‘Chinatown’

The trouble with Hitchcock(about the making of Psycho) is that it was a Fox production and Universal owned Psycho...and refused to give the makers any clips from Psycho or to allow script dialogue to be shown being spoken. The Hitchcock heirs refused to cooperate..they felt the movie besmirched Alfred AND Alfred Hitchcock.

So you ended up with a movie about the making of Psycho that could BARELY show anything about the making of Psycho.

I've only seen clips from The Offer...Paramount did cooperate so scenes could be restaged from the film. Its better than Hitchcock in those clips. However, Peter Bart, who worked on The Godfather as a Paramount exec, is alive and says the series didn't really show what happened, and chose to pick a "hero" (producer Al Ruddy) who didn't have that kind of power, says Bart. Bart also says that a female Paramount staffer who didn't have that much to do with The Godfather was elevated "to give the series an important female character."

A big problem for these biopics about famous stars and famous directors is that you cant CAST famous stars and directors. They were UNIQUE. That's what made them stars.

I've been thinking about it, and all the GOOD gossipy stories from Chinatown revolve around the brilliant, tragic, eventually villainous director Roman Polanski. This turned out to be his final American studio film.

To wit:

Polanski returned to Hollywood fillmaking here for the first time since the slaughter of his wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child. This seemed to "feed" the gory moments of Chinatown, its dark, perverse worldview, and its downbeat ending.

Polanski and diva Faye Dunaway feuded all through the film. He plucked a hair from her head for a scene to get her "to photograph better" and she went berserk on him. Later in revenge, Dunaway threw a cup of her own urine at Polanski.

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