Screenwriter Robert Towne poses at The Regency Lodge in New York on March 7, 2006. Jim Cooper/AP conceal caption
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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 kind 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 loss of life.
In an trade which gave delivery to rueful jokes in regards to the author’s standing, Towne for a time held status corresponding to the actors and administrators he labored with. By way of his friendships with two of the most important stars of the Nineteen 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 stage of artistic 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 kind of place of final resort. It is a spot the place, in a phrase, folks go to make their desires come true. And so they’re eternally upset.”
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 acquired a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, just like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and fully (unique),” stated Shampoo actor Lee Grant on X.
Towne’s success got here after an extended stretch of working in tv, together with The Man from U.N.C.L.E and The Lloyd Bridges Present, and on low-budget films for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a traditional present enterprise story, he owed his breakthrough partially to his psychiatrist, by means of 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 film was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions have been uncredited for Bonnie and Clyde, the landmark crime movie 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 “aid pitcher who might are available for an inning, not pitch the entire recreation.”
However Towne was credited by identify for Nicholson’s macho The Final Element and Beatty’s intercourse comedy Shampoo and was immortalized by Chinatown, the 1974 thriller set throughout the Nice Despair.
Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a non-public detective requested to comply with 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 traditional 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 crucial repeated traces in film historical past, phrases of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his associate Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Overlook it, Jake, it is Chinatown.”
Towne’s script has been a staple of movie writing courses ever since, though it additionally serves as a lesson in how films usually get made and within the dangers of crediting any movie to a single viewpoint. He would acknowledge working carefully 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 suitable selection. (Nobody has formally been credited for writing “Overlook it, Jake, it is Chinatown”).
However the idea started with Towne, who had turned down the possibility to adapt The Nice Gatsby for the display screen so he might work on Chinatown, partly impressed by a e book 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 believed, ‘Why not do an image a few crime that is proper out in entrance of everyone?,’ ” he instructed The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.
“As a substitute 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 huge.”
The again story of Chinatown has itself develop into a sort 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 Nineteen Sixties-Seventies Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s The Massive Goodbye, devoted completely to Chinatown. In The Massive Goodbye, printed in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost author — former school roommate Edward Taylor. In line with The Massive 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 complete consciousness virtually indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you are in paradise and waking up at midnight — that is Chinatown. Pondering you have received it found out and realizing you are useless — that is Chinatown.”
The studios assumed extra energy after the mid-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 business 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 acquired three Oscar nominations, together with for Towne’s script, he was sad with the end result. Towne took the identify 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 automotive driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over price range and principally panned, though its admirers embrace Quentin Tarantino and numerous racing followers. And Towne’s script popularized an expression utilized by Duvall after Cruise complains one other automotive 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: Not possible films. 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 kids. 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 gown store, closed down due to the Nice Despair. (His father modified the household identify to Towne). He had all the time cherished to write down and was impressed to work in films 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 communicate usually of its impression.
“I’ve recognized fishing with writing in my thoughts to the extent that every script is sort of a journey that you are taking — and you’re fishing,” he instructed the Writers Guild Affiliation in 2013. “Typically they each contain an act of religion. … Typically it is sheer religion alone that sustains you, since you suppose, ‘God rattling it, nothing — not a chunk right this moment. Nothing is occurring.’ “
