Screenwriter Robert Towne found inspiration for the movie Chinatown (1974) in the real history of the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The aqueduct, planned during a severe drought (1892–1904) and completed in 1913, diverted water from the Owens River more than 200 miles (320 km) south to the San Fernando Valley, ultimately feeding the needs of the rapidly growing Los Angeles, which had no sufficient local water supply. The project was vehemently opposed by Owens River Valley inhabitants, including farmers, ranchers, and small-town residents, whose livelihoods would be ruined by the loss of much of the river’s flow. Adding insult to injury, the aqueduct plan, overseen by William Mulholland, a civil engineer for what later became the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, had been kept secret from the valley’s population. They found out only after the city had acquired all the necessary property and water rights through unpublicized purchases by a prosperous businessman, former mayor Frederick Eaton. Other prominent power brokers benefited from the project because they owned land in the San Fernando Valley, including railroad magnate Henry Huntington and Los Angeles Times publisher Harrison Gray Otis. Towne drew on these and other incidents and figures in his script for Chinatown, giving traits of Mulholland to both the fictional engineer Hollis Mulwray and the ruthlessly visionary businessman Noah Cross, setting the action decades later, and changing the locations and other details.