Jake Gittes: Style Icon

[cookie]

Donegal Tweed and Mr Gittes

I would love to have a repro of that Donegal Tweed Jacket he wears in 'The Two Jakes'. What a jacket!

 

[cookie]

Some Memorable quotes of Mr Gittes from the Two Jakes

Memorable quotes for
The Two Jakes (1990)
Jake Gittes: Get on your knees, put your a** in the air and don't move until I say to.

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Jake Berman: You know something, Jake, you might think you know what's going on around here but... you don't.

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Jake Gittes: You can't trust a guy who's never lost anything.

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Jake Gittes: What I do for a living may not be very reputable. But I am. In this town I'm the leper with the most fingers.

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Walsh: Does that mean he wants you to prove your own client is guilty of murder?
Jake Gittes: Yeah.
Walsh: Well, 's that ethical?
Jake Gittes: Larry, he's a lawyer.

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Khan: You are very successful.
Jake Gittes: Oh, I can't complain.
Khan: Does that mean you are happy?
Jake Gittes: Who can answer that question off the top of their head?
Khan: Anyone who's happy.

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Jake Gittes: You can follow the action, which gets you good pictures. You can follow your instincts, which'll probably get you in trouble. Or, you can follow the money, which nine times out of ten will get you closer to the truth.

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Jake Gittes: The problem with you, kid, is you don't know who you're kiddin'.

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Captain Lou Escobar: How do you know he didn't have the gun with him?
Jake Gittes: Oh, I'd never frisk him before I let him walk in on his wife hanging on the headboard while some guy was slammin' her into the wall, Lou!

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Kitty Berman: Does it ever go away?
Jake Gittes: What's that?
Kitty Berman: The past.
Jake Gittes: I think you have to work real hard on that one.

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[last lines]
Jake Gittes: Katherine?
[she turns to look at him]
Jake Gittes: It never goes away.


Filming locations for
The Two Jakes (1990)
City Hall - 200 N. Spring St., Downtown, Los Angeles, California, USA


Dresden Room Restaurant - 1760 N. Vermont Ave., Los Feliz, Los Angeles, California, USA


Los Angeles, California, USA

http://www.movie-list.com/trailers.php?id=twojakes


This sequel to "Chinatown" opens in the postwar boom of 1948 as developers rapaciously exploit the natural resources of Southern California. With his small, dingy practice expanded into a thriving operation, Private Investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is now a card-carrying member of the bourgeoisie and engaged to be married. He still does a divorce case occasionally, however, and it is just such a case that draws Gittes into a complicated web of intrigue and corruption involving the mysterious daughter of the dead Evelyn Mulwray. When the husband of an adulterous wife Gittes is investigating murders his wife's lover, it first appears to be a simple crime of passion. But as the case unfolds, it turns out that the victim was actually the husband's real-estate partner and the murder may have been committed in order to gain control of a lucrative property development. In his effort to solve the mystery, Jake is forced to re-examine the painful events of his past -- specifically, his love affair with Evelyn Mulwray

Amazon.com
Set more than a decade after the story in Chinatown, this 1990 sequel brings Jack Nicholson back to the screen as L.A. private detective Jake Gittes. Older, fatter, worn, and frustrated, the Jake of 1948 is still haunted by the tragic events of the earlier film. While investigating a case involving adultery and questionable land dealings by an L.A. tycoon (Harvey Keitel as the other Jake), Gittes unexpectedly confronts a few old ghosts and discovers that the resource of choice in Southern California--one for which people die--is no longer water but oil. The film had a notorious production history, with Nicholson taking over the project from writer-director Robert Towne, and the dense plot can be difficult to follow. But if The Two Jakes doesn't measure up to the legendary status of its stylish predecessor, the film does satisfy on its own terms and brings the events of Chinatown to a moving conclusion. Terrific work by Keitel and supporting players Meg Tilly, Madeleine Stowe, Eli Wallach, and Ruben Blades. --Tom Keogh



The Two Jakes


BY ROGER EBERT / August 10, 1990

Cast & CreditsJake Gittes: Jack Nicholson
Jake Berman: Harvey Keitel
Kitty Berman: Meg Tilly
Lillian Bodine: Madeleine Stowe
Cotton Weinberger: Eli Wallach
Mickey Nice: Ruben Blades
Chuck Newty: Frederic Forrest
Loach Jr.: David Keith
Earl Rawley: Richard Farnsworth
Tyrone Otley: Tracey Walter

Paramount Pictures Presents A Film Directed By Jack Nicholson. Produced By Robert Evans And Harold Schneider. Written By Robert Towne. Edited By Anne Goursaud. Photography By Vilmos Zsigmond. Music By Van Dyke Parks. Running Time: 128 Minutes. Classified R.


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Here at long last is Jack Nicholson's "The Two Jakes," seven years in the trade papers, center of prolonged teeth-gnashing at Paramount Pictures, and it turns out to be such a focused and concentrated film that every scene falls into place like clockwork; there's no feeling that it was a problem picture. It's not a thriller and it's not a whodunit, although it contains thriller elements and at the end we do find out whodunit. It's an exquisite short story about a mood, and a time, and a couple of guys who are blind-sided by love.

The movie takes place in postwar Los Angeles - the 1940s of the baby boom and housing subdivisions - instead of the 1930s city where "Chinatown" was set. It's not such a romantic city anymore. And private eyes like J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) are a little more worn by time and care. The Gittes of "Chinatown" was the spiritual brother of Philip Marlowe. But now it is after the war, and Gittes has moved out of the two-room suite into a building of his own. He heads a staff of investigators. He belongs to a country club and has a fiancee and has put on some weight. One of these days he's going to stop calling himself an investigator altogether and become a security consultant.

But he still handles some of the old kinds of cases. The cases where the outraged husband bursts into the motel room and finds his wife locked in the arms of an adulterer, and then the investigator leaps in with a camera and takes photos that will look bad in divorce court. He knows, Gittes tells us in the film's opening narration, that he shouldn't get involved in messy situations like that anymore. He's outgrown them. They're beneath him. But sometimes he still takes the jobs.

That's how he meets the other Jake - Jake Berman (Harvey Keitel), a property developer who thinks his wife (Meg Tilly) is fooling around with his partner. So Gittes tutors Berman on how to act when he bursts in through the door, and what to say, and then they stake out a motel where the evil act is confidently expected to take place. But Berman doesn't follow the script. A gun appears from somewhere, and the partner is shot, and the partner's wife (Madeleine Stowe) thinks that maybe it wasn't a case of adultery at all. Maybe it was cold-blooded murder, and Berman intended to kill his partner so that he and his wife could collect the partner's share of the property development. That might make Gittes accessory to murder.

So far, what we have here is the kind of plot that any private eye movie might have been proud of. But "The Two Jakes" uses the plot only as an occasion for the deeper and more brooding things it has to say.

Everyone connected with this movie seems to have gone through the private eye genre and come out on the other side. The screenplay is by Robert Towne, who at one stage in the project's troubled history was going to direct it. He has not simply assembled some characters from his "Chinatown," added some new ones, and thrown them into a plot. This movie is written with meticulous care, to show how good and evil are never as simple as they seem, and to demonstrate that even the motives of a villain may emerge from a goodness of heart.

Jack Nicholson directed the film, and Vilmos Zsigmond photographed it, in the same spirit. This isn't a film where we ricochet from one startling revelation to another. Instead, the progress of the story is into the deeper recesses of the motives of the characters. We learn that Gittes - fiancee and all - still is deeply hurt by the murder of the Faye Dunaway character in "Chinatown"; he never will be over her.

We learn that the property being developed by Berman has been visited before by Gittes, in that long-ago time. We learn that love, pure love, is a motive sufficient to justify horrifying actions. And we learn that when the past has been important enough to us, it never will quite leave us alone.

The movie is very dark, filled with shadows and secrets and half-heard voices, and scratchy revelations on a clandestine tape recording. Out in the valley where the development is being built, the sunshine is harsh and casts black shadows, and the land is cruel - the characters are shaken by earthquakes that reveal the land rests uneasily on a dangerous pool of natural gas.

The performances are dark and gloomy, too, especially Nicholson's.

He tones down his characteristic ebullience and makes Gittes older and wiser and more easily disillusioned. And he never even talks about the loss that hangs heavily on his heart; we have to infer it from the way his friends and employees tiptoe around it.

Right from his first meeting with the Keitel character, when he notices they are wearing the same two-tone shoes, he feels a curious kinship with him, and that leads to a key final confrontation that I will not reveal. And he feels something, too, for the Meg Tilly character, who has been deeply hurt in her past and is afraid to express herself. She is like a bird with a broken wing.

The point of "The Two Jakes" is that love and loss are more important than the mechnical distribution of guilt and justice. When Nicholson and Keitel, as the two Jakes, have their final exchange of revelations, it is such a good scene because the normal considerations of a crime movie are placed on hold. The movie really is about the values that people have, and about the things that mean more to them than life and freedom. It's a deep movie, and a thoughtful one, and when it's over you can't easily put it out of your mind.

 

[Indy Magnoli]

I just finished this prototype tie based on this shot of Jack:

I'm curious what you guys think of it and if it would be worth producing. I think it'd make for a great summer tie.

Kind regards,
Magnoli

 

[jake_fink]

Hi Indy,

I'm not getting the right thing from your prototype. The sunray - if that is what it was called - seems to be a little darker in tone and the colours appear to be solid. Your prototype seems much more contemporary, lighter, and favoring the orange rather than the red, which also lightens it up.

Maybe Baron Kurtz will have a look in here and may even have a smaple of a Gittes-like tie to show us.

Cheers.

 

[ortega76]

Great tie! I'd certainly buy one. I love the colors. You know, Jake Gittes was one of the major influences in starting me off in my love of retro.

 

[carter]

Appropriate for the Fedora Lounge

Memorable quotes for
The Two Jakes (1990)
Jake Gittes: You can't trust a guy who's never lost anything.

Jake Gittes: What I do for a living may not be very reputable. But I am. In this town I'm the leper with the most fingers.

Jake Gittes: The problem with you, kid, is you don't know who you're kiddin'.

Cookie, I severely edited your post in the interest of space.

The line by Jake Gittes in The Two Jakes that I thought was most memorable was, "I don't want to forget the past, I just don't want to live in it".

 

[cookie]

I just finished this prototype tie based on this shot of Jack:

I'm curious what you guys think of it and if it would be worth producing. I think it'd make for a great summer tie.

Kind regards,
Magnoli

not close enough to the original..too modern but nice combo of colours nevertheless

 

[thunderw21]

Is that a Superba tie? P'raps from the "sugar and spice" line?

bk

Here is a "sugar and spice" tie from my collection.

It might also be a good reference for Magnoli. Like others have said, the colors on your prototype tie are nice but it's a bit different from the original. It appears the red and yellow of your prototype tie need to be switched.

I would also be interested in the finished product.

 

[Indy Magnoli]

Thanks for the comments! This tie wasn't meant to be an exact replica necessarily, but I see what everyone is saying. The color pattern is inverted (upside down) from what I original intended. Also, I'd like to have the red and off-white take up more space and minimize the transition area. I'll keep you posted...

Kind regards,
Indy

 

[Ying Ko]

Your prototype tie doesn't look too bad. It doesn't look like the Jake Gittes tie, but it looks sufficiently Thirties to me. What are the dimensions of the tie?

Also, since you're working with printed silks, have you ever considered going through a vintage textile book and reproducing some of the patterns as a necktie? The carpeting used in Radio City Music Hall, for example, would look great as a printed silk necktie.

Or, maybe, there's a fellow lounger who'd be willing to submit a design for you. Wasn't there a lounger who was a graphic designer or something? I'm thinking of the guy who designed a 1939-New-York-World's-Fair-Trylon-and-Perisphere watch face.

Me personally, I'd love for someone to take an old 1930's matchbook cover and turn it into a repeating textile pattern, to be used as either a necktie, or, maybe, curtains. Just a thought.

 

[JimInSoCalif]

A few match book covers might make an interesting repeating design for braces.

 

[SteveN]

Peaked Lapels & Pointed Collars: Back Again?

Apparently pointed collars and peaked lapels are back in fashion with some. I just snapped some photos of this combination at the Versace store in Sydney today.

Peaked lapel and long pointed shirt collar:

Another peaked lapel, with an interesting fabric. Forgive the glare from the shopfront window.

I was hoping to see a belted back but, alas, they were nothing special.

- SteveN

P.S. Not sure why the images are sidewise. They appear upright in PhotoBucket.

Here's a vintage 1930s cotton dress shirt, Indy.


Note that the breast pocket and the collar look VERY much like yours. And yes, the collar points are 3 3/4 inches long!

.

 

[carter]

worthlesswithoutpics

SteveN, We need pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.

 

[SteveN]

worthlesswithoutpics

SteveN, We need pictures. Lots and lots of pictures.

How do you add photos?

 

[Feraud]

How do you add photos?

You need to first upload your pictures to a free hosting service like Photobucket then post the link provided to the Lounge.
It is easier than it sounds.

 

[carter]

You need to first upload your pictures to a free hosting service like Photobucket then post the link provided to the Lounge.
It is easier than it sounds.

Read this thread.

http://www.thefedoralounge.com/FAQ.html#photos

 

[SteveN]

Done!

I must say, rather clumsy way of doing things though. I would be much easier to have the ability to import photos as part of the forum software.

Regards,
- SteveN

Read this thread.

http://www.thefedoralounge.com/FAQ.html#photos

 

[Feraud]

Does anyone have an example of the Sunray tie Nicholson wears in the film?

 

[cookie]

There is a pic of it buried in the Chinatown thread methinks.... I saw that shirt too over the holidays Steven and thought the same thing.

 

[Feraud]

Close enough?