All Time Best Pictures--#3

Chinatown [1974] by Robert Towne is the WGA’s choice for the third best screenplay of all time. Entire books have been written about the making of this film and the construction of the screenplay. Towne himself has talked about it, as has director Roman Polanski and then studio head Robert Evans.

Why is it this high on the list? What makes it so special? While it was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, it only won one: Best Screenplay.

Take a look at the trailer from 1974: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh4BCgDLmmI.

One of the famous facts about Chinatown is that almost none of the movie actually takes place in Chinatown - realizing that, the filmmakers placed the final scene there. For Towne, the title Chinatown had just been a metaphor for “a place where you have no idea what’s going on”—in Towne’s mind, that was what Los Angeles was. Plus there’s a veiled reference throughout the film to Jake’s past—that Chinatown was his beat when he was a cop, and something traumatic happened to him there involving a woman, so the title also refers to, per Towne: “Jakes’ fucked up state of mind.”

This is a brilliant screenplay. It doesn’t spoon feed its audience—you have to work to keep up. There seem to be all these disparate elements in the story, and the main character, Jake, is just as confused as we are as to what’s going on and why, who can be trusted and who can’t.

And if you look at the screenplay you can see how fast-paced it is—around 250 scenes for the 2 hour and 10- minute film. That’s an average of about 2 scenes per page, 2 scenes per minute. Two scenes per page. Sure, there are long scenes in Chinatown, as in any script, but most scenes are short, clipped, quick.

One of the hardest things to “get” about screenwriting is how fast-paced it needs to be. Film isn’t stagnant, it doesn’t go into detail about feelings and thoughts the way a novel does, and it doesn’t have characters go into big monologues the way many plays do—film moves. And that’s not just true of action films, it’s true of all films.

As a writer, when you’re working on a scene and you find it going to two pages in length, stop and look. Does it really need to be that long? And if you get to three pages? Well, you better be at one super-important moment in the story that actually needs that much time to get to the point, to make the big reveal, or whatever you had planned for those three pages.

One of the best things you can do is just banish backstory, banish expository dialogue from your repertoire as a writer. If backstory and exposition need to come out, let them emerge through the telling of the story. That’s what Towne did with Chinatown—learn from this incredibly gifted writer.

And one final fact about Chinatown—Towne wanted to write it, had this idea for it, and pitched it to then studio boss Robert Evans. Evans instead offered him $175,000 to write an adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but Towne—a man of impeccable integrity—chose to write Chinatown for just $25,000. In today’s dollars? Well, imagine someone offered to pay you $1 million to write a story but you said, “No, I want to write this other story” but the studio is only going to offer you $143,000 to write your pet project. Which would you choose?

Copyright © Diane Lake

19Apr20

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com