Ben Affleck to Direct Paramount Film About the Iconic Making of ‘Chinatown’
Ben Affleck is returning to the director’s chair for the first time since his 2016 bomb “Live by Night” with “The Big Goodbye,” a dramatic retelling of the behind-the-scenes drama that went into making Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” Affleck will helm the movie for Paramount Pictures. The project was first announced by Deadline as an adaptation of Sam Wasson’s 2020 nonfiction tome “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood.” IndieWire has reached out to Paramount Pictures representatives, who confirmed the news, and that Affleck will also write the script.Rights to the book were purchased by “Saturday Night Live” showrunner Lorne Michaels. The deep-dive biography of the movie as told by Wasson unfurls the twisty story that led to the 1974 classic that lost Best Picture, but still earned screenwriter Robert Towne a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award. Framed against the wildly changing backdrop of 1970s Hollywood, “The ...