‘The Two Jakes’-- It’s All Jake Now

After 16 years, one false start, a couple of shattered friendships, a rewritten script, a new ending and enough other rumors to keep a private eye busy full-time, Paramount Pictures’ sequel to “Chinatown” is about to open. But with less than two weeks to its Aug. 10 release date, director-star and Jake Gittes alter-ego Jack Nicholson has been back in the studio recording eight pages of narrative dialogue for “The Two Jakes.”

“I always wanted to have a whack at (a narration),” Nicholson tells us. “It’s the toughest piece of writing I’ve ever done.”

Like “Chinatown,” “The Two Jakes” is complicated: set in 1948, 11 years after the events of “Chinatown,” it has Jake embroiled in a murder case that both links the sequel to the original film and pivots on a complex scam to rip off oil beneath the L.A. basin.

“We didn’t put (narration) there to explain the story,” Nicholson says, “but to give audiences a point of reference. This is not a popcorn movie; audiences are going to have to work for it and we wanted to let them know that it’s all right, they’re going to get it.”

Nicholson admits that adding narration to the already thickly woven Robert Towne script made him nervous. So Nicholson invited his “idol,” Billy Wilder--the king of film noir narration (“Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Boulevard”)--to a screening of the narrated version “to see if he thought narration helped or hurt the picture.”

“Two good lines of narration can save you a half-hour of a boring picture,” says Wilder, who gives Nicholson’s “Two Jakes” narration a thumbs up.

“It’s a very cerebral picture, it’s way above the usual ‘Die Hard’ level,” Wilder says. “(Nicholson) asked me should he have the narration or not. I thought he should. I thought it was excellent.”