Robert Towne Always Knew How To Bring Out The Best In The Movie Stars He Befriended

Robert Towne is a giant, a pillar of the New American cinema which is arguably the best era of film in the short history of the medium. He was one of the film brats, that first generation of filmmakers who went to film school and learned there how to make movies by studying other movies. He understood, as they all did, how the nation had been torn apart by the backlash to Civil Rights and two shining, progressive years at the end of the 1960s that ultimately saw the assassination and burial of every major progressive leader to have emerged in the United States, making the mortal mistake of promising to unite the poor against the wealthy. The film brats were the product of a relatively new idea that film was not just a commodity, a product/pastime of occasionally astonishing liquidity, but an art form and a political weapon that could capture and communicate the spirit of an entire age. After experiencing one of the few “down” periods at the end of the old Hollywood studio era, the town gave over the keys to the kingdom to the “brats” — these arrogant, cocksure geniuses and other varieties of savant who got major commercial conglomerates for a while, in their desperation, to invest in their idiosyncratic pet projects. Why were audiences rejecting bloated Dr. Doolittle musicals while flocking to Easy Rider? The film brats were smart so they knew their time was short — it had to be, nothing so personal gets bankrolled forever — so they worked too hard, took too many drugs, and between 1967 and 1981, in the midst of the perfect storm that made them possible, they created a few of the greatest films ever made.

As an acting student, Towne boasted Jack Nicholson as a classmate, the man for whom Towne would create arguably Jack’s signature role, skeezy private dick Jake Gittes in a script for Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. That script is widely considered to be the best screenplay written in the modern era, if not of all time. (Towne wrote the sequel, too, The Two Jakes, though the doomed project nearly tore apart their friendship.)

Robert Towne’s films are all, at least in some way, about friendship. All this is important in understanding why Towne loved movie stars: not only loved them, but understood them inside and out, could hear how they talked, could see how they carried themselves and maybe most importantly, how everyone in their orbit behaved in their wake. Towne used that information, I think, to befriend them, forging close personal bonds with Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Tom Cruise that he parlayed into a few masterpieces: Bonnie & Clyde and Shampoo for Beatty — making him impotent in the former and so oversexed he loses all forward impetus in the latter. At Beatty’s request, Towne did extensive, again uncredited work on The Parallax View, sitting on-set, watching the Watergate hearings with Beatty between takes and conjuring pages to shoot that day to reflect which way the national wind was blowing. Joe Frady, the investigative reporter Beatty plays in that film, steadily unravels the identity of a corporation formed to carry out political assassinations and as reward for that knowledge, he and his friends are murdered and framed for unimaginable crimes. Towne punched up the script for Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, too, that ends similarly for Beatty’s overconfident frontiersman who believes he’s making a deal when really he’s busily digging his own grave.

Towne loved movie stars, but its the supporting characters in his films that sing. Part of fully understanding the gravitational pull of stars, after all, is being able to chart the course of satellites in their orbit. Consider Burt Young in Chinatown as poor, cuckolded Curly: a minor role but so fully realized in his initial despair (“All right, Curly, enough’s enough. You can’t eat the Venetian blinds, I just had them installed on Wednesday”) and then in his fearful resolve to repay his debt and serve as a driver for the film’s conclusion — that he becomes one of the most memorable parts of a film that’s already impossible to shake. Think of director John Huston as the vile industrialist Noah Cross, greedily feasting on a poached fish and then crying crocodile tears as he collects his grand/daughter from the scene of an obscene injustice. Even the film’s greatest line — the greatest line in the greatest screenplay from one of the greatest films of the paranoid decade — isn’t given to Jack Nicholson or Faye Dunaway, but to veteran TV character actor Joe Mantell: “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” I’m spending less time on Chinatown than most remembrances of Robert Towne might because when I think of it, I think of it as a true collaboration between Towne and Roman Polanski: a personality at least as insistent and abrasive as Towne’s (who has asked for his name to be removed from more films than most people get to write), who rewrote the ending of Chinatown to ensure Evelyn’s (Dunaway) death. Towne has famously argued his happy ending to be the superior one. Given how many of Towne’s scripts end with the death of its protagonist (and how his script for Brian DePalma’s Mission: Impossible film wipes out almost all of the Impossible Missions team in the first ten minutes), I think closer to the truth is Towne knew Polanski was right and he would rather be thought a lesser writer than ever wrong. Polanski would ask him back to punch-up his wonderfully-sprung, hallucinogenic Frantic. Towne was difficult, but, in his own words, he got things made. He was also a brilliant, lovely writer of dialogue. Maybe the best to ever do it. Towne loved stars, but he knew they could only be defined by their support and so no one in his scripts is unimportant, without unique and compelling motivation and individual quirks and peculiarities. 

More, Towne had a contempt for the powerful and the rigidity of the status quo, a strong grasp of irony and of irony’s relationship to nihilism. Irascible, irritable, even antagonistic the one time I got to interview him (after the release of Ask the Dust, his final film as both writer and director), it didn’t go well. Looking back I recognize his attitude as impatience answering questions from someone (me) too far behind to ask any of the important ones. Given a do-over, I wouldn’t ask anything about Chinatown or Beatty or much at all about the brats and a period of time and body of work so studied and combed over that further examination is more akin to tourism than archaeology. It’s like having a few minutes with the Rolling Stones in their seventh decade of existence and asking to hear “Satisfaction.” The immature impulse when in the presence of your heroes is to desire they recreate their greatest hits in a private audience. Given another chance, I would start with the first film of his I ever saw, one he wrote and directed, Tequila Sunrise.

I was fifteen, in love with Michelle Pfeiffer and in awe of Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell — and here’s this film, a twisty, sexy crime drama less about the drug heist MacGuffin that drives it than about the Pat Garrett/Billy the Kid friendship at its center, running on the strength of all that starpower, sure, but also on extraordinary supporting performances by J.T. Walsh as an overzealous detective and a gorgeous Raul Julia as a Mexican drug agent who might be more than he seems. The film is in love with film. Every part of it is rapture: Gibson has never been more like Bogie and Pfeiffer has never been more like Bacall. There’s sadness to it because for as great as it is, it’s not as great as the old John Huston and Allan Dwan films to which Towne owes his tough guy/classicist aesthetic. I would ask Towne about being one kind of giant while wishing he was another: the actor he trained to be; the director he longed to be who, over the course of four films, could never quite find both critical and popular approval for the same film.

And then I would ask him about his two plangent, irrefutably personal sports films: his tough, intimate, landmark LGBTQ film Personal Best and then his biopic about the runner Steve Prefontaine Without Limits starring Billy Crudup and a magisterial Donald Sutherland as Prefontaine’s coach, Bill Bowerman. Both pictures are uncompromising, bruising films about how ambition colors everything in a person’s life — how it can, if you let it, sap away all of ones joy and humanity. I think a lot about the scene in Personal Best where track teammates Chris (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory (Patrice Donnelly) make love for the first time and then, in the afterglow, examine one another’s bodies intimately, slowly. Chris asks how Tory got a scar on her knee and then says “Gosh, I’ve never been hurt.” She carries the moment with so much heartbreaking innocence, this line that holds such immense foreboding and, indeed, irony. If it were someone other than Hemingway, a line like this might feel mawkish. I think Towne was an underestimated director and this is exhibit one in my argument. Personal Best is wonderfully written, of course, but it’s also smartly cast and intuitively-directed. Towne has a particular eye for bodies in rest and motion. (Remember the hot tub sex scene in Tequila Sunrise?) And even as he obsessively captures the drama and strain of physical competition, he doesn’t lose his thematic cynicism and skepticism about the abuses of systemic power. Chris and Tory achieve their “personal bests” on the track, but at the severe cost of a separation engineered by Chris’ mephistophelean coach. Even their professional victories prove pyrrhic at the end as the United States’ boycott of the Moscow Olympics strand them short of their sport’s pinnacle. At the end of Without Limits, Prefontaine’s coach gives a eulogy for the runner. He says:

“All my life, man and boy, I’ve operated under the assumption that the main idea in running was to win the race. Naturally, when I became a coach I tried to teach people how to do that. Tried to teach Pre how to do that. Tried like hell to teach Pre to do that. And Pre taught me. Taught me I was wrong. Pre, you see, was troubled by knowing that a mediocre effort can win a race and a magnificent effort can lose one. Winning a race wouldn’t necessarily demand that he give it everything he had from start to finish. He never ran any other way. I tried to get him to, God knows I tried… but… Pre was stubborn. He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory. ‘A race is a work of art’; that’s what he said, that’s what he believed and he was out to make it one every step of the way. Of course he wanted to win. Those who saw him compete and those who competed against him were never in any doubt how much he wanted to win. But how he won mattered to him more. Pre thought I was a hard case. But he finally got it through my head that the real purpose of running isn’t to win a race. It’s to test to the limits of the human heart. That he did… Nobody did it more often. Nobody did it better.”

I have to think that Robert Towne shared some of these sentiments in this film he picked so late in his career: the idea that a race is a work of art, every step like a frame in a picture or a page in a screenplay, the one following the next and dependent on the former for power and stability. I wonder if he hoped this eulogy would speak of him, too, one day. If I had it to do again, sit down with Robert Towne for thirty minutes, I would ask him about the limits of the human heart, about friendship’s uses and abuses, and about the influence of celestial bodies on terrestrial objects. I think his answers are all there, embedded inextricably in his intimidating body of work. The list of films he touched in some way include some of the most important films in the modern age: he wrote the scene in The Godfather where Vito apologizes to Michael for pulling him into the family business, Hal Ashby’s heartbroken The Last Detail, Nicholson’s directorial debut Drive, He Said with Terrence Malick. He wrote the episode of The Outer Limits where Robert Duvall is genetically altered to infiltrate an invading alien force only to find his real humanity, grace, and friendship when humanity has been robbed of him by a capricious human military. Towne was a clockmaker in a time of them, the eternal gadfly, eternally restless and unsatisfied. And now he’s gone. Robert Towne, July 1, 2024, at rest at last. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available for purchase.