Star and Director: Jack, Be Nimble : Nicholson seems to handle double duties without trouble in the longtime coming ‘Chinatown’ sequel

Jack Nicholson stands on a wind-swept hilltop in the northwest reaches of the Santa Clarita Valley. He gazes beyond him, into a kind of valley within the valley, where giant yellow earthmovers raise clouds of dust as they sculpt the bare terrain into pads for houses.

The hill he stands atop is already sculpted and padded, and curbs are in although the roads are unpaved. For the moment the only two houses in view are props--the shells of two tract houses in the early postwar style. A still-spongy sod lawn and other plantings are newly in place. Real estate flags snap in the breeze and before one of the houses a sign reads, “$9700. $500 down.” It is enough to make you weep, but the year is 1948, when dollars were real.

Nicholson surveys the earthmoving and chortles. “Ah, the rape of the land,” he says, with ironic satisfaction. The satisfaction is that this valley is doubling so perfectly for the San Fernando Valley, which must have looked just about this way in 1948. Another lawn sign reads “El Rancho San Fernando.”

Nicholson is directing “The Two Jakes,” a sequel to “Chinatown,” the fine 1974 film which Roman Polanski directed from the script by Robert Towne, who has also written the new script and, a month or so into shooting, was still rewriting the later stretches of it.

“Chinatown,” set in 1937, had as its underlying theme control of the water rights which was the key to land speculation in the Valley. (There were murder and incest among other ingredients, but the principal engine was money.)

Now, in “The Two Jakes,” it is a decade and a world war later, but the theme is still murder born of greed, focused now on land development and oil discoveries.

Nicholson is again playing private investigator Jake Gittes, his makeup including a thin scar where his nose was knifed in “Chinatown.” The second Jake, played by Harvey Keitel, is Jake Berman, a real estate developer whose partner turns up murdered early in the proceedings.

The new film has a tangled history, even by Hollywood standards. Production--rehearsals, although no cameras actually turned--began in 1985 but stopped after two days because of “creative differences” that indeed proved irreconcilable, or at least looked so terminal that Paramount withdrew its backing for the film.

The differences involved Towne, who was to direct “Two Jakes” as well as having written it; Robert Evans, who was to play Jake Berman as well as produce it; and Nicholson, who was the principal star. What seems to have been crucial was Towne’s rising doubt about Evans’ rightness for the part, which collided with Nicholson’s loyal support of Evans.

In all events, production ceased. Cast, crew and suppliers were paid off to the tune of at least $3 million; lawsuits were filed and the property lay dormant for the better part of four years, the subject of rumors and negotiations. Paramount, which owns the original “Chinatown” and its characters, was understandably reluctant to let a potentially lucrative property go, although at least one other company actively sought it.

“The Two Jakes” now resumes, with a budget of $19 million financed by Paramount, which will distribute the film, as before. It is scheduled as a Christmas release, to catch the holiday trade but, more important in the long run, to qualify for Academy Award nominations. The producing entity is the 88 Production Company, co-owned by Paramount.

Evans is the co-producer of record with Harold Schneider, who produced “Goin’ South.” “Schneider is the best producer I’ve ever worked with,” says Evans, who screens the dailies every night at his house in Beverly Hills. Now linked in courtroom testimony to a murder case, Evans has had to leave the line producing chores to Schneider.

The creative differences have ostensibly been resolved, but a source close to the film says that one or two of the relationships remained strained and may stay that way.

From his Santa Clarita hilltop, Nicholson points out the theme tower of Magic Mountain amusement park, in the distance at the left end of the valley below. In the middle distance are new, low factory buildings. Power lines, carried on tall stanchions, stretch west across the valley and over the hills toward the ocean.

“Right out to Port Hueneme and the offshore oil rigs,” Nicholson says. “The land, the development, the oil, all in one neat package if you want to think of it that way. One day you’ve got beautiful fields and hills and the next day you’ve got ugly bare earth.”

Nicholson is wearing Jake Gittes’ wide-brimmed soft felt fedora, the kind of hat men were starting not to wear in the postwar years. His outfit consists of shiny blue gabardine slacks and a tan gabardine jacket which, like the slacks, looks to be a size too large, as if Jake had been trying to get more for his money. It is also as if he had made an attempt at nattiness which has not quite worked.

In the day’s sequence, Nicholson, driving a wonderful 1948 Hudson convertible, has come to call on Keitel, who, he suspects, murdered his partner. Keitel has all kinds of other problems: a wracking cough and natural gas, which is lousing up the artesian well on the property.

“I knew the previous owners of this land,” Nicholson says as Gittes, looking away in a sudden silence. It is one of the few links to “Chinatown,” understated like the rest.

“I took out a flashback. I want to do it as if it had nothing to do with the other. They’ve all been to war. Perry (Lopez, the detective from “Chinatown,”) lost a leg. Harvey (Keitel) was a Marine, but we let it speak for itself. A detective story has a lot of plot densities, as Bob Towne calls ‘em. You have to adjust the scenes to be sure you’ve got ‘em but not too many. Thus the rewriting; we always planned to do it that way.” (The previous owner Gittes mentions was presumably the John Huston character, the silence for his daughter, Faye Dunaway.) The female interests this time are Madeleine Stone and Meg Tilly as the wives of the late partner and Keitel, respectively.

Nicholson seems to handle the double duties of star and director without trouble. He co-authored and directed but did not appear in “Drive He Said,” a modish 1970 film in which Robert Towne did a small role as an actor. In 1978, Nicholson directed and acted in “Goin’ South.” The picture was not well-received and thought to be indulgent, but its cast included Mary Steenburgen and John Belushi and it now has the dented patina of a cult film.

Schneider says that the then-and-now difference in Nicholson as a director is as “night and day.” Production is about on schedule and Nicholson has worked out each day’s scenes with meticulous care, keeping the script pages with his notes in a pants pocket. His director’s chair is always handy but little used. Many of the crew members have worked with Nicholson before, on “Goin’ South” or on films in which he has appeared. The easy but efficient camaraderie of the crew is obvious.

“The only trouble is that they’re two jobs that each take a lot of time,” Nicholson says, “and every day there are things I really don’t get time to do.” A linked television camera lets Nicholson watch an instant replay of each scene, but often he accepts the word of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and other aides whether an additional take is needed.

A visitor observed that there seemed to be a lot of Frisbees lying about, possibly the sign of a really relaxed set. Not quite, producer Schneider explains. It turns out that on “Chinatown” Roman Polanski discovered that Frisbees make excellent marks for actors to hit in scenes where the feet aren’t visible. “They’re easier to see than pieces of tape or bits of paper, and you can feel them as you step,” Schneider says. There’s no telling what modern technology will come up with next.

Nicholson spent a good deal of time in pre-production discussing with Zsigmond the particular look he sought for “The Two Jakes.” “I worked with him on ‘Witches (of Eastwick),’ ” Nicholson says. “He had a good feeling for what we wanted to do here.”

“What we’re doing,” Zsigmond says, “is duplicating the Hollywood lighting style of the ‘40s--hard and perfect, not soft and natural like the present style. In terms of present tastes, we’re daring to go back to bad technique, or what people would say now was bad technique.” He adds, grinning, “But it looks great on the monitor, in black and white.”

“Hard surfaces, sharp negatives,” Nicholson says. “By the mid-’50s they’d become cliches, but now I think they’re good again.”

Nicholson’s wisecracking style, his use of words that sound like his own invention (“That’s the kookamoola!” he cries in admiration of a shot), and his toss-away attitudes often seem as much a defensive mask as Alfred Hitchcock’s studied poses. Hitchcock to the end of his days seemed to be concealing beneath the Hitchcock of legend a real if unjustified insecurity and a profound discomfort with anything like intimacy. For his part Nicholson sometimes suggests a man who wants no one to know that he is very smart and possessed of a connoisseur’s taste. The Nicholson who never misses a Lakers game is real enough, but it is less than the full triptych.

“The Two Jakes,” Nicholson explains, moves from indoors, where most of the exposition setting up the plot takes place, to the outdoors, where most of the action takes place. (There is a major earthquake.)

Nicholson cites painterly equivalents for the shift in the tone of the images as the story moves from interior to exterior, city to open spaces.

“I want the early scenes to look like Sheeler paintings,” he says. Charles Sheeler’s style (“machine-tooled,” as one art historian described it) captured the man-made modern landscape in images that are smooth, almost abstract, and rather chilly.

“And then we’ll get to Maynard Dixon’s work,” Nicholson adds. Dixon, an admired but not widely known painter who worked largely in the Southwest, was encouraged by Frederick Remington. He did some remarkable desert paintings in the 1920s, in a stark and simplified style that suggested the influence of Cubism.

“Vilmos got a shot of a parking lot, that was just supposed to be a shot of a parking lot. But he got the shadow of an oil pump stretching all across it. Kookamoola!” Nicholson shouts, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

“I’m not Roman Polanski,” Nicholson says. “But I’d be doing the same thing as an actor if he were directing, and I think he’d be doing the same things as a director. The detective picture dictates certain handlings. You have to see what the detective sees, so what you shoot is dictated by what Jake Gittes sees and does.”

Even as Nicholson moves through a 70-day shooting schedule on “The Two Jakes,” the hype is building around “Batman,” the summer’s widest and most conspicuous opening. The reviews stress Nicholson as the Joker even more than Michael Keaton as Batman.

“I always like to mix it up,” Nicholson says, “something on the realistic side and then something way out there. I had a great time with the Joker. It’s a real circus romp. But I tried to inject human feelings into that character, like a good clown might.”

After the lunch break, Nicholson and Keitel rehearse a master shot. Keitel has a coughing spell as Nicholson tells him his suspicions and they walk down to the convertible. It works fine. The Frisbees are in place.

“Action, dammit!” Nicholson cries cheerfully.

EVANS’ TROUBLES

At the “Cotton Club murder” hearings. Page 33.