Above, entertainment of the day … Below, because the St. Francis Dam broke after the March 13 paper had been published, The Times couldn’t report the disaster until March 14 … Robert Towne drew on this event as a plot device in "Chinatown" when Hollis Mulwray refers to the Van der Lip Dam disaster. Bonus fact: In one draft of the screenplay, Lt. Lou Escobar says some of his relatives were killed when the dam broke.
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