The screenwriter who penned Chinatown
Robert Towne's mastery of storytelling made him the major voice in the New Hollywood wave of the 1970s. Nominated for best-screenplay Oscars three years in a row, including for The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975), he won with the gritty noir Chinatown (1974), a tale of greed and corruption centering on water rights in Los Angeles. The script, still taught in film schools as a masterpiece of three-act structure, was a struggle for Towne. He wrote it as a vehicle for his good friend and roommate Jack Nicholson. But he butted heads with director Roman Polanski, who insisted on a much darker ending than Towne had envisioned, and the two men battled for weeks. Polanski's gut-punch finish — "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" — was like "the tunnel at the end of the light," Towne said. But he later conceded, "Chinatown would have been a disaster without him."Â
Born Robert Bertram Schwartz — his shop-owner father later changed the family name — Towne grew up in the working-class port of San Pedro, Calif. After studying literature and philosophy at Pomona College, he moved to Los Angeles to start work in the B-movie world of Roger Corman. Thanks to his "pitch-perfect dialogue and soul-searching vignettes," said The Washington Post, he quickly became sought after as a script doctor, writing a pivotal scene in The Godfather (1972). But his "talent came with baggage." Renowned as "a perfectionist," said Deadline, he tended to "disappear for months to work on a scene." Still, actors like Tom Cruise adored him. He wrote the Cruise flicks Days of Thunder (1990) and The Firm (1993) as well as the first two Mission Impossible films.Â
Towne's directing career was marked by "intelligent passion projects," said The Guardian, but the results were mixed. The first film he directed, Personal Best (1982), was a box-office flop, and he had affairs with both co-stars, Patrice Donnelly and Mariel Hemingway. Tequila Sunrise (1988) was a hit, but his attempt at a Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes (1990) saw him removed from the director's chair. Yet toward the end of his life, he returned to the Chinatown story, co-writing a yet-unreleased prequel series for Netflix that goes into the backstory of the Nicholson character. "Small details that are touched on in the film are given life and breadth," he said this year, "in a way that surprised even me." |