World Courant
NEW YORK — Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Shampoo,” “The Final Element” and different acclaimed movies whose work on “Chinatown” turned a mannequin for the artwork type and helped outline the pampered attraction of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne died Monday surrounded by household at his Los Angeles residence, publicist Carri McClure mentioned. She declined to touch upon the reason for demise.
In an trade that gave rise to unhappy jokes in regards to the standing of the author, Towne loved for a time a status akin to that of the actors and administrators with whom he labored. 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 few of the defining movies of an period when artists had an uncommon diploma of artistic management. A uncommon “auteur” amongst screenwriters, Towne dropped at the display a deeply private and influential imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles.
“It is a metropolis that is so illusory,” Towne informed The Related Press in a 2006 interview. “It is the westernmost west in America. It is sort of a final resort. It is a spot the place, briefly, individuals go to make their goals come true. They usually’re all the time disillusioned.”
Towne, who’s recognizable in Hollywood by his excessive brow and full beard, gained a Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three extra instances, for “The Final Element,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he obtained a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, just like the characters he created, was sharp, iconoclastic and wholly (authentic),” “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant mentioned in X.
Towne’s success got here after an extended interval of labor in tv, together with “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Lloyd Bridges Present,” and in low-budget movies for “B” producer Roger CormanIn a traditional show-business story, he owed his breakthrough partly to his psychiatrist, by means of whom he met Beatty, a fellow affected person. Whereas Beatty was engaged on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he introduced Towne in for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and saved him on the set whereas the movie was being shot in Texas.
Towne’s contributions went uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the groundbreaking crime movie launched in 1967, and for years he was a popular ghostwriter. He labored on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait,” amongst others, and referred to as himself “a aid pitcher who may pitch an inning however not the entire sport.” However Towne was credited for Nicholson’s macho “The Final Element” and Beatty’s intercourse comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized in “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set through the Nice Despair.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as JJ “Jake” Gittes, a personal investigator employed to observe Evelyn Mulwray’s (Faye Dunaway) husband, chief engineer for the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy, who finds Gittes caught up 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 revived the menace and temper of a traditional Los Angeles movie noir, however solid Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey towards a grander, extra insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues pile up in a timeless detective story, helplessly resulting in tragedy, summed up in some of the repeated traces in cinema historical past, phrases of grim fatalism {that a} devastated Gittes receives from his companion Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Neglect it, Jake, it is Chinatown.”
Towne’s script has since change into a staple in film-writing lessons, although it additionally serves as a lesson in how films are sometimes made and the dangers of attributing a movie to a single perspective. He would acknowledge working carefully with Polanski as they revised and refined the story, and sparring with the director over the movie’s despairing ending — an ending Polanski insisted on and Towne later agreed was the suitable alternative (nobody is formally credited with writing “Neglect It, Jake, It is Chinatown”).
However the idea started with Towne, who had turned down the chance to adapt “The Nice Gatsby” for the display so he may work on “Chinatown,” impressed partly by a ebook revealed in 1946, Carey McWilliams’ “Southern California: An Island on the Land.”
“There was a chapter in it referred to as ‘Water, Water, Water,’ which was a revelation to me. And I assumed, ‘Why do not we make a film a few crime that is on the market for everybody to see,'” he informed The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.
“As an alternative of a jewel-encrusted falcon, make it one thing as widespread as water faucets, and make it a conspiracy. And after studying about what they had been doing, dumping water and ravenous the farmers off their land, I noticed the visible and dramatic prospects had been monumental.”
The backstory of “Chinatown” has itself change into one thing of a 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 Hollywood within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s; and in Sam Wasson’s “The Huge Goodbye,” devoted completely to “Chinatown.” In “The Huge Goodbye,” revealed in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne obtained in depth assist from a ghostwriter — former school roommate Edward Taylor. In keeping with “The Huge 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” was extra essential.
Wasson additionally wrote that the movie’s well-known closing line got here from a vice cop who had informed Towne that crimes in Chinatown had been not often prosecuted.
“Robert Towne as soon as mentioned that Chinatown is a frame of mind,” Wasson wrote. “Not only a spot on a map in Los Angeles, however a state of full consciousness nearly indistinguishable from blindness. To dream you are in paradise and get up at nighttime — that is Chinatown. To suppose you’ve got figured it out and understand you are useless — that is Chinatown.”
Because the studios gained energy after the mid-Nineteen Seventies, Towne’s standing declined. His personal makes an attempt at directing, together with “Private Finest” and “Tequila Dawn,” had combined outcomes. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a industrial and significant disappointment when it got here out in 1990 and led to a brief estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Across the similar time, he agreed to work on a movie far faraway from the arthouse aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer manufacturing “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 movie was famously over-budget and largely panned, although it counted Quentin Tarantino and legions of racing followers amongst its admirers. And Towne’s script popularized a phrase Duvall used after Cruise complained that one other automotive had hit him: “He did not hit you, he did not bump you, he did not push you. He rubbed you.”
“And rubbing, son, is racing.”
Towne later labored with Cruise on “The Agency” and the primary two “Mission: Unattainable” movies. His most up-to-date movie was “Ask the Mud,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that was launched in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two youngsters. His brother, Roger Towne, can be a screenwriter; his credit embrace “The Pure.”
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s clothes retailer closed because of the Nice Despair. (His father modified the household identify to Towne.) He had all the time loved writing and was impressed to work in movies by the proximity of the Warner Bros. Theater and by studying the critic James Agee. Towne labored for a time on a tuna boat and infrequently spoke of its affect.
“I’ve recognized fishing in my thoughts with writing a lot that each script is sort of a journey that you simply’re on — and also you’re fishing,” he informed the Writers Guild Affiliation in 2013. “Typically they’re each an act of religion … Typically it is sheer religion that retains you going, since you’re like, ‘Goddammit, nothing — not a chunk immediately. Nothing’s taking place.'”
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AP movie author Jake Coyle contributed to this report.
