Trivia for
The Two Jakes (1990) More at IMDbPro »

• Writer Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans and director Jack Nicholson founded the production company T.E.N. in 1985 just to produce this film. When legal and financial problems occurred, Nicholson finished the project alone.
  
  
• Cameo: [Tom Waits] police detective
  
  
• Producer Robert Evans was tapped early on to play the "second" Jake. Writer Robert Towne (who had hoped to direct the film) didn't think that Evans was up to the job and fired him, and Jack Nicholson became the picture's director. This film is/was the second in a planned trilogy of films.
  
  
• Robert Towne had originally planned a trilogy of movies chronicling at eleven-year intervals (in narrative terms) the development and decline of southern California as the result of rapacious developers and tycoons. Chinatown (1974) had been water rights, The Two Jakes (1990) was to deal with oil and a third movie, set in the 1950s, would deal with pollution caused by the building of the freeway system. The final movie was to be called "Cloverleaf".
  
  
• Kelly McGillis and Cathy Moriarty were considered for the female lead.
  
  
• Dennis Hopper and Joe Pesci were considered for the role of Jake Berman.
  
  
• 18 months elapsed between the film's US release and its first (minimal) appearance in UK cinemas.
  
  
• Harrison Ford and Roy Scheider were Robert Towne's choice for the part of the older Jake Gittes.
  
  
• John Hackett, who appears briefly as the murdered Mark Bodine, is Jack Nicholson's stand-in.
  
  

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