The 3-Act Paradigm at Work: Chinatown

written by Robert Towne


Robert Towne's Chinatown is one of those scripts that has won the Syd Field Paradigm Perfect Screenplay Award and as a result probably has been studied in screenwriting classes more often than any other script. But this both flatters and insults the three-act paradigm.

It flatters it because it implies that all one has to do is write a "paradigm perfect" script and success is guaranteed. Nothing could be farther from the truth - which is that many terrible scripts, horrendous scripts, also follow the three-act paradigm.

The popularity of Chinatown as an object for study insults the paradigm by suggesting that it is some kind of special "honor" to be structured in three-acts.

The three-act paradigm (beginning-middle-end) is nothing less than the grammar of storytelling in this culture. You need to adhere to it because the paradigm defines the rules for dramatic communication. But this means only that you are now allowed to play the game, not that you automatically are going to play it well.

A powerful screenplay is a gestalt of many things with structure being the most fundamental and necessary, but also something which good and bad movies can share alike. Just because you know the language doesn't mean that you're not going to speak gibberish.

Structural Analysis

  1. The Hook (0 min.)
    • We start off with a bang, from first frame. A man is groaning as we see photos of lovemaking. Adultery has been captured on film, taken by the detective who is our hero, Jake, and the groans belong to the cheating woman's husband. We are in the thick of a story from the get-go - even though this is not the story that is the focus of the film. But we won't know the movie we've actually seen til the end, which is one of the strengths of this gripping tale.
  2. Complication (17 min.)
    • Jake is hired by a Mrs. Mulray to follow her husband, and what Jake learns - that Mr. Mulray, head of LA's water and power department, is having an affair - makes the paper. Then the real Mrs. Mulray shows up, ready to sue Jake. She never hired him - and in fact is not the woman who hired Jake under the pretense of being Mrs. Mulray.
  3. Hero's call to action (27 min.)
    • Jake turns up many fishy things linking Mulray and LA's water issue. Mrs. Mulray is willing to drop the suit but Jake won't let this case go. He needs to know who set him up and why. It's a matter of professional pride.
  4. Plot Point: Act I (31 min.)
    • Mr. Mulray turns up dead, a victim of drowning.
  5. Plot Point: midpoint (64 min., 82 min.)
      There are two midpoints, it seems to me - a "professional" one regarding the plot at hand but also a "personal" one which gets Jake involved in his investigation at a personal level:
      • Professional (64 min.): Jake gets hired by Mrs. Mulray's father to find the girl that Mulray was having an affair with;
      • Personal (82 min.): Jake becomes romantically involved with Mrs. Mulray.
  6. Plot Point: Act II (109 min.)
    • Mrs. Mulray reveals that "the other woman" is both her sister and her daughter - the child she had by her father.
  7. Climax & Resolution (127 min.)
    • Trying to help Mrs. Mulray escape with her daughter, Jake only manages to get her killed - just like what happened to him before in Chinatown when he got too personally involved.

Big Sequences

Big sequences usually have great visual interest, as is the case here.

Notes

Other points from Chinatown: