Obituary: Robert Towne, Oscar-winning screenwriter and director best known for ‘Chinatown’ who was one of Hollywood’s most famous writers

The film depicts the corruption behind the development of Los Angeles in the late 1930s. A private eye, JJ Gittes (Jack Nicholson), accidentally uncovers corruption and incest as he delves into the lives of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and her tycoon father Noah Cross (John Huston).

The film won both the Golden Globe and the Oscar for best screenplay and is now a film school set text, something Towne found mysterious.

“What I hit upon just by a kind of monkey-at-a-typewriter trial and error — that somebody can extrapolate a formula from it astonishes me,” he said. “Maybe there are rules and maybe I stumbled across them, but I don’t even know what ‘story-sense’ is. I had the same hard time [on later work] that I had on Chinatown.”

As a script doctor, he also left his mark on other Hollywood classics, including Bonnie and Clyde, The Parallax View and The Godfather

In its final form, the film diverges from Towne’s script, which originally killed off John Huston’s character at the end. Instead, director Roman Polanski insisted Faye Dunaway should be killed — an ending Towne called “so cynical it works against itself”.

Chinatown came in the middle of a string of hits for Towne, starting with The Last Detail (1973) and ending with Shampoo (1975).

As a script doctor, he also left his mark on other Hollywood classics, including Bonnie and Clyde, The Parallax View and The Godfather (for which he was uncredited). In the 1990s, he enjoyed a renaissance as Tom Cruise’s screenwriter of choice following Days of Thunder (1990) with Mission: Impossible (1996) and its first sequel.

But Towne also had his share of frustration and failure. A number of his films were badly received or else he had taken his name off the credits because he was unhappy with the end result.

Greystoke, a project which he had been nurturing for years, was eventually taken out of his hands and made by the British director, Hugh Hudson. Towne credited his work on the final screenplay, which received an Oscar nomination, to his Hungarian sheepdog, PH Vazak. Neither of them saw the film.

Although one of the most successful screenwriters of his generation, Towne’s spasmodic career showed as well as any other the unpredictability of film-making. The painful process of watching his scripts being destroyed by Hollywood producers eventually led Towne to direct his own films, but these also met with little success.

​Robert Burton Towne was born on November 23, 1934, in Los Angeles. His father was a woman’s clothing store owner of Russian-Jewish descent who changed his name from Schwartz to Towne after he bought the Towne Smart Shop in San Pedro, just south of LA, where Robert and his brother grew up.

Towne harboured aspirations to be a writer from a very early age, writing his first story when he was six. The multi-ethnic surroundings in which he was brought up had a profound influence on his later work. As he recalled to John Brady in The Craft of the Screenwriter (1981), “I grew up amidst fishermen, Mexicans, chief petty officers in the merchant marine with three-day growths of beard who could come up and wheeze on you.”

That atmosphere permeates the setting of Towne’s Chinatown, a southern California just beginning to decay into suburbia, a Los Angeles where one could still smell eucalyptus, pepper trees, and water coming out of the ground. After high school, Towne studied English and philosophy in college. He worked for a time in military intelligence and as a real-estate salesman before joining a commercial tuna fishing operation.

Towne first became interested in screenwriting in 1958 when he began taking a Hollywood acting class. Among the students were James Coburn, Richard Chamberlain and Jack Nicholson, who became Towne’s roommate.

One of the exercises, at which Nicholson excelled, influenced Towne’s evolving feel for dramatic structure.

“You are given a situation and told that you must talk about everything but the situation to advance the action,” Towne explained. “Take a very banal situation — a guy trying to seduce a girl. He talks about anything but seduction, anything from a rubber duck he had as a child to the food on the table... It’s inventive, and it teaches you something about writing.”

Watching such improvisations, he learned “the power of dealing obliquely or elliptically with situations, because most people rarely confront things head on. They’re afraid to.”

That experience also gave Towne a sense of Nicholson’s specific strengths that proved invaluable in their later work together.

Towne’s first break came from filmmaker Roger Corman who directed Towne’s screenplay The Last Woman on Earth (1960). In 1967, Warren Beatty hired Towne to rework the script of the film Bonnie and Clyde. Towne emphasised the inevitability of the outlaws’ deaths, asking “when would it happen” rather than “if it would happen”.

Although he was much in demand after that, Towne was too ill to write a complete script. Until his condition of continuous exhaustion was diagnosed in 1972 as a mixture of allergies, Towne was convinced that it was psychological, a “writer’s hypochondria”.

Although he went uncredited for his work on The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola publicly acknowledged Towne’s assistance when accepting the Oscar for best screen adaptation

Towne then went on to write some unsuccessful films. Villa Rides (1968), which he wrote with Sam Peckinpah and later described as a “textbook on how not to make a movie”. ​

Although he went uncredited for his work on The Godfather (1972), Francis Ford Coppola publicly acknowledged Towne’s assistance when accepting the Oscar for best screen adaptation. Towne’s most famous contribution was the scene in which Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) passes on his domain to his son (Al Pacino), saying: “I never wanted this for you.”

The screenplay for The Last Detail (1973), written at the request of Jack Nicholson, earned Towne his first Oscar nomination. In the film two seasoned sailors (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young), charged with transporting a young man (Randy Quaid) to prison, choose to give him a taste of life before fulfilling their mission. Towne became one of Hollywood’s hottest writers, commanding up to $150,000 (€138, 585) for adaptations and $300,000 for original scripts, plus a percentage of box-office receipts.

In 1990 Towne wrote the screenplay for Tom Cruise’s Days of Thunder. Although his screenplay was described as over-mechanical, Cruise and Towne went on to make several more hits.

A 1990 sequel to Chinatown, however, named The Two Jakes, written by Towne and eventually directed by Jack Nicholson, was a disaster. Towne fell out with Chinatown’s original producer Robert Evans.

When shooting finally began, after a delay of five years, Towne would fax the final pages of the script from Bora Bora. As a result, he also fell out with his old roommate Jack Nicholson.

Shortly before he died, Towne told Variety that he had completed the scripts for a forthcoming Chinatown prequel television series for Netflix, directed by David Fincher.

Robert Towne married, first, in 1977, actress Julie Payne and had a daughter, actress Katharine Towne. That marriage was dissolved in 1982 and two years later he married Luisa Gaule, with whom he had another daughter, writer and director Chiara Towne.