Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford? Cross: The future, Mr Gitts, the future.
The lines are spoken by Jack Nicholson and John Huston, sharing a moment of mutual incomprehension in the Roman Polanski film Chinatown. The man who wrote those words is Robert Towne, who will be visiting next month's Galway Film Fleadh. So it is timely to remember the Irishman who forms the basis of two of the characters in the film, the avaricious and Machiavellian businessman Noah Cross and the honourable, upstanding public servant Hollis Mulwray.
Chinatown deals with the foundation myth of the City of Angels, a metropolis that might have baked anonymously in a permanent California heat haze were it not for the vision and the energy of William Mulholland.
He was born in Belfast in 1855 but his southern Irish parents soon moved back to their native Dublin. At the age of 15, after a beating from his father, young William decided the time had come to leave home. He ran away to sea before deciding to settle in the US. By 1877 he had made his way to Los Angeles, then a sleepy town of 9,000 souls. Mulholland, who would supervise one of the most extraordinary engineering projects of the 20th century, began his working life in LA digging ditches as an employee of the Los Angeles Water Company. His supervisor at the time was a man named Fred Eaton. Later Eaton would become mayor of Los Angeles. He also helped engineer the purchase of the LAWC by the growing city (the population had expanded to 100,000 by 1900). Self-educated engineer William Mulholland, former navvy, was its first superintendent.
Both Eaton and Mulholland were convinced that Los Angeles would never grow much beyond its 1900 boundaries without access to far greater supplies of water. Identifying additional local sources in the arid southern Californian landscape was not a viable proposition. The two men looked north, to the Owens Valley more than 200 miles away. Eaton cajoled, cheated and conned most of the water rights for the valley away from its inhabitants. Instead of increasing the prosperity of the fruit growers of Inyo County the water would be heading south to Los Angeles County, assuming Mulholland could get it there.
Work began in 1905 on the building of an aqueduct capable of delivering billions of gallons of water to the virtual desert that was Los Angeles. The project, driven by the dogged Irishman, took eight years to complete. More than 2,000 workers built 164 tunnels to channel the water 233 miles from the Owens River to a reservoir in the San Fernando Valley. It was a triumph of planning and delivery, all administered by the single-minded Irishman. In Chinatown the malevolent Noah Cross tells Jake Gittes, "Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water." Mulholland had accomplished the former.
As the "white gold" arrived in time for the aqueduct's official opening on November 5th, 1913 Mulholland told the citizens of Los Angeles: "There it is. Take it." He might just as easily have been talking to his business cronies. This is where fact and fiction intertwine. Despite the dire predictions of Eaton and Mulholland the city of Los Angeles, whose population by 1913 stood at 500,000, was managing adequately without Inyo County's water - which was just as well because Eaton and Mulholland were diverting much of it to irrigation schemes in the San Fernando Valley. Huge tracts of dusty land there had been bought by wealthy Angelenos with insider knowledge. The water that should have been irrigating the Owens Valley was helping make southern California's robber barons even richer.
As Inyo County was slowly drained dry local farmers retaliated. What, in George Bush's America, would be classified as "acts of terrorism" were perpetrated against the aqueduct. A fraught Mulholland commented that his one regret at the destruction of the water-starved orchards of the Owens Valley was that "there were no longer enough trees to hang all the troublemakers who live there". But Mulholland managed to keep the water flowing and, slowly, the "Owens Valley War" fizzled out.
A grateful Los Angeles rewarded the Irishman by naming one of the finest roads in their county after him. Mulholland Drive is, perhaps, second only in importance to Sunset Boulevard - both have films named after them. It was also predicted that Mulholland would run for mayor of the city. His considered response was: "I'd rather give birth to a porcupine." It was just as well that he had no stomach for public office because early on the night of March 12th, 1928, the St Francis Dam, built by Mulholland, burst spectacularly and sent billions of gallons of water and mud hurtling through Ventura County.
Almost 500 people, including 40 schoolchildren, were drowned. Mulholland was the obvious choice for fall guy. He died seven years later but suffered untold psychological horrors in the intervening period. As he told an inquest jury examining the causes of the worst civil engineering accident in American history, "I envy the dead".
Ironically, almost 70 years later an engineering investigation placed the blame for the catastrophe on an unstable rock formation underneath the dam and exonerated Mulholland. The city of Los Angeles has steadfastly stuck with the naming of Mulholland Drive, though there must have been a great temptation to change to something like Pickford Parkway in the 1930s. However the only other significant monument to the man, aside from the aqueduct itself, is a fountain on Los Feliz Boulevard, not far from the shack he lived in when he was digging ditches.