The story
The long way into the picture business
Bob Chinn was born on May 10, 1943, the son of Chinese immigrants, into a family whose American story already ran deep: by his own account, a great-grandfather helped build the Central Pacific Railroad. His childhood was itinerant. He grew up between Los Angeles, the Territory of Hawaii, and the desert towns of southeastern New Mexico, each move asking him to square Chinese family tradition with a different slice of mid-century America. That early education in people and places would become the observational eye his work is known for.
He studied at Santa Monica College and then the UCLA film school, graduating in 1966 from a program that counted future Doors frontman Jim Morrison among his classmates. Like most of his cohort, Chinn wanted to direct mainstream Hollywood pictures. Hollywood, as it does, declined to make room.
He wrote the first Johnny Wadd script on the back of an envelope. Two days later the picture was finished.
With a young family to feed, Chinn took the work that existed. In the late 1960s that meant clandestine loops; by the early 1970s it meant feature-length erotic films shot on real film stock and played in real theaters, during the short window later dubbed the Golden Age. Then, one afternoon in 1970, a tall, skinny young man with an unruly afro walked into his office looking for acting work. Chinn saw little potential until his partner insisted he take a second look. He hired John Holmes on the spot, scribbled a script, and shot the first Johnny Wadd in two days.
His instinct was always narrative. Where the genre traded in disconnected scenes, Chinn built a hard-boiled private eye borrowed from the noir serials and pulp paperbacks he devoured, and then brought him back, film after film, from Los Angeles Chinatown to the Hawaiian Islands to Mexico and San Francisco. It was the form's first recurring-character franchise. It changed the commercial logic of the business, and it made a star of the actor who played the part.
Chinn kept working through the 1980s and returned at the turn of the century to direct a new generation. Then he did something few of his peers managed: he sat down and wrote it all out. A crime novel first, then a two-volume memoir that is now one of the essential first-person records of the era, praised by contemporaries for its candor, its generosity toward others, and its unsparing honesty about himself.