Robert Towne, the screenwriting icon who gained an Academy Award for his unique script for “Chinatown,” died Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.
His publicist Carri McClure announced the information on Tuesday.
In a screenwriting vocation introduced in 1960 as a author for very low-funds producer-director Roger Corman, Towne acquired an early reputation in Hollywood as a sought-immediately after “script physician,” stepping in to do uncredited work on troubled screenplays for motion pictures such as “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972).
Towne experienced nonetheless to turn out to be a legend of the New Hollywood era of filmmaking when he saw a 1969 picture essay in West, the Los Angeles Times’ previous Sunday journal.
Titled “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.,” it highlighted not long ago shot photographs of Los Angeles locales taken as if it have been nonetheless the late 1930s and ‘40s heyday of Chandler’s fictional tricky-boiled personal eye Philip Marlowe, which includes an evocative photo of a vintage convertible parked upcoming to an aged streetlight outdoors Bullocks Wilshire, the landmark Art Deco luxury office store on Wilshire Boulevard.
Towne, a Los Angeles indigenous born during the Despair, mentioned in a 2008 Writers Guild Basis job interview that he was surprised that “you could continue to recapture the L.A. that I vaguely remembered by the considered assortment of locations about the town, quite a few of which I knew.”
“That got me began thinking.”
Certainly, Towne generally acknowledged that the picture essay was a catalyst for crafting the critically acclaimed, influential screenplay for which he is very best known: “Chinatown.”
Directed by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, the 1974 film classic is established in 1937 Los Angeles and capabilities Nicholson as non-public investigator J.J. “Jake” Gittes, who is hired to examine a supposedly cheating husband but rather finds himself enmeshed in a dim mystery involving deception, murder, and a broad water and land conspiracy in the San Fernando Valley.
Towne been given uncommon general public acknowledgment of his guiding-the-scenes do the job in 1973 when “Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola recognized a screenwriting Oscar for that landmark film and, “giving credit exactly where credit rating is because of,” thanked him for producing “the very wonderful scene involving Marlon [Brando] and Al Pacino in the garden” — a scene Towne wrote the night time right before it was shot that illustrates the transfer of electrical power from the aged Mafia don to his son Michael and indirectly captures the adore among the two characters.
Two several years afterwards, the press was calling Towne “the best author in Hollywood.”
Bookending his Academy Award-winning script for “Chinatown” had been Oscar nominations for his screen adaptation of the novel “The Final Detail” (1973), starring Nicholson as a person of two Navy lifers escorting a young prisoner to Portsmouth Naval Jail and for “Shampoo” (1975), which he co-wrote with the film’s producer, Warren Beatty, who starred as a womanizing Beverly Hills hairdresser.
Amongst Towne’s other screenwriting credits are “The Yakuza” (with Paul Schrader), “The Two Jakes” (a “Chinatown” sequel), “Days of Thunder,” “The Firm,” (with David Rabe and David Rayfiel), “Mission: Impossible” (with David Koepp) and “Mission Not possible: II.” As a regular script health practitioner, he also did uncredited function on movies these as “Drive, He Reported,” “The Parallax Look at,” “Marathon Guy,” “The Missouri Breaks” and “Heaven Can Wait around.”
The tall, bearded and smooth-spoken screenwriter who favored slender cigars turned a director with the 1982 film “Personal Most effective,” from his unique screenplay about two feminine keep track of stars. He later directed and wrote the screenplays for “Tequila Dawn,” “Without Limits” (published with Kenny Moore) and “Ask the Dust,” established in Depression-period Los Angeles.
Towne also co-wrote the 1984 film “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes,” which was based mostly on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel “Tarzan of the Apes,” a venture Towne experienced been functioning on for numerous several years. But Towne, who was originally slated to direct, was so disappointed with the finished film, co-created by Michael Austin and directed by Hugh Hudson, that he had his title replaced in the credits with a pseudonym: P.H. Vazak, the title of his Komondor, a Hungarian livestock guard doggy, who then went on to share an Oscar nomination with Austin.
But none of Towne’s screenplays received the enduring stature of “Chinatown,” which carries on to be researched by writers and movie-university pupils and is deemed 1 of the very best motion picture scripts at any time penned. Based on a vote of its customers, the Writers Guild of The us rated “Chinatown” at No. 3 in its 2006 record of the “101 Greatest Screenplays,” powering “Casablanca” and “The Godfather.”
In presenting Towne with an honorary doctorate of wonderful arts degree at the American Movie Institute’s commencement ceremony in 2014, Coppola explained, “You have in your script for ‘Chinatown’ offered the de facto blueprint for aspiring screenwriters, a platonic excellent of both of those composition and design and style taught as a template close to the entire world.”
In the 2020 reserve “The Massive Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood,” author Sam Wasson revealed that 1 of Hollywood’s most effective-regarded script doctors gained uncredited enable himself: For additional than 40 a long time, Towne paid out Edward Taylor, a longtime shut good friend, to help him with his scripts, like “Chinatown.”
Taylor, who was Towne’s literature- and theater-loving roommate at Pomona Faculty and later taught sociology and data at USC, began secretly operating with Towne on his scripts in the mid-1960s and, according to the e book, evidently experienced no problem with remaining nameless. Towne, Wasson wrote, continued to seek advice from with Taylor in individual or by telephone until eventually Taylor’s loss of life in 2013.
Towne, who was not interviewed for the ebook, built a veiled public acknowledgment of his mystery collaborator in an introductory essay for a 1983 limited version of the “Chinatown” screenplay: Although crafting “the heart” of the script on Catalina Island in the tumble of 1972, Towne gained periodic visits by his good friend Taylor, whom he explained as obtaining been his Jiminy Cricket, Mycroft Holmes and Edmund Wilson given that their faculty days.
Born Robert Burton Schwartz in Los Angeles on Nov. 23, 1934, Towne was 2 when his family moved to San Pedro, wherever his father purchased a women’s clothing keep termed the Towne Sensible Store. It was not extended just before Lou Schwartz was being termed Mr. Towne.
“I feel he liked that,” Towne explained of his father, who later turned a thriving authentic estate developer, in the Writers Guild Basis job interview. “By the time my brother [Roger] was born, he had lawfully adjusted his name.” (Roger Towne afterwards co-wrote the screenplay for the 1984 movie “The Pure.”)
The loved ones afterwards moved to Rolling Hills on the Palos Verdes Peninsula and then to Brentwood.
At Pomona Faculty in Claremont in the 1950s, Towne analyzed philosophy. He also took a imaginative creating class in which a person of his small tales, centered on a latest stint functioning on a industrial tuna-fishing boat, “got everybody’s awareness,” he recalled.
Whilst in higher education, Towne considered becoming a journalist. But by the late 1950s, Towne, who served a stint in the Military, was in Hollywood taking an acting course taught by blacklisted actor Jeff Corey, whose pupils involved James Coburn, Sally Kellerman and Richard Chamberlain. A different college student was Nicholson, who grew to become Towne’s near mate.
“My teaching as a writer truly came from 7 many years of improvising in that course, and coming to have a emotion for what was effective dramatically, what was productive in phrases of dialogue and just what people could and couldn’t say to be powerful,” Towne recalled.
His very first skilled split arrived when another student in the course, Corman, who as a quickie movie producer and director was there to discover a lot more about the creative system of actors, available him a prospect to create. “It was rough building a dwelling creating for Roger,” Towne reported, “but at the very least he gave me a begin.”
Towne’s initially screenwriting credit was for Corman’s “Last Lady on Earth,” a 1960 science-fiction film in which Towne played one particular of the three starring roles under the identify Edward Wain. Underneath the similar title, he also was a single of the stars of Corman’s “Creature from the Haunted Sea” (1961). For Corman, he also wrote the display screen adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe brief story “The Tomb of Ligeia” (1964), starring Vincent Price.
In addition to his motion picture perform, Towne wrote for tv in the 1960s, which includes “The Male from U.N.C.L.E,” “The Outer Limits,” “The Lloyd Bridges Show” and “The Richard Boone Clearly show.” Significantly afterwards in everyday living, he was a consulting producer on the well-liked television drama “Mad Gentlemen.”
Towne’s screenwriting profession started its upswing when Beatty, the star and producer of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and the film’s director, Arthur Penn, necessary enable with a script prepared by David Newman and Robert Benton. For his contributions, Towne was detailed in the acclaimed hit film’s credits as “creative expert.”
As a screenwriter, Towne is explained by Peter Biskind in his bestselling guide on the New Hollywood era, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” as remaining “unusually literate” in “a town total of dropouts, exactly where several read through guides.”
“He had a serious sense for the fine factors of plot, the nuances of dialogue, experienced the means to describe and contextualize film in the overall body of Western drama and literature,” wrote Biskind.
“He experienced this means, in every website page he wrote and rewrote, to depart a perception of humidity on the page, as if he just breathed on it in some way,” producer Gerald Ayres explained to Biskind. “There was constantly some thing that jostled your sensibilities, that made the looking through of the webpage not just a notion of plot, but the emotion that anything accidental and correct to the lifestyle of a human remaining had happened there.”
In producing “Chinatown,” with its plot revolving all around a large-amount drinking water and serious estate conspiracy, Towne was motivated by things of the controversial heritage of the Los Angeles Aqueduct that brought drinking water from the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada down to L.A. before in the century.
“Everything about it [‘Chinatown’] was an attempt to get an existing genre and imbue it with items from lifestyle,” Towne explained to The Periods in 2004. “Not to do an exotic film about Maltese falcons and jewel-encrusted birds, but to acquire a criminal offense that was suitable in front of your face, that was as basic as h2o and electric power. And a detective who was not a tarnished knight like Philip Marlowe, but kind of a sleazy, charming, dapper man who would only just take [divorce] instances because they made him the most money.”
Prior to the filming of “Chinatown” started in 1973, Towne and Polanski argued regularly throughout the lots of weeks they invested condensing and revising Towne’s lengthy screenplay.
Their biggest struggle was above the ending.
Towne preferred Evelyn Mulwray (Dunaway), the widow of the murdered chief engineer of the Office of H2o and Energy, to eliminate her father, the abundant and ruthlessly strong Noah Cross (John Huston), who experienced raped her as a teenager and was the father of her youthful daughter, whom she was decided to maintain absent from him.
But Polanski, whose expecting actress-wife Sharon Tate experienced been murdered by members of the Manson spouse and children in 1969, experienced some thing considerably additional chilling in brain: He wanted Evelyn to die at the finish and her daughter drop into the palms of her father — evil triumphant.
The director had his way, and the film comes to its memorably stunning summary as Evelyn tries to flee with her daughter in a automobile on a avenue in Chinatown.
A critically acclaimed box-place of work strike, “Chinatown” gained 11 Academy Award nominations, such as finest image, director, actor and actress.
And as Towne, the film’s only Oscar winner, explained to The Periods in 1999, he had considering the fact that arrive to concur that Polanski “was right about the end.”
In 1997, Towne been given the Monitor Laurel Award, the Writers Guild of America’s maximum award for screenwriting, which is specified in recognition of a writer’s entire body of perform.
Towne experienced a daughter, Katharine, with his 1st wife, Julie Payne (the daughter of actors John Payne and Anne Shirley) the relationship ended in divorce. He also had a daughter, Chiara, with his 2nd spouse, Luisa Gaule.
McLellan is a former Instances workers author.
