Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Shampoo,” “The Final Element” and different critically acclaimed movies whose work on “Chinatown” turned a mannequin for the style and helped outline the attraction of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne “handed away peacefully surrounded by his loving household” on Monday at his house in Los Angeles, his supervisor, Carey McClure, advised CBS Information in an announcement. The reason for dying was not given.
In an trade that has spawned rueful jokes concerning the standing of the author, Towne for a time loved a status corresponding to that of the actors and administrators he labored with. 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 loved an uncommon degree of inventive management. A uncommon “auteur” amongst screenwriters, Towne was capable of convey a deeply private and poignant imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles to the display screen.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Pictures for AFI
In a 2006 interview with the Related Press, Towne stated: “It is a very imaginary metropolis. It is the westernmost a part of America. It is form of a final resort. It is a spot the place folks go to make their goals come true. However they’re at all times disillusioned.”
Identified in Hollywood for his excessive brow and bushy beard, Towne received an Academy Award for his position in “Chinatown” and was nominated three extra instances for his roles in “The Final Element,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he acquired a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, just like the characters he created, was insightful, rebellious and utterly authentic,” “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant stated on X.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s clothes retailer closed as a result of Nice Despair. His father modified the household identify to Towne.
Towne’s breakthrough got here after an extended profession 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 Corman. In a basic present enterprise story, he owed his breakthrough partly to his psychiatrist, by whom he met Beatty, one other affected person. Whereas Beatty was engaged on “Bonnie and Clyde,” Towne was employed to assessment Robert Benton and David Newman’s script, and he was with him on the set in the course of the Texas shoot.
Towne was not talked about in “Bonnie and Clyde,” the 1967 crime thriller, and for years he was a favourite author. He helped write “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View,” “Heaven Can Wait” and different movies, and described himself as “a backup pitcher who may pitch a complete inning, not a complete recreation.” However Towne was credited with Nicholson’s “The Final Element,” Betty’s intercourse comedy “Shampoo,” and was immortalized within the 1974 movie “Chinatown,” a thriller set in the course of the Nice Despair.
Directed by Roman Polanski, Chinatown stars Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gates, a personal investigator who’s tasked with following Evelyn Mulwray’s (Faye Dunaway) husband, the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy, and Gates finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, performed by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Impressed by Raymond Chandler’s creativeness, Towne recreates the menace and temper of basic Los Angeles crime movies, however casts Gates’s meandering journey by a grander, extra sinister Southern California. The clues pile up in a timeless detective story, main inexorably to tragedy, summed up by one of the crucial repeated traces in cinema historical past, the bleakly fatalistic phrases {that a} devastated Gates receives from his companion Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Neglect it, Jake, it is Chinatown.”
The backstory of Chinatown has turn out to be a form of detective story in itself, and has been explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, The Child Stays within the Image; Peter Biskind’s East Riders, Raging Bulls, a historical past of Hollywood within the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies; and Sam Wasson’s The Huge Goodbye, which is solely dedicated to Chinatown. In The Huge Goodbye, printed in 2020, Wasson claims that Towne had vital help from a ghostwriter—his former faculty 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 necessary.
After the mid-Nineteen Seventies, studios gained extra energy, and Towne’s standing declined. His directorial efforts, together with The Better of Life and Tequila Dawn, had blended outcomes. The Jackian, the long-awaited sequel to Chinatown, was a important and business disappointment when it was launched in 1990, resulting in a short lived rift between Towne and Nicholson.
Across the similar time, he agreed to work on a movie far faraway from the art-house aspirations of the Nineteen Seventies, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer’s Days of Thunder, starring Tom Cruise as a race automotive driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 movie was notoriously overbudget and critically panned, although it has followers together with Quentin Tarantino and numerous auto racing followers. Towne’s screenplay even popularized an expression Duvall makes use of after Cruise complains about being hit by one other automotive: “He didn’t hit you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t push you. He rubbed you.”
“And Robin, son, is racing.”
Towne later labored with Cruise on The Agency and the primary two movies within the Mission: Not possible sequence. His most up-to-date movie was Ask the Mud, a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed and launched in 2006. Towne has been married twice, the second time to Louisa Jules, and has two youngsters. His brother Roger Towne has additionally written screenplays, together with The Pure.
