This is a testament to how collaboration can better the arts.

From the era when the BBC actually cared about film

I remember watching this when it first aired. they showed The Two Jakes the week after if I remember correctly. Robert McKee was on British TV quite a lot at that time, I remember watching a season of Bergman films where he did the introductions. Back then in the UK we only had 4 terrestrial channels but I remember the two 'arty' channels BBC2 and C4 regularly showing famous films from World Cinema, seasons of films featuring Fellini, Kurosawa, Ray, Renoir the French New Wave. Now all we seem to get is standard Hollywood fare.

This is a phenomenal analysis and introduction.

Both Polanski and Towne deserve credit for Chinatown

As was the film, exceptional. Thank you!

One of the greatest analyses of one of the greatest films of one of the greatest screenplays!

Excellent!

I remember watching this in 1994

Oh my god this is such an incredible analysis! What! Out of nowhere!

Thank you so much for this 1994 introduction from Robert McKee about Chinatown. Fascinating. Do you have other introductions in this series?

Huge overstatement to say that basically everything that makes Chinatown special was Polanski and not Towne. Listen to the commentary track with Towne and Fincher, most of the crucial story beats and iconic moments were in the original script. Not that the changes didn’t help but I think it’s taking it a bit too far to say that it was all Roman

In his 2004 film documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen explains the relationship between Robert Towne's screenplay and its historical background: Robert Towne took an urban myth about the founding of Los Angeles on water stolen from the Owens River Valley and made it resonate. Chinatown isn't a docudrama, it's a fiction. The water project it depicts isn't the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, engineered by William Mulholland before the First World War. Chinatown is set in 1938, not 1905. The Mullholland-like figure-"Hollis Mulwray"-isn't the chief architect of the project, but rather its strongest opponent, who must be discredited and murdered. Mulwray is against the "Alto Vallejo Dam" because it's unsafe, not because it's stealing water from somebody else.... But there are echoes of Mullholland's aqueduct project in Chinatown.... Mullholland's project enriched its promoters through insider land deals in the San Fernando Valley, just like the dam project in Chinatown. The disgruntled San Fernando Valley farmers of Chinatown, forced to sell off their land at bargain prices because of an artificial drought, seem like stand-ins for the Owens Valley settlers whose homesteads turned to dust when Los Angeles took the water that irrigated them. The "Van Der Lip Dam" disaster, which Hollis Mulwray cites to explain his opposition to the proposed dam, is an obvious reference to the collapse of the Saint Francis Dam in 1928. Mullholland built this dam after completing the aqueduct and its failure was the greatest man-made disaster in the history of California. These echoes have led many viewers to regard Chinatown, not only as docudrama, but as truth-the real secret history of how Los Angeles got its water. And it has become a ruling metaphor of the non-fictional critiques of Los Angeles development.

Wow!

The scariest thing about this whole analysis is ? (you got it) Robert McKee's eyebrows !

Robert Mckee speaks with authority. I could see how he would convincingly fashion himself as a great screenplay guru. However, he is not quite right on a number of things. The stuff with motifs is interesting, but Chinatown is definitely film noir, even if Towne also subverts the genre. You have a morally ambiguous detective, a dangerous woman, an uncovered crime/conspiracy. Temptation. Violence. The fatalist ending. Also: the idea that the film boils down a general statement on humanity, that "evil is within us all" is simplistic. Where for instance is the evil in Mrs. Mulwray? She is a pure victim. and as we see: Gittes is a man capable of change, of doing good. He could be redeemed. It's just that the game is rigged. The cynicism belongs to Noah Cross, it is he who says people, given the right circumstances, are capable of anything. It is not the thesis of the film.

Brilliant....eyebrows...

Chinatown London... The Triads

6:12 A lot of horses? Hardly. 6:09 Castration? I can only guess that he's referring to the nose-slitting scene. If so, that's a very, *very* tenuous connection.

I think the top 3 greatest screenplays are Chinatown All the presidents men Alien Ironically all from the 70s.

Fantastic commentary and analysis

Wrong! Of course it's film noir.

Analytical gem 🤘

I'm clearly in a minority here. I think, on the whole, McKee is talking absolute sh!te.