Water and Power--and Accuracy

Everyone who saw “Chinatown” knows the story of Los Angeles water.

Jack Nicholson is hired by a mystery woman to snoop on her husband, but when he tries to expose John Huston’s villainous, land-grabbing plot to profit from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, Roman Polanski slices open his nose and Faye Dunaway gets chow-meined.

Well, maybe not.

Although the perspective is generally similar, a somewhat different account emerges in “Mulholland’s Dream,” the 90-minute premiere of a four-part documentary series on PBS titled “Cadillac Desert.” Written, directed and produced by Jon Else, the first three parts are “adapted” from Marc Reisner’s much-debated book “Cadillac Desert,” the fourth from Sandra Postel’s book “Last Oasis.”

And in a footnote to this wet spectacular, National Public Radio’s USC-produced “Marketplace” today airs “Liquid Gold,” a report on water scarcity, trading and politics, and water’s importance to nature.

As entertainment, “Mulholland’s Dream” is a swell film to watch, one that sticks to your ribs. Although in less artful hands this could be a drag, credit Else with irrigating potentially arid history with great old photos and footage, gorgeous new filming, cohesive narration by Alfre Woodard and lively commentary, principally from Reisner, “Chinatown” writer Robert Towne, California historian Kevin Starr and Catherine Mulholland.

The Mulholland in the title is her grandfather, that fabled and controversial Irish immigrant, William Mulholland. Broadly speaking, he was the progenitor of modern Los Angeles, given that the amazing aqueduct he finished in 1913 as the desert city’s chief engineer became the artery through which life-giving water has flowed here from a river in the Owens Valley, more than 200 miles to the north.

Instead of “A River Runs Through It,” Mulholland’s story on PBS is “A River Runs to It.” It also features Machiavellian intrigues and epic conflicts over water, pitting David (the farmers of Owens Valley) vs. Goliath (L.A. and its power barons), in which little David puts up a helluva brave battle but this time still gets clobbered.

But how accurate is it?

“I absolutely and resolutely stand by the accuracy of all three of the films I directed in this series,” Else said by phone from San Francisco.

Else is in a defensive mode because “Mulholland’s Dream”--and its picture of L.A. and Mulholland as water bullies who ruthlessly drained and turned Owens Valley to dry gulch--is nightmarish to Catherine Mulholland and those who share her views.

In a letter to Else, she said she felt “deceived, disappointed, distressed, and shall regret for the rest of my life the part I played in this enterprise.” She condemned his film as a “disjointed rehash of the tired old canards and libels which portray Los Angeles as a water-grabber and despoiler of nature.”

Accusing Else of ignoring “reputable sources,” she labeled Reisner a “self-promoting (and mendacious) Jeremiah,” Starr a “pop historian who has yet to utilize a primary source” and Towne a “Hollywood script writer,” which he is. “All that’s lacking,” she added, “is Joan Didion murmuring about the Nothingness of it all.”

Some may dismiss Catherine Mulholland as a self-serving special-interest group of one, trying to guard her family’s image. Yet Else received much lengthier negative critiques of his film from Robert V. Phillips, former general manager and chief engineer of the L.A. Department of Water & Power, and from Los Angeles historian Abraham Hoffman, author of “Vision or Villainy: Origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles Water Controversy.”

Phillips wrote that he didn’t have a drink before watching the documentary, “but before I finished viewing the tape I wished I had.” Hoffman called it “badly flawed with numerous errors of fact, distortion, lack of historical context and objectivity.”

Else replied to them in letters seeking to rebut their criticisms point by point.

This is a battlefield for historians and gladiators with direct knowledge of what really transpired on the Los Angeles water front, a bittersweet, adventurous melodrama that the film extends past the 1927 water wars, the 1928 San Francisquito Dam disaster, the death in 1935 of William Mulholland and beyond the 1988 Mono Lake dispute, all the way to the present.

Else said his plans for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley to appear in the documentary fell through when Bradley suffered a stroke, and some of his other interview requests were rejected. Thus, with the exception of Catherine Mulholland, voices here are almost entirely on the anti-L.A. side of the issue (Phillips is granted a single, fleeting sound bite). And as William Mulholland’s granddaughter, that lone voice is bound to be viewed skeptically when making favorable comments about L.A.’s role in the water controversy.

The city did desperately need more water to grow and prosper. “The sense that somehow L.A. had sinned against another people . . . I’ve always had a lot of trouble with,” she says at one point in the film.

Kind words about her grandfather are kept to a minimum. The narration does say that William Mulholland “did not profit directly” from various water dealings, but did become “the highest-paid public employee in California.” But an Owens Valley veteran speaks unflatteringly of him as having a “fantastic vision, but he didn’t care who he stepped over.” A Native American says: “First we had the valley, then the settlers came and took it from us, then the city of Los Angeles came and took it from them.”

And a current resident ruminates about a valley once verdant: “I would have liked to have seen what my grandparents saw there. I’d like to see the green. I’d like to see the orchards. It must have been gorgeous.”

“Chinatown” and Towne (whose screenplay for that movie earned an Oscar) are curiously prominent in “Mulholland’s Dream.” He makes unspecific allusions to allegedly criminal behavior by L.A.’s super-capitalists in the water struggle. And he says his initial title for “Chinatown” was “Water and Power,” because “water was power. It was money. And those who knew how to manipulate it much more adroitly than anybody could ever manipulate a stock market could make money off it. . . . You could see it running through your movie . . . just a river of greed.”

Running through his movie? But this isn’t a movie, right? So why, except to juice the production, is Else deploying several sound bites from Towne--in effect, anointing him as an expert--and five clips from “Chinatown,” a movie that the documentary itself ultimately calls “bad, contorted history” and no more than a “powerful myth”?

Else explained on the phone that he did so to emphasize how films like “Chinatown” flourish as “prevailing myths” that live on as indelible truths of pop culture. Unfortunately, his documentary solidifies the process.

At age 74, Catherine Mulholland remains a formidable woman who lives in the San Fernando Valley and is herself a historian, her latest manuscript being what she defined recently as “a piece of revisionist history that challenges many existing myths about the water story.”

Meanwhile, we’ll always have “Chinatown” and the Nothingness of it all.

* “Cadillac Desert” airs the next four Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28. “Liquid Gold” airs today on “Marketplace”--at 2 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9) and at 6 p.m. on KUSC-FM (91.5).