REMEMBER the movie Chinatown? That 1974 epic starring Jack Nicholson told how politics and greed, mixed with more than a little violence, led to a fortunate few early in the last century seizing control of the Los Angeles water supply at the time when the city was starting the sudden and phenomenal growth that has made it the nation’s second largest.

“People are gonna be mad when they find out they’re paying for water they’re not gonna get,” an undercover source tells the Nicholson character in one of the movie’s key scenes.

Which pretty much sums up the situation Angelenos — and, indirectly, the rest of us — now face: despite spending millions of taxpayer dollars over decades to construct one of the world’s most extensive infrastructure projects to transfer water from naturally rainy Northern California to naturally parched Southern California, there’s not enough available water to fight the monster fires ravaging Los Angeles.