Robert Towne, who has died aged 89, wrote a stunning hat-trick of screenplays that helped outline the good American cinema of the Nineteen Seventies: The Final Element (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975). He additionally did extravagantly paid work as a script physician, including a scene or just a few pages of dialogue to different writers’ screenplays, or finishing what is thought within the trade as a “polish”.
If a script was flawed or missing, administrators and studios went to Towne. “It’s essential to undertake the primary principle of Hippocrates, which is to do no hurt,” he stated about this sideline. “You attempt to prolong the fabric, to not impose your self on it.” Generally, as with The Godfather (1971), he may present a pick-me-up to a affected person that was already preventing match. In different circumstances, equivalent to Armageddon (1998), he may do little greater than slap a sticking plaster on a damaged leg.
Among the many screenplays that bore his title, probably the most achieved was Chinatown, a noir thriller concerning the battle over water rights in 30s Los Angeles; Towne wrote the a part of the non-public eye Jake Gittes for his pal and former roommate Jack Nicholson.
The author was nonplussed when requested concerning the routine use of Chinatown in film-school lessons. “We weren’t making an attempt to write down a screenplay that was completely structured,” he stated. “We have been simply making an attempt to make it make sense.”
The primary draft took Towne 9 months to write down and ran to nearly 180 pages; it was thought of unintelligible by the movie’s director, Roman Polanski, and its producer, Robert Evans. The ultimate model, which Polanski finessed and rewrote in tandem with Towne, gained an Academy Award.
“As much as the final second, I used to be a kind of who thought Chinatown was going to be a catastrophe,” Towne later admitted. One contentious level was the ending. The unique script closed with Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) killing her revolting father, Noah Cross (John Huston), by whom she had had a daughter. “You knew that Evelyn was going to have to face trial and also you knew that she wasn’t going to have the ability to inform why she did it,” he defined. “Nevertheless it was bitter-sweet within the sense that one particular person, no less than, wasn’t tainted – the kid.”
Polanski disagreed. “I knew that if Chinatown was to be particular, and never simply one other thriller the place the great guys triumph within the ultimate reel, Evelyn needed to die,” the director insisted. “Its dramatic influence can be misplaced except audiences left their seats with a way of shock on the injustice of all of it.”
Towne noticed accurately that Polanski’s ending represented “the tunnel on the finish of the sunshine” however conceded: “Chinatown would have been a catastrophe with out him.”
Born in Los Angeles, he was the elder of two sons of Helen and Lou Schwartz, and spent his early childhood within the fishing port of San Pedro, California. His father, who owned a girls’s clothes retailer earlier than discovering success in actual property and shifting the household to Palos Verdes, the place Robert went to Chadwick faculty, later modified the household title.
After learning philosophy and literature at Pomona School in Claremont, California, graduating in 1956, Towne served a stint within the military earlier than doing odd jobs together with working as a tuna fisherman.
In 1958 he attended an performing workshop the place Nicholson was one in every of his classmates. Each males grew to become a part of Roger Corman’s steady of actors and writers. Towne wrote Corman’s science-fiction movie The Final Lady on Earth (1960), through which he additionally acted underneath the pseudonym Edward Wain, and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). Throughout the identical interval he additionally wrote for tv collection together with The Outer Limits and The Man from UNCLE.
One other essential determine in Towne’s profession was the actor Warren Beatty. Towne did some rewriting work on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) for which he was listed as “particular marketing consultant”. He and Beatty later collaborated on the screenplay for the satirical comedy Shampoo and Love Affair (1994), whereas Towne did uncredited writing on different Beatty movies: The Parallax View (1974), Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Reds (1981).
He additionally contributed to Nicholson’s directing debut, Drive, He Mentioned (1971) and was referred to as upon by Francis Ford Coppola, one other Corman protege, to write down a small however very important scene for The Godfather.
Late within the day, Coppola realised that there was no dialog between the ageing Mafia boss, Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), and his previously respectable son, Michael (Al Pacino). Towne solved the issue with a protracted and poignant alternate that confirmed, he stated, “the switch of energy … It was profitable as a result of Francis had completed great work, he knew what he needed, however he didn’t actually know, at that time, the right way to do it.”
Towne was thanked in Coppola’s acceptance speech when the screenplay gained an Oscar in 1973.
There was an sudden delay within the making of the scabrous comedy The Final Element resulting from wrangles over the screenplay’s profanity depend. (David Begelman, then head of Columbia Footage, requested Towne: “Wouldn’t it’s higher in the event you used 20 ‘motherfuckers’ relatively than 40?”) This left the author with time on his fingers, which he crammed by writing Chinatown. After Shampoo, Towne didn’t have one other screenplay credit score for seven years, although his doctoring work piled up: The Missouri Breaks and Marathon Man (each 1976), and the Goldie Hawn comedy-drama Swing Shift (1984), have been among the many scripts through which he had an invisible hand.
He was additionally busy writing a screenplay that he hoped would supply him together with his directing debut: Greystoke, a sensible retelling of the Tarzan story.
“As I wrote it, no less than 70 minutes or so would have been silent with apes and a baby. The issues of making an attempt to delineate character via motion with out a lot dialogue me.” However the movie was by no means made in that kind and supplied him together with his best skilled heartache.
In 1982, he wrote and directed Private Finest, an intense and clever portrait of the lesbian relationship between two athletes. When that movie drastically exceeded its funds, he was solely capable of retain management over the fabric by signing away his rights to Greystoke.
A messy court docket case later ensued, through which he filed a $110m swimsuit in opposition to Warner Bros, and claimed to be so poor that he was pressured to dwell in a visitor home. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) was finally directed by Hugh Hudson. “The one unalloyed disappointment was the lack of Greystoke,” Towne stated later. “It bore no relation to what I take into account the perfect script I’d ever written.” Quite than have his personal title on the movie, he put ahead his canine, PH Vazak, for a screenwriting credit score. The canine’s response to being nominated for an Oscar for finest tailored screenplay was not recorded.
Towne’s directing profession was characterised by clever ardour tasks. He wrote and directed the good, trendy thriller Tequila Dawn (1988), starring Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer, and one other athletics-based drama, With out Limits (1998), with Billy Crudup as the space runner Steve Prefontaine.
He additionally directed his personal adaptation of John Fante’s novel Ask the Mud (2006), which had been on the boil for the reason that 70s. The movie starred Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek and was produced by Tom Cruise, for whom Towne had already written Days of Thunder (1990), The Agency (1993), Mission: Not possible (1996) and Mission: Not possible II (2000).
It was a supply of consternation for Towne that his proposed sequels to Chinatown, following Jake Gittes into different eras and circumstances, skilled such turbulence. The third, Gittes vs Gittes, was by no means made, whereas the second, The Two Jakes, started filming underneath Towne’s course in 1985, just for the manufacturing to be shut down when a serious casting threat – placing the producer Robert Evans in one of many main roles – proved to be disastrous in addition to unorthodox. Nicholson lastly directed Towne’s script in 1990.
In 2006, Towne was the topic of a documentary by the artist Sarah Morris. In 2013, he grew to become a employees author and consulting producer on the ultimate collection of the acclaimed tv collection Mad Males. For all of the tales of extra that surrounded him in his heyday (he was reportedly often called “write-a-line, snort-a-line Towne”), he maintained a sure level-headedness about his craft.
“A film, I believe, is admittedly solely 4 or 5 moments between two folks,” he stated. “The remainder of it exists to present these moments their influence and resonance.”
He’s survived by his second spouse, Luisa Gaule, and their daughter, Chiara, in addition to a daughter, Katharine, from his first marriage, to the actor Julie Payne, which resulted in divorce, and his brother, Roger.
