Robert Towne said he took the title, and the famous exchange, “What did you do in Chinatown?” / “As little as possible”, from a Hungarian vice cop who had worked in Chinatown. The cop explained to Towne that the complicated array of dialects and gangs in Los Angeles’s Chinatown made it impossible for the police to know whether their interventions in Chinatown were helping victims or furthering their exploitation. As a consequence, the police decided the best course of action was to do as little as possible.