NEW YORK — Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail,” and other outstanding films, has died. His work on “Chinatown” was a model of the art form and helped define the jaded allure of his native Los Angeles. He was 89.
According to publicist Carri McClure, Towne died on Monday at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by his family. She refuses to remark on the cause of death.
Robert Towne, Oscar-Winning Writer Of ‘Chinatown,’ Dies At 89
Towne once enjoyed prestige on par with the actors and directors he worked with in a field that gave rise to rueful jokes about writers’ standing. Through friendships with two of the biggest actors of the 1960s and 1970s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he authored or co-wrote some of the iconic films of a period when artists had exceptional creative power. The rare “auteur” among screenwriters, Towne was able to convey a profoundly personal and influential picture of Los Angeles to the cinema.
“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne said in a 2006 interview with the Associated Press. “It’s the farthest west of America. It is a final resort. It’s a location where people go to make their aspirations a reality. “And they’re always disappointed.”
Towne, known in Hollywood for his prominent brow and long beard, won an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated for three more, including “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo,” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, the Writers Guild of America honored him with a lifetime achievement award.
“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” quoted “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on the television show X.
Towne’s success came after a long career in television, including roles in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” as well as low-budget films for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business scenario, he partly owes his breakthrough to his psychiatrist, who introduced him to Beatty, another patient. As Beatty worked on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought Towne to revise the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on set while the film was shot in Texas.
Towne’s contributions to the famous crime picture “Bonnie and Clyde,” released in 1967, went unacknowledged, and he was a popular ghostwriter for many years. He worked on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View,” and “Heaven Can Wait,” among others, and described himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning but not pitch the entire game.” However, Towne was named in Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s erotic comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized in “Chinatown,” a 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and stars Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a private investigator assigned to track down Evelyn Mulwray’s husband. The spouse is the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Gittes becomes entangled in a catastrophic spiral of corruption and violence led by Evelyn’s brutal father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Towne, influenced by Raymond Chandler’s fiction, revived the danger and ambiance of a classic Los Angeles film noir but set Gittes’ convoluted quest against a wider, more sinister backdrop of Southern California. Clues gather into a timeless detective story that leads helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the most repeated lines in film history, words of gloomy fatalism delivered to a distraught Gittes by his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Towne’s script has long been a mainstay of filmwriting workshops, but it also teaches how movies are made and the dangers of attributing any film to a single point of view. He admits to working closely with Polanski as they revised and tightened the story and arguing fiercely with the director about the film’s despairing ending, which Polanski pushed for and Towne later agreed was the right choice.
However, the notion originated with Towne, who passed down the opportunity to adapt “The Great Gatsby” for the cinema to work on “Chinatown,” which was inspired in part by Carey McWilliams’ 1946 book “Southern California: An Island on the Land.”
“There was a chapter called ‘Water, water, water,’ which was a revelation for me. In 2009, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “And I thought, ‘Why not do a picture about a crime right in front of everybody’?”
“Instead of a jewel-encrusted falcon, make it something as common as water faucets, and create a conspiracy out of it. And after reading about what they were doing, dumping water and starving farmers, I knew there were immense visual and dramatic potential.”
The backstory of “Chinatown” has become a kind of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of 1960s-1970s Hollywood; and Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” which is entirely dedicated to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” released in 2020, Wasson claimed that Towne received substantial assistance from a ghostwriter, former college buddy Edward Taylor. According to “The Big Goodbye,” for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor did not seek credit for the picture since his “friendship with Robert” was more important.
Wasson also wrote that the movie’s famous concluding phrase came from a vice detective who told Towne that crimes in Chinatown were rarely prosecuted.
“Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind,” Wasson wrote in an email. “Not just a location on a map in Los Angeles, but a state of complete awareness almost identical to blindness. Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark—that’s Chinatown. Thinking you’ve got it figured out and then discovering you’re dead – that’s Chinatown.”
After the mid-1970s, the studios gained power, and Towne’s reputation dwindled. His directorial efforts, such as “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” yielded mixed success. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a commercial and critical failure when released in 1990, resulting in a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Robert Towne, Oscar-Winning Writer Of ‘Chinatown,’ Dies At 89
Around the same time, he agreed to work on a film far removed from the 1970s’ art-house goals, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a racing car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was notoriously over budget and critically derided, despite its admirers, including Quentin Tarantino and other racing enthusiasts. And Towne’s script popularized a word used by Duvall when Cruise complains that another automobile hit him: “He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t nudge you.” He rubbed you.
“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.'”
Towne later collaborated with Cruise on “The Firm” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” films. His most recent film, “Ask the Dust,” a Los Angeles narrative he wrote and directed, was released in 2006. Towne married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and they had two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also authored scripts, with credits including “The Natural.”
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro when his father’s clothes shop failed due to the Great Depression. (His father changed the family’s name to Towne). He had always enjoyed writing and was encouraged to work in film by the vicinity of the Warner Bros. Theater and by reading critic James Agee. Towne had worked on a tuna boat and frequently discussed its impact.
“I’ve identified fishing with writing in my mind to the extent that each script is like a trip that you’re taking — and you are fishing,” he told the Writers Guild Association in 2013. “Sometimes they both require an act of faith… Sometimes it’s just faith that keeps you going, because you’re thinking, “God damn it, nothing—not a bite today.” “Nothing is happening.
SOURCE – (AP)
