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# The Resnicks’ Water Holdings in California and the Plot of Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown”
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/prochital-ochen-strannuiu-istoriiu-ob-amerikanskoi-seme-milliarderov-kollektsionerov-reznikov-kotorye-popali-v-fokus-obshchestvennogo-vnimaniia-v-sviazi-s-pozharami-v-kalifornii/
- Published: 2025-02-09T16:28:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:37:26.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Cinema, Observations, Society

I have read a most peculiar story about the Resnicks, an American family of billionaire collectors who have come into the public eye because of the wildfires in California.

The point is that, besides an enormous art collection in Beverly Hills, which includes works by Fragonard, Boucher and Picasso, besides the $30 million Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center at the Hammer Museum and the Resnick Pavilion designed by Renzo Piano at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which cost the couple $90 million, the pair own an agribusiness conglomerate. It embraces the production of bottled water, pistachios, juices and mandarins, the largest flower delivery service in America, 185,000 acres of land and a controlling stake in the Kern Water Bank, a water storage facility in the southern part of California's Central Valley.

The Resnicks came under close scrutiny precisely because of the matter of water use, since years of drought have turned parts of Southern California into desert. Of course, the claim that a single pair of billionaires owns nearly all the water in California proved an exaggeration: the water bank in their hands is not among the hundred-odd suppliers of water to Los Angeles, and they themselves put their consumption at 1% of California's water.

This whole business of water and landowners in California bears an uncanny resemblance to Roman Polanski's cult noir "Chinatown", with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. In the plot, the water department deliberately engineers a drought in certain districts in order to buy up, at a bargain, land that has fallen out of agricultural use. The department's chief engineer uncovers the scheme and is murdered. Jack Nicholson, as the detective, tries to unravel the strange killing and is drawn into a very dark affair involving powerful magnates, officials and thugs.

The screenwriter, Robert Towne, was an environmentalist and became interested in the subject of water after making the acquaintance of Carey McWilliams's book on water and oil developments in Southern California. The story itself rests on genuine events in California in the 1930s: the owners of the city's water supply system dumped fresh water into the ocean, artificially creating a drought, which forced local farmers to sell their land to front men from their own structures. In the end, as you will understand, the land bought up in this way was used not only to found new, successful agribusinesses, but also for exclusive residential developments and fashionable ranches.

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