Chinatown & The Last Detail

by RobertTowne (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1998

  $3.25

  Robert Towne is one of America's most influential screenwriters. His screenplays are revered in Hollywood, and his lines and scenes are quoted from memory by countless fans. Collected here are two of his most famous and critically acclaimed scripts: Chinatown and The Last Detail. Each earned Towne a nomination for an Academy Award.Chinatown follows a seedy private investigator, Jake Gittes, as he becomes embroiled in a case far more complicated than he ever imagined and uncovers a conspiracy reaching to the economic foundations of Los Angeles.The Last Detail is about the lost weekend odyssey of two Navy lifers, Buddusky and Mule who are assigned to escort a court-martialed recruit to prison. The film celebrates their determination to enjoy their taste of freedom as they try to postpone the moment when they have to face the inevitable.Released in the mid-1970s, these two movies revolutionised Hollywood film-making with scriptwriting that is political and uncompromising in language and event, and complex in design and execution. This edition also includes an introduction by Robert Towne in which he discusses the craft of screenwriting.

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $19.81

  1930s Los Angeles. Jake Gittes is a successful 'bedroom dick': a private eye specialising in cases of marital infidelity. Paradoxically he might also be the last truly ethical man in a corrupt town. Lured into an investigation of the death-by-drowning of City Water Commissioner Hollis Mulwray, Gittes gets more than usually entwined with his new client, Mulwray's enigmatic widow Evelyn. He then finds himself crossing swords with Evelyn's redoubtable father, the aging business magnate Noah Cross, who has professional and personal reasons of his own for wanting both Hollis and Evelyn silenced. Academy Award-winner for Best Original Screenplay of 1974, Robert Towne's Chinatown is widely regarded as the finest American movie script of the post-war years. Complex in narrative design, infused with the sordid real-life history of Los Angeles' economic growth and unmistakably adult in its updating of the trademark violence and sexual intrigue of film noir, on the page Chinatown still shines - and cuts - like a blade.