Robert Towne Dead at 89: Legendary ‘Chinatown’ Screenwriter Was One of Hollywood’s Great Scribes
A motion picture screenplay is by nature imperfectible, and time, tide, and taste will have their say. The Oscar-winning script written for 1974’s “Chinatown“ by Robert Towne — who passed away Monday, July 1, at age 89, according to his publicist (via THR) — makes its own case for being as perfect an example of the form as we may ever see. That it was the first original (as opposed to an adaptation) Towne ever authored, coming along at the age of 40, is itself remarkable.
It’s no coincidence that his great friend Jack Nicholson, an artistic comrade in arms since they met as neophytes in a Hollywood acting class, was the center of “Chinatown’s” dark beauty and also of the ribald, corrosive and mordantly funny Towne script for 1973’s “The Last Detail.” Another friend, Warren Beatty, was the centerpiece of 1975’s “Shampoo,” which joined the previous two to notch Towne’s third best screenplay Oscar nom in a row.
Those three films alone would have guaranteed his stature as one of the great screenwriters. Witness “Chinatown’s” ranking as one of the top three in the Writers’ Guild members voting to select the Top 101 screenplays ever written. “Casablanca,” ranked first, is a not-so-distant cousin to it; and “The Godfather,” ranked second, boasts as a crucial scene Marlon Brando’s title character Vito Corleone passing the torch to Al Pacino’s Michael (“I never wanted this for you…”). Towne wrote that hastily inserted passage for the ever-grateful Frances Ford Coppola, who thanked him from the stage while accepting the award for the screenplay he’d otherwise co-authored with Mario Puzo: “[Towne] wrote that very beautiful scene between Marlon and Al Pacino in the garden; that was Bob Towne’s scene.”
Even as Towne would have less success with most of the other films he authored, his track record as a script doctor capable of an almost magic touch undergirds his reputation for brilliance in the form.
From his earliest work in the trade, through the hat-trick Oscar noms, and on through directing jobs like 1982’s “Personal Best,” and 1998’s “Tequila Sunrise,” he puzzled out human motivations. This facility encompassed his key role of bringing character depth to the many twists of the first two Tom Cruise-starring iterations of “Mission: Impossible.” He could be resolutely insistent on holding fast to the logic of his own creations, even as he sought help from confreres. (If his work on “Days of Thunder” was more generic, he strong-armed “The Firm” into claiming a moral heft that had been neglected in the book.)
Famously, as a result of being deeply aware of the tragic residue of Sharon Tate’s death, he acceded to Roman Polanski’s fiat that Chinatown’s ending go darker with the horrific death of a major character. “I don’t mean this unkindly,” he said in an interview for “The Great Moviemakers,” “but I think it was impossible for Roman to come back to Los Angeles and not end his movie with an attractive blonde lady being murdered.” Towne’s literary bent was kept in tune via uncredited but indispensable collaboration with his college roommate Edward Taylor, who was a steady touchstone — until giving testimony regarding Towne’s alleged cocaine habit in an early ’80s divorce case with wife Julie Payne.
For all the lineaments the lead character of “Chinatown” shared with noir predecessors like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the heady atmosphere derived not so much from that fictional realm as from the writer’s own grounding in things Los Angeles. Born Bertram Schwartz on November 23, 1934, in the Southland port town of San Pedro but raised largely in tony Brentwood as dad Lou grew rich in real estate, Towne graduated from Pomona College but always stayed mindful of his early experiences manning tuna fishing boats that journeyed far into the Pacific. The “difficult and dangerous” work, as he described it, brought him a metaphor for what would become his métier.
Towne cited the philosopher Plato’s distinction between the world we see and a potential ideal world — under which structure his writing became “not so much an invention as a discovery.” He added, ”I’ve identified fishing with writing in my mind, to the extent that each script is like a trip that you’re taking — and you are fishing. Sometimes they both involve an act of faith — I mean you’re looking at the fucking water and assuming that there’s something underneath it that you’re going to catch…”
He was still an obscure aspirant when the mid-‘60s efflorescence of thoughtful screen dramas got underway, but from the time he was thanked as a “Special Consultant” in Warren Beatty’s credit roll for 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (David Newman and Robert Benton were the credentialed, credited duo), there was heat attached to Towne’s name by insider Hollywood.
Lanky and bearded, often solemn in tone but with a ready edge of sarcasm, Towne could show a professorial air. He and Nicholson’s oft-recounted ’60s scuffling days would put them among the young prodigies (Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Demme, and more) who fell into Roger Corman’s low-budget, B-film production factory. Handed the assignment to write a Vincent Price horror flick called “The Tomb of Ligeia” (1964), he tried to cram some artistic touches into the hackwork, and would later say, no doubt half-jokingly, that he worked harder on that script than any other in his career.
Also grappling for a start was Nicholson, and as fellow students in blacklisted actor Jeff Corey’s acting class, they bonded. Not only did he immediately buy into Nicholson’s deep actor’s resourcefulness, he began studying how his friend could string out a line in a slightly halting fashion that demanded a viewer’s attention. “You’re gonna be a movie star,” he told Nicholson, “And I’m gonna write for you.”
Navy prisoner-escort Buddusky in “The Last Detail” was written to allow Jack’s Jersey-shore tough guy aspect to come to the fore (“I am the fucking shore patrol, motherfucker!”) but the cussing came with a rationale Towne had ready when production execs complained about 40 f-bombs in his script. As writer Sam Wasson unearthed for his book “The Big Goodbye” about the epoch, Towne told producers “the swearing is not used for dramatic emphasis. It’s used to emphasize the impotence of these men who will do nothing but swear, even though they know they’re doing something unjust by taking this poor, neurotic little kid to jail…”
By the same token, even as he laboriously crafted “Chinatown” — Polanski and producer Robert Evans leaned in heavily through many, often squabbling rewrite debates — when it came time to flesh out the J.J. Gittes part, he knew there’d be scant need for directorial notes, as the role was written with great specificity for Jack.
It says much that no less a cinema artisan than director David Fincher joined Towne for the commentary track of “Chinatown,” and that very nearly the last we heard of creative ventures from Towne was of the duo’s hoped-for collaboration on a prequel that would have been set in Gittes’ early days on the force in the Los Angeles district of the title. Nicholson had avoided playing any detectives in hopes of a shared trilogy for Gittes. But when the until-them loyal trio sought in 1989 to mount a sequel called “The Two Jakes,” trouble came. In a meet of the trio at Nate & Al’s deli in L.A., the critique of Towne’s draft was severe. When director-to-be Nicholson refused for a time to heed Towne’s wish to bounce Evans (who’d been cast as the second Jake) from acting in the project, Towne went to Bora Bora, effectively A.W.O.L. from script fixes. When the film flopped with critics and bombed at the box office, a lasting edge of bitterness between all parties arose.
What Towne and friends would learn after the first great flush of success was that cinema’s second golden era, that of the ‘60s and ‘70s, was fading as the big studios grew more corporate, cautious, and wary of controversy. Even attempting a throwback tribute to the previous golden era when Tarzan swung from vines, Towne’s “Greystoke” project — the work on it was undercut by dramatic personal strife with wife Payne, amid accusations of his druggy indulgence — was so mishandled in the making that he took his name off and left the credit to one P.H. Vazak, notoriously his dog’s moniker. “A movie’s a living thing when you’re making it,” he would say in an interview for the Writers’ Guild archive, “and it can go any which way.”
With luck, near-miscues become wins. Thus Evans’s late-in-the-game move to scrap the first go at a score for “Chinatown” (by Phillip Lambro), instead to abruptly hire classic soundtrack composer Jerry Goldsmith to craft the mournful trumpet airs that gave the mood such somber anchoring. And thus Polanski’s forceful rejiggering of the end of the film. If Towne had wanted to flip the noir scenario on its head by having the seductive blonde be the upright force in a dirty world (rather than being a femme fatale), the same logic let him live with the film’s famously reworked ending — and with the use of one of the film’s rare crane shots to close out.
Towne wrote Nicholson’s gumshoe not as a varlet on the make but, as Gittes scoldingly tells a mouthy “bimbo” in the barber shop, a man who makes “an honest living.” A confrontation with Faye Dunaway’s simmering Evelyn Mulwray ends with her wising up the wise guy: “I don’t get tough with anybody Mr. Gittes — my lawyer does.” Towne’s puckish wit emerges when Jake grills a subordinate of Hollis Mulwray’s as to whether Mulwray might be having an affair and is informed, “He never even kids about it,” to which Jake replies with Nicholsonian sangfroid, “Maybe he takes it very seriously.”
Towne had grown excited about moving the story’s scenario from the usual immoralities and sins into a much more psychologically subterranean ethos that included incest and the elites of the city scorning the welfare of its citizens. There’s a nihilism that Polanski’s own worldview coaxed out of him, a message about the near impossibility of doing good in a dark world.
Robert Towne’s ascent into a permanent spot in the Hollywood creative firmament happened like a windstorm, and will surely remain as long as movies are loved and discussed. He lost friendships, marriages, and perhaps a certain faith that we all might be a little better and kinder. He showed us ourselves most strikingly inside a genre that he adopted and heightened unforgettably. A key moment comes in “Chinatown” when Evelyn Mulwray, wishing to confide one of the story’s dank secrets, whispers, “Are you alone?”
And Nicholson as Jake, with his perfect, slightly bitter dispassion set loose by his great friend’s screenplay, replies, “Alone? Isn’t everyone?”
Such are the insights of a man who knew himself — and maybe all of us — very well.
