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reader has to know what the story is about and who it's about. I tell
my students you have to approach the first ten pages of your screenplay as a unit, or block, of dramatic action. It must be designed and
executed with efficiency and dramatic value because it sets up
everything that follows.
I thought about this as I was preparing this chapter. When I first
wrote Screenplay, I used Chinatown as an illustration of the best way
to set up your screenplay, interrelating story with character and
situation. I examined other films as well, but I kept coming back to
Chinatown. The first ten pages of this film still work perfectly as an
example of setting up your story.
Chinatown is now considered one of the classic American
screenplays; conceived in the 1970s, it was written and produced
during a virtual renaissance of American screenwriting. Not that
it's any "better" set up than The Godfather, or Apocalypse Now,
or All the President's Men, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
or Five Easy Pieces (Carol Eastman, aka Adrien Joyce), or Annie
Hall, or Julia, or Coming Home, or later films such as Raging
Bull (Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin), or An Officer and a
Gentleman (Douglas Day Stewart), or Dances With Wolves, or
Thelma & Louise, or Forrest Gump (Eric Roth), or Pulp Fiction
(Quentin Tarantino), or The Usual Suspects (Chris McQuarrie),
and so many others. All of these films are outstanding examples
of how screenplays are set up. But after looking at them all, as

Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Matrix, or Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship
of the Ring, or with a dramatic sequence, as in The Shawshank
Redemption, The Pianist, or Mystic River (Brian Helgeland). The

The reader must know what's going on immediately, from the

very first words on the page. Setting up your story by explaining
lings through dialogue slows down the action and impedes the
story progression. A screenplay is a story told with pictures, remember, so it's important to set up your story visually. The reader must
know who the main character is, whatthe dramatic premise is, what
e story is about, and the dramatic situationthe circumstances
surrounding the action.
These elements must be introduced within the first ten pages,
whether you open your screenplay with an action sequence, as in

SETTING UP THE STORY

SCREENPLAY

well as many others, I decided Chinatown was still the most effective.
Why? Because Chinatown is a film that works on all levels: story,
characters, historical perspective, visual dynamics, and above all,
the basic essentials that illustrate screenwriting as a craft. The film is
a mystery-thriller in the style and tradition of Raymond Chandler;
Robert Towne used the Owens Valley Scandal of the early 1900s as
the dramatic backdrop to the story, but updated the action from the
turn of the century to Los Angeles in 1937. In this way, Towne
achieved the same revolutionary shift in filmmaking as did the
Flemish painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who
placed the portraits of their Belgium patrons against the backdrop
of Italian landscapes, a move that changed the course of art history.
I've written a lot about my experience of Chinatown, and I still
vividly recall the first time I saw it, at an industry screening at
Paramount. I was working at Cinemobile at the time, and there was
a light rain falling as I pulled into the Paramount lot. As I walked
through the dampness of early evening, I did not want to be there. It
had been an extremely full and stressful day. I had read my usual
quota of scripts, attended my usual quota of meetings, and had a
large and late lunch with a writer during which I drank a little too
much wine. My throat was raw, and I felt I was coming down with a
cold. Nothing would be better, I thought, than soaking in a long hot
bath, having a nice cup of tea, and crawling into bed.
The film began, and as the story unfolded, my critical mind
kicked in and I started a little dialogue in which I was complaining
about the movie. I thought it was flat, the characters dull and onedimensional. Before I knew it, I had nodded off. I don't know how
much of the film I missed, I just knew it was one of those evenings
where my body was in the screening room, but I certainly was not.
When I heard the last lines of the film, "Forget it, Jake __ It's
Chinatown," that's exactly what I wanted to do. By the time I got
home, I had already forgotten about it.
So much for my introduction to Chinatown.
A short time later, I had the opportunity to interview Robert
Towne, and during the course of our conversation I asked how he
went about creating his characters, especially how he conceived Jake

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