Robert Towne, Oscar-winning screenplay writer, dies at 89

NEW YORK (AP) — Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay author of “Shampoo,” “The Final Element” and different acclaimed movies whose work on “Chinatown” grew to become a mannequin of the artwork type and helped outline the jaded attract of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.

Towne died Monday surrounded by household at his house in Los Angeles, mentioned publicist Carri McClure. She declined to touch upon any reason behind loss of life.

In an trade which gave start to rueful jokes in regards to the author’s standing, Towne for a time held status similar to the actors and administrators he labored with. By his friendships with two of the largest stars of the Nineteen Sixties and ‘70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote a few of the signature movies of an period when artists held an uncommon stage of inventive management. The uncommon “auteur” amongst display writers, Towne managed to carry a extremely private and influential imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles onto the display.

“It’s a metropolis that’s so illusory,” Towne instructed The Related Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a type of place of final resort. It’s a spot the place, in a phrase, folks go to make their goals come true. They usually’re eternally dissatisfied.”

Recognizable round Hollywood for his excessive brow and full beard, Towne gained an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three different occasions, for “The Final Element,” “Shampoo” and “Greystroke.” In 1997, he obtained a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.

“His life, just like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and completely (unique),” mentioned “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on X.

Towne’s success got here after a protracted stretch of working in tv, together with “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Present,” and on low-budget motion pictures for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a basic present enterprise story, he owed his breakthrough partly to his psychiatrist, by means of whom he met Beatty, a fellow affected person. As Beatty labored on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he introduced in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set whereas the film was filmed in Texas.

Towne’s contributions have been uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark crime movie launched in 1967, and for years he was a favourite ghost author. He helped out on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait” amongst others and referred to himself as a “reduction pitcher who may are available for an inning, not pitch the entire sport.” However Towne was credited by title for Nicholson’s macho “The Final Element” and Beatty’s intercourse comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set in the course of the Nice Melancholy.

“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a personal detective requested to observe the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (performed by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy and Gittes finds himself caught 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 resurrected the menace and temper of a basic Los Angeles movie noir, however forged Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey throughout a grander and extra insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate right into a timeless detective story, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by the one of the crucial repeated traces in film historical past, phrases of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his associate Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Neglect it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

Towne’s script has been a staple of movie writing lessons ever since, though it additionally serves as a lesson in how motion pictures typically get made and within the dangers of crediting any movie to a single viewpoint. He would acknowledge working intently with Polanski as they revised and tightened the story and arguing fiercely with the director over the movie’s despairing ending — an ending Polanski pushed for and Towne later agreed was the suitable selection (Nobody has formally been credited for writing “Neglect it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”).

However the idea started with Towne, who had turned down the prospect to adapt “The Nice Gatsby” for the display so he may work on “Chinatown,” partly impressed by a e-book printed in 1946, Carey McWilliams’ “Southern California: An Island on the Land.”

“In it was a chapter known as ‘Water, water, water,’ which was a revelation to me. And I believed ‘Why not do an image a few crime that’s proper out in entrance of all people,‘” he instructed The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.

“As a substitute of a jewel-encrusted falcon, make it one thing as prevalent as water taps, and make a conspiracy out of that. And after studying about what they have been doing, dumping water and ravenous the farmers out of their land, I spotted the visible and dramatic potentialities have been huge.”

The again story of “Chinatown” has itself turn into a form of 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 Nineteen Sixties-Nineteen Seventies Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s “The Massive Goodbye,” devoted fully to “Chinatown.” In “The Massive Goodbye,” printed in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost author — former school roommate Edward Taylor. Based on “The Massive 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” mattered extra.

Wasson additionally wrote that the film’s well-known closing line originated with a vice cop who had instructed Towne that crimes in Chinatown have been seldom prosecuted.

“Robert Towne as soon as mentioned that Chinatown is a frame of mind,” Wasson wrote. “Not only a place on the map in Los Angeles, however a situation of complete consciousness virtually indistinguishable from blindness. Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up at the hours of darkness — that’s Chinatown. Pondering you’ve obtained it discovered and realizing you’re lifeless — that’s Chinatown.”

The studios assumed extra energy after the mid-Nineteen Seventies and Towne’s standing declined. His personal efforts at directing, together with “Private Finest” and “Tequila Dawn,” had blended outcomes. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a industrial and important disappointment when launched in 1990 and led to a short lived estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.

Across the identical time, he agreed to work on a film far faraway from the art-house aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer manufacturing “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a race automobile driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over price range and principally panned, though its admirers embody Quentin Tarantino and numerous racing followers. And Towne’s script popularized an expression utilized by Duvall after Cruise complains one other automobile slammed him: “He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t nudge you. He rubbed you.

“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.’”

Towne later labored with Cruise on “The Agency” and the primary two “Mission: Unimaginable” motion pictures. His most up-to-date movie was “Ask the Mud,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that got here out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two youngsters. His brother, Roger Towne, additionally wrote screenplays, his credit together with “The Pure.”

Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s enterprise, a costume store, closed down due to the Nice Melancholy. (His father modified the household title to Towne). He had all the time beloved to jot down and was impressed to work in motion pictures by the proximity of the Warner Bros. Theater and from studying the critic James Agee. For a time, Towne labored on a tuna boat and would communicate typically of its influence.

“I’ve recognized fishing with writing in my thoughts to the extent that every script is sort of a journey that you simply’re taking — and you might be fishing,” he instructed the Writers Guild Affiliation in 2013. “Generally they each contain an act of religion … Generally it’s sheer religion alone that sustains you, since you suppose, ‘God rattling it, nothing — not a chew as we speak. Nothing is occurring.’”

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AP Movie Author Jake Coyle contributed to this report.