Before getting into the pleasures and puzzles of Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynhchon’s ’70s-set PI novel, a brief tale of Hollywood’s past. During the production of 1946’s The Big Sleep, director Howard Hawks and his screenwriters found themselves with an unanswered question about the murder plot that drove the Bogart-Bacall film: Who’d killed the chauffeur? Legend has it that author Raymond Chandler was asked that very question by the production staff … and later realized that even he, the author of the tale, had no exact idea of who’d done the deed.
via Review: Inherent Vice.