Screenwriter Robert Towne poses at The Regency Lodge in New York on March 7, 2006.
Jim Cooper/AP
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Jim Cooper/AP
NEW YORK — Robert Towne, the Oscar-Winning screenplay author of Shampoo, The Final Element and different movies, whose script for Chinatown grew to become a mannequin of the artwork type and helped outline the jaded attract of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne died Monday surrounded by household at his house in Los Angeles, stated publicist Carri McClure. She declined to touch upon any reason for dying.
In an business which gave delivery to rueful jokes in regards to the author’s standing, Towne for a time held status akin to the actors and administrators he labored with. Via his friendships with two of the largest stars of the Sixties and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote among the signature movies of an period when artists held an uncommon degree of inventive management.
The uncommon “auteur” amongst display screen writers, Towne managed to carry a extremely private and influential imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles onto the display screen.
“It is a metropolis that is so illusory,” Towne instructed The Related Press in a 2006 interview. “It is the westernmost west of America. It is a form of place of final resort. It is a spot the place, in a phrase, individuals go to make their desires come true. They usually’re without end disillusioned.”
Recognizable round Hollywood for his excessive brow and full beard, Towne received an Academy Award for Chinatown and was nominated three different occasions, for The Final Element, Shampoo and Greystoke. In 1997, he obtained a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, just like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and fully (authentic),” stated Shampoo Actor Lee Grant on X.
Towne’s success got here after a protracted stretch of working in tv, together with The Man from U.N.C.L.E and The Lloyd Bridges Present, and on low-budget Movies for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a basic present enterprise story, he owed his breakthrough partly to his psychiatrist, via whom he met Beatty, a fellow affected person. As Beatty labored on Bonnie and Clyde, he introduced in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set whereas the movie was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions have been uncredited for Bonnie and Clyde, the landmark crime Film launched in 1967, and for years he was a favourite ghost author. He helped out on The Godfather, The Parallax View and Heaven Can Wait amongst others, and referred to himself as a “reduction pitcher who might are available for an inning, not pitch the entire recreation.”
However Towne was credited by title for Nicholson’s macho The Final Element and Beatty’s intercourse comedy Shampoo and was immortalized by Chinatown, the 1974 thriller set in the course of the Nice Melancholy.
Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a non-public detective requested to observe the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (performed by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne resurrected the menace and temper of a basic Los Angeles movie noir, however solid Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey throughout a grander and extra insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate right into a timeless detective story, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by the one of the repeated traces in film historical past, phrases of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his accomplice Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Overlook it, Jake, it is Chinatown.”
Towne’s script has been a staple of movie writing lessons ever since, though it additionally serves as a lesson in how motion pictures usually get made and within the dangers of crediting any movie to a single viewpoint. He would acknowledge working intently with Polanski as they revised and tightened the story and arguing fiercely with the director over the movie’s despairing ending — an ending Polanski pushed for and Towne later agreed was the correct alternative. (Nobody has formally been credited for writing “Overlook it, Jake, it is Chinatown”).
However the idea started with Towne, who had turned down the prospect to adapt The Nice Gatsby for the display screen so he might work on Chinatown, partly impressed by a guide printed in 1946, Carey McWilliams’ Southern California: An Island on the Land.
“In it was a chapter known as ‘Water, water, water,’ which was a revelation to me. And I assumed, ‘Why not do an image a couple of crime that is proper out in entrance of everyone?,’ ” he instructed The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.
“As an alternative of a jewel-encrusted falcon, make it one thing as prevalent as water taps, and make a conspiracy out of that. And after studying about what they have been doing, dumping water and ravenous the farmers out of their land, I spotted the visible and dramatic potentialities have been monumental.”
The again story of Chinatown has itself grow to be a form of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, The Child Stays within the Image; in Peter Biskind’s East Riders, Raging Bulls, a historical past of Sixties-Nineteen Seventies Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s The Large Goodbye, devoted completely to Chinatown. In The Large Goodbye, printed in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost author — former faculty roommate Edward Taylor. In line with The Large Goodbye, for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor didn’t ask for credit score on the movie as a result of his “friendship with Robert” mattered extra.
Wasson additionally wrote that the film’s well-known closing line originated with a vice cop who had instructed Towne that crimes in Chinatown have been seldom prosecuted.
“Robert Towne as soon as stated that Chinatown is a frame of mind,” Wasson wrote. “Not only a place on the map in Los Angeles, however a situation of whole consciousness nearly indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you are in paradise and waking up in the dead of night — that is Chinatown. Considering you’ve got acquired it found out and realizing you are useless — that is Chinatown.”
The studios assumed extra energy after the mid-Nineteen Seventies and Towne’s standing declined. His personal efforts at directing, together with Private Greatest and Tequila Dawn, had blended outcomes. The Two Jakes, the long-awaited sequel to Chinatown, was a industrial and important disappointment when launched in 1990 and led to a short lived estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Towne’s biggest remorse, he stated within the 2006 AP interview, was how Greystoke turned out. Towne wrote the difference of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes and needed to direct it. However manufacturing troubles on Private Greatest bled into his hopes for Greystoke. Hugh Hudson, as a substitute, directed the 1984 movie. And whereas Greystoke obtained three Oscar nominations, together with for Towne’s script, he was sad with the end result. Towne took the title of his canine, P.H. Vazak, for his screenwriting credit score, making Vazak an unlikely Oscar nominee.
Across the similar time, he agreed to work on a film far faraway from the art-house aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer manufacturing Days of Thunder, starring Tom Cruise as a race automobile driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over funds and principally panned, though its admirers embody Quentin Tarantino and numerous racing followers. And Towne’s script popularized an expression utilized by Duvall after Cruise complains one other automobile slammed him: “He did not slam into you, he did not bump you, he did not nudge you. He rubbed you.
“And rubbin,’ son, is racin.'”
Towne later labored with Cruise on The Agency and the primary two Mission: Inconceivable motion pictures. His most up-to-date movie was Ask the Mud, a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that got here out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two youngsters. His brother, Roger Towne, additionally wrote screenplays, his credit together with The Pure.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s enterprise, a costume store, closed down due to the Nice Melancholy. (His father modified the household title to Towne). He had at all times beloved to put in writing and was impressed to work in motion pictures by the proximity of the Warner Bros. Theater and from studying the critic James Agee. For a time, Towne labored on a tuna boat and would converse usually of its affect.
“I’ve recognized fishing with writing in my thoughts to the extent that every script is sort of a journey that you take — and you’re fishing,” he instructed the Writers Guild Affiliation in 2013. “Generally they each contain an act of religion. … Generally it is sheer religion alone that sustains you, since you assume, ‘God rattling it, nothing — not a chew right now. Nothing is going on.’ “
