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 dwelling in Los Angeles, mentioned publicist Carri McClure. She declined to touch upon any explanation for demise. In an trade which gave delivery to rueful jokes concerning the author’s standing, Towne for a time held status similar to the actors and administrators he labored with. Via 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 a number of the signature movies of an period when artists held an uncommon stage of inventive management.
The uncommon “auteur” amongst display screen writers, Towne managed to deliver 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 goals come true. And so they’re ceaselessly disenchanted.” Recognizable round Hollywood for his excessive brow and full beard, Towne gained 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 (authentic),” mentioned 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 films 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 film was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions had 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 may are available in for an inning, not pitch the entire sport.” 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 throughout 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 forged 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 probably the most repeated strains in film historical past, phrases of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his accomplice Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Neglect 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 fitting selection. (Nobody has formally been credited for writing “Neglect 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 may 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 referred to as ‘Water, water, water,’ which was a revelation to me. And I assumed, ‘Why not do an image a few 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 had been doing, dumping water and ravenous the farmers out of their land, I noticed the visible and dramatic prospects had been huge.” The again story of Chinatown has itself change into 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 Nineteen Sixties-Nineteen Seventies Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s The Large Goodbye, devoted totally 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 keeping 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 had been seldom prosecuted. “Robert Towne as soon as mentioned that Chinatown is a mind-set,” Wasson wrote. “Not only a place on the map in Los Angeles, however a situation of complete 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 obtained it discovered 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 Finest and Tequila Dawn, had combined outcomes. The Two Jakes, the long-awaited sequel to Chinatown, was a business and important disappointment when launched in 1990 and led to a brief estrangement between Towne and Nicholson. Towne’s best remorse, he mentioned within the 2006 AP interview, was how Greystoke turned out. Towne wrote the difference of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel Tarzan of the Apes and wished to direct it. However manufacturing troubles on Private Finest 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 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 automotive driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over finances and largely 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 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: Unimaginable 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 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 all the time beloved to jot 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 converse 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 might be 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 chunk in the present day. Nothing is going on.’ ”