#step sheet

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiW7Zzi0J50)

“Well, I don’t have to tell you that we weren’t trying to write a screenplay that was perfectly-structured. We were just trying to make it make sense. I remember, even without Roman, the first structural question, which may seem absurd now after the fact, was the question of which revelation comes first, the incest or the water scandal? And of course, it was the water scandal. When I realized that, I realized how foolish it was even to have asked the question. But the water scandal was the plot, essentially, and the subplot was the incest. That was the underbelly, and the two were intimately connected, literally and metaphorically: raping the future and raping the land. So it was a really good plot/subplot with a really strong connection. In the first draft, as I recall, it was pretty much a single point-of-view. And in the second draft I tried changing that for purposes of clarification and I think in the end, that’s what made the second draft weaker than the first draft. It’s one of the very, very few detective movies, including ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ which has a singular point-of-view.” --Robert Towne looks back on Chinatown’s 35th anniversary

“In fact, before you set out to write your beat sheet, consider this: one of the most ‘perfect’ screenplays ever written is ‘Chinatown.’ It has been analyzed thousands and thousands of times in screenwriting classes and textbooks. However, the first draft of ‘Chinatown’ was 178 pages long; screenwriter Robert Towne took 9 months to finish it saying that ‘... the writing of it was just tough: writing scenario, after scenario, after scenario was just so complicated that after a certain point, I thought I’d never get through it.’ Producer Robert Evans called the first draft brilliant but incomprehensible, and even Towne himself admitted that if the first draft had been shot, ‘it would have been a mess.’ That ‘perfect beat sheet’ that appears in screenplay books only emerged after a long process of restructuring, revision and clarification. (See LA Times Article on the director/writer/producer collaboration in ‘Chinatown.’)” --Sean Hood, Writing The Feature Script: Week Three -- The Treatment

Download the ‘Chinatown’ Step Sheet. (NOTE: For educational purposes only)

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