Screenwriter Robert Towne poses at the Regency Hotel in New York on March 7, 2006.
Jim Cooper/AP
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Jim Cooper/AP
NEW YORK — Robert Towne, Oscar-winning screenwriter Shampoo, Final details and other films, with scripts for Chinatown who became an icon of the art form and helped shape the old-school charm of his hometown of Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne died Monday surrounded by family at his home in Los Angeles, spokeswoman Carri McClure said. She declined to comment on any cause of death.
In an industry that made sad jokes about the status of writers, Towne was for a time as prestigious as the actors and directors he worked with. Through his friendship with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and 1970s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the defining films of an era when artists held an unusual degree of creative control.
A rare “author” among screenwriters, Towne has brought a very personal and influential perspective of Los Angeles to the screen.
“It was a city of fantasy,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It was the westernmost tip of America. It was a place of last resort. In short, it was where people came to make their dreams come true. And they were forever disappointed.”
Known in Hollywood for his high forehead and bushy beard, Towne won an Academy Award for Chinatown and has been nominated three other times, for Final details, Shampoo And GreystokeIn 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, like the characters he created, was profound, groundbreaking and completely (inventive),” he said. Shampoo Actor Lee Grant in X.
Towne’s success came after a long career in television, including The Man from UNCLE And Lloyd Bridges Program, and in low-budget films for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owes his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, with whom he met Beatty, another patient. While Beatty was working on Bonnie and Clyde, He brought Towne in to revise the Robert Benton-David Newman script and invited Towne to be on set while the film was being shot in Texas.
Towne’s contributions go unrecognized Bonnie and Clyde, The landmark crime film was released in 1967, and for many years he was a popular ghostwriter. He helped The Godfather, Parallax View And Heaven Can Wait among others, and called himself “a relief pitcher who might come in for an inning, but not pitch the entire game”.
But Towne is credited with creating Nicholson’s masculinity. Final details and Beatty’s sex comedy Shampoo and has been immortalized by Chinatown, 1974 horror film set during the Great Depression.
Chinatown Directed by Roman Polanski, Nicholson stars as JJ “Jake” Gittes, a private investigator who is asked to track down the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway). The husband is the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Gittes finds herself caught up in a chaotic cycle of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by Raymond Chandler’s novel, Towne revives the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film, but frames Gittes’s meandering adventures in a larger, more sinister portrait of Southern California. The clues accumulate into a timeless detective story, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the most repeated lines in film history, the words of grim fatalism that the heartbroken Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, this is Chinatown.”
Towne’s script has since become a staple in screenwriting classes, though it also serves as a lesson in how filmmaking often works and in the risks of crediting any film to a single point of view. He admits to working closely with Polanski as they revised and tightened the story and argued furiously with the director over the film’s desperate ending—an ending that Polanski pushed for and that Towne later agreed was the right choice. (No one is officially credited with writing “Forget It, Jake, It’s Chinatown.”)
But the concept started with Towne, who turned down the opportunity to adapt. The great Gatsby give him the screen so he can work Chinatown, partly inspired by a 1946 book, Carey McWilliams Southern California: An island on the mainland.
“There’s a chapter in there called ‘Water, Water, Water,’ which was a revelation to me. And I thought, ‘Why not make a picture of a crime that’s right in front of people’s eyes?'” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.
“Instead of a falcon covered in jewels, turn it into something as common as a water tap, and create a plot out of it. And after reading about what they were doing, pouring water and starving farmers on their land, I realized the visual and dramatic possibilities were huge.”
The story behind Chinatown became a kind of detective story, explored in the memoirs of producer Robert Evans, The child is still in the picture; in Peter Biskind The Eastern Riders, The Raging Bulls, history of Hollywood in the 1960s-1970s, and in Sam Wasson Big goodbye, dedicated entirely to Chinatown IN Big goodbye, published in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was heavily assisted by a ghostwriter — former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to Big goodbye, Towne declined to be interviewed, and Taylor did not claim credit for the film because “his friendship with Robert” was more important.
Wasson also writes that the film’s famous ending line comes from a deputy sheriff telling Towne that crimes in Chinatown are rarely prosecuted.
“Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind,” Wasson writes. “Not just a place on a map of Los Angeles, but a state of total awareness that is almost indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you are in heaven and waking up in darkness—that is Chinatown. Thinking you have it figured out and realizing you are dead—that is Chinatown.”
Studios held more power after the mid-1970s and Towne’s position declined. His own efforts at directing, including Personal best And Tequila Dawn, had mixed results. Two Jakes, The long-awaited sequel Chinatown, was a commercial and critical disappointment upon its release in 1990 and led to a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Towne’s biggest regret, he said in a 2006 interview with the AP, was how Greystoke As it turns out, Towne wrote an adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes and wanted to direct it. But production troubles Personal best flowed into his hope for Greystoke. Hugh Hudson, instead, directed the 1984 film. And while Greystoke received three Oscar nominations, including for Towne’s screenplay, he was unhappy with the outcome. Towne named his dog, PH Vazak, for the screenwriting credit, making Vazak an unlikely Oscar nominee.
At the same time, he agreed to work on a film that was completely different from the art-house aspirations of the 70s, a Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production. Thunder and lightning day, starring Tom Cruise as a race car driver and Robert Duvall as his team captain. The 1990 film was notoriously over budget and largely panned, though its fans include Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans. And Towne’s script popularized a line Duvall used after Cruise complained that another car had hit him: “He didn’t hit you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t shove you. He rubbed you.”
“And rub it, son, it’s racin’.”
Towne then worked with Cruise on The firm and the first two Mission Impossible movies. His most recent movie is Ask Dust, a Los Angeles story that he wrote and directed that debuted in 2006. Towne has been married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and has two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also wrote the screenplay, and his credits include Nature.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s clothing store business closed during the Great Depression. (His father changed his last name to Towne.) He always loved to write and was inspired to work in the film industry by the proximity of the Warner Bros. Theater and by reading the critic James Agee. For a time, Towne worked on a tuna fishing boat and often spoke about its impact.
“I’ve identified fishing with writing in my mind to the point where every script is like a trip you’re taking—and you’re fishing,” he told the Writers Guild in 2013. “Sometimes both involve an act of faith. … Sometimes it’s just sheer faith that sustains you, because you think, ‘Fuck, there’s nothing—not a bite today. Nothing’s happening.'”
