NEW YORK — Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Shampoo,” “The Last Command” and other acclaimed movies whose work on “Chinatown” became a model for the art form and helped define the jaded charm of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne died on Monday surrounded by his family at his home in Los Angeles, said publicist Carri McClure. She declined to comment on the explanation for death.
In an industry that was vulnerable to rueful jokes concerning the screenwriter's status, Towne enjoyed for a time a prestige comparable to that of the actors and directors he worked with. Thanks to his friendship with two of the most important stars of the Sixties and Seventies, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote a few of the most distinctive movies of an era wherein artists had an unusual degree of creative control. A rare “auteur” amongst screenwriters, Towne managed to bring a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles to the screen.
“It's a city that's so illusory,” Towne told the Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It's the westernmost west of America. It's kind of a last resort. In short, it's a place where people go to make their dreams come true. And they're forever disappointed.”
Towne is recognizable in Hollywood by his high brow and full beard. He won an Oscar for “Chinatown” and was nominated three more times, for “The Last Command,” “Shampoo” and “Greystroke.” In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
He got here to success after a protracted stint on television, including “The Man from UNCLE” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and in low-budget movies for B-list producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owed his break partly to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. While Beatty was working on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought Towne in for revisions to the screenplay by Robert Benton and David Newman and had him on set while the film was being shot in Texas.
Towne's work on “Bonnie and Clyde,” the groundbreaking 1967 crime film, was uncredited, and he was a well-liked ghostwriter for years. He helped out on “The Godfather” and “Heaven Can Wait,” amongst others, and described himself as “a backup pitcher who could come in for an inning but didn't have to pitch the whole game.” But Towne was credited for Nicholson's macho film “The Last Command” and Beatty's sex comedy “Shampoo,” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set in the course of the Great Depression.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as JJ “Jake” Gittes, a personal investigator assigned to shadow 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 becomes caught up in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn's ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by the novels of Raymond Chandler, Towne recreated the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but solid Gittes' labyrinthine odyssey right into a grander and more insidious portrait of Southern California. The clues pile up right into a timeless detective story and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up in probably the most oft-repeated lines in film history, words of grim fatalism delivered to a devastated Gittes by his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.”
Towne's script has since change into a staple of screenwriting courses, though it also serves as a lesson in how movies are sometimes made and the risks of attributing a movie to a single perspective. He admitted that he worked closely with Polanski as they revised and tightened the story, and that he argued fiercely with the director concerning the film's hopeless ending – an ending that Polanski pushed for and that Towne later agreed was the fitting selection (nobody was officially credited as the author of Forget It, Jake, It's Chinatown).
But the concept got here from Towne, who turned down the possibility to adapt The Great Gatsby to the screen to work on Chinatown as an alternative. He was partly inspired by Carey McWilliams' 1946 book Southern California: An Island on the Land.
“There was a chapter in it called 'Water, Water, Water' that was a revelation to me. And I thought, 'Why not make a movie about a crime that's happening right in front of everyone's eyes?'” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.
“Instead of a jewelled falcon, use something as mundane as faucets and make a conspiracy out of it. And after reading about what they were doing, dumping water and starving the peasants, I realised the visual and dramatic possibilities were enormous.”
The backstory of “Chinatown” has itself change into a sort of murder mystery, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of Hollywood within the Sixties and ’70s, and Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” which is entirely dedicated to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” published in 2020, Wasson claims Towne had extensive assistance from a ghostwriter — his former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to “The Big Goodbye,” for which Towne declined an interview, Taylor didn’t ask to be credited because the film’s author because he was more concerned together with his “friendship with Robert.”
Wasson also wrote that the film's famous final line got here from a vice cop who told Towne that crimes in Chinatown were rarely punished.
“Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind,” wrote Wasson. “Not just a place on the map of Los Angeles, but a state of total wakefulness, almost indistinguishable from blindness. To dream you're in paradise and wake up in the dark – that's Chinatown. To think you've got it all figured out and then realize you're dead – that's Chinatown.”
By the mid-Seventies, the studios were gaining more power and Towne's popularity was declining. His own directorial efforts, including “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had mixed results. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a business and significant disappointment upon its release in 1990 and led to a brief estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Around the identical time, he agreed to work on a movie that was far faraway from the arthouse ambitions of the '70s: the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production Days of Thunder, wherein Tom Cruise played a race automobile driver and Robert Duvall his crew chief. The 1990 film was notoriously over-budget and largely panned, although its admirers included Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans. And Towne's script popularized a phrase Duvall used after Cruise complained that one other automobile had hit him: “He didn't crash into you, he didn't jostle you, he didn't bump you. He rubbed you.”
“And rubbing, son, is racing.”
Towne later worked with Cruise on The Firm and the primary two Mission: Impossible movies. His most up-to-date film was Ask the Dust, a movie about Los Angeles that he wrote and directed and which was released in 2006.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father's clothing store closed on account of the Great Depression (his father modified the family name to Towne). He had all the time enjoyed writing and was inspired to work in movies by the proximity of the Warner Bros. Theater and by reading critic James Agee. For a time, Towne worked on a tuna boat and infrequently spoke of the effect it had on him.
“I've equated fishing in my head with writing, in that every script is like a journey you take – and you're fishing,” he told the Writers Guild Association in 2013. “Sometimes both involve an act of faith. … Sometimes it's just pure faith that keeps you going, because you think, 'Damn, nothing – not a single bite today. Nothing's happening.'”
AP film author Jake Coyle contributed to this report.
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