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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Plot Point: Act I (31 min.)
- Mr. Mulray turns up dead, a victim of drowning.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Sheep are driven into a city meeting as farmers protest the LA
drought. (5 min.)
- Jake discovers a great flood of water turned loose into a dry
river bank, almost getting swept away by the water - and gets his nose
sliced when he is found out. (38 min.)
- A car chase through an orange groove. (68 min.)
Notes
Other points from Chinatown:
- Visual storytelling:
- Since Jake is a detective whose job in
part is tailing people, a lot of no-dialogue suspenseful sequences are
possible here. Always look for ways to tell your story visually without
words. Don't forget that "moving pictures" are one of your basic tools.
- Subterfuge:
- This movie is filled with brilliant false leads. Towne manages
to give us "facts" important to the story throughout - but also manages to
present them the first time in a context that leads us, along with
Jake, to wrong conclusions about them:
- Jake finds Mrs. Mulray keeping
"Mulray's woman" in a house - and later learns it is her daughter/sister she
is hiding from her father.
- Jake finds glasses in the pond, believing they belong to Mulray and
proof he was murdered at home. But they belong to the killer, Mrs. Mulray's
father.
- Jake thinks Mrs. Mulray is fleeing because she is guilty of murdering
her husband, not because she is a victim of abuse trying to protect her
daughter from her father.
- Efficient scene design:
- Almost all beginning screenwriters are very inefficient in their scene
design, starting scenes too early and ending them too late. The secret is
to begin in the middle of an action and to get out as soon as the scene
has done its job. Study the scene transitions carefully in this movie.
Notice how:
- The scene cut is from Jake's bleeding nose directly to Jake wrapped in
bandages. An amateur would take us to the hospital, which has nothing to
do with the story.
- Don't give us anything in a scene that doesn't have a function. Sometimes
here we don't know why we are getting information. For example, when we learn
that Mrs. Mulray's maiden name was Cross. The information seems to come out
of nowhere. But only a few minutes later we learn that Cross and Mulray
owned the water and power company privately as partners before it became
public. The Mulray-Cross stories become intertwined, though we have no way
of knowing the true horror of this combination.
- Visual exposition:
- Exposition - telling the audience facts it needs to know to understand
the story - is always a challenge to a writer. You can do this subtly
and visually, as here when Jake finds a political flier on a car
with the headline, "LA Dying
of Thirst." This is far better than Jake or someone saying, "Gee, it sure
is quite a drought we've been having."
- Who's the antagonist?:
- The real antagonist in this story is Mrs. Mulray's father - but we
don't learn this til the last act. Who carries the burden of the antagonist
until then? The mystery does. Jake's quest is to find out who the antagonist
really is, and we get to go along for the ride.
- Where's the happy ending?:
- Probably 99% of successful Hollywood movies have a happy ending.
Chinatown ends with Mrs. Mulray, a victim of abuse, dead and the
abuser, her father, walking off into the sunset with his daughter/granddaughter.
Talk about the bad guys winning! It works here because we are in the
film noir genre, the dark cynical form of mystery where bad
guys get to win (Body Heat is another example), and because the
ride itself is so suspenseful and gripping that we enjoy this for its
own sake. But if you are going to write a script where the antagonist wins,
you had better be damn good at it.
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MODULE 4:
SCREENWRIGHT: the craft of screenwriting
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