If Robert Towne tuned suspense as taut as a piano string on his Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown, the real-life tension between him and the film’s director, Roman Polanski, came close to exploding the instrument.
Already at loggerheads over Towne’s late delivery of the script and Polanski’s attempts to condense the bloated screenplay, the pair’s relationship disintegrated when Polanski insisted on changing the ending so that the female protagonist played by Faye Dunaway is killed. At one point Polanski screamed, “Bob, do you think I’m a schmuck?”, to which Towne softly replied through a plume of cigar smoke: “No, you’re a terrific .400 hitter, which means that I think you’re right less than half the time.”
When the film started shooting Polanksi banned Towne from the set. Perhaps unsurprisingly Towne was unhappy with the film and it was a long time before he could appreciate the achievement of what some have cited as the greatest Hollywood screenplay, not least because it was the perfect vehicle for Jack Nicholson who plays JJ Gittes, a cynical private investigator hired by Evelyn Cross Mulwray (Dunaway) to spy on her cheating husband but who stumbles into a murderous web of corruption of instead.
A tall, rumpled figure with a stooping gait, who would work through the night when the proverbial gun was pointed at his head, Towne capitalised on a period when the big studios were receptive to subtler and more offbeat movies that hitherto would have been strictly in the domain of the art house.
Towne had many ideas for his own projects funded by his lucrative sideline as a Hollywood “script doctor”. He demonstrated his talent for finding the missing ingredient by adding a moving scene to the Oscar-winning 1972 film The Godfather, in which Vito Corleone and his son Michael meet for the last time in a garden. The perfectionist Francis Ford Coppola had written the script himself and agonised before hiring Towne. He did not regret it. The scene written the night before it was shot feels spare, but overflows with love, regret and threat.
Michael (Al Pacino) has effectively taken over the “family business” and is trying to convince Vito (Marlon Brando) that he can handle the challenges of a mafia turf war in New York City. Vito turns his sad eyes on Michael and, as his jowls sag, and rasps: “I never wanted this for you. I don’t apologise for taking care of my family. And I refused to be a fool. Dancing on the string of all those big shots. But I thought that when it was your turn that you would be the one to hold the strings … Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone.” The poignancy is broken as Vito snaps back to reality: “Now listen, whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor, don’t forget that.”
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The scene became the talk of the industry and led to Towne making many interventions at $150,000 a time. Script doctoring funded his extravagant lifestyle, often in the carousing company of Warren Beatty and Nicholson — at least when he had not fallen out with them.
Towne had a reputation for combativeness, suffered from periodical writer’s block, was afflicted by various allergies and was also a self-described hypochondriac. The phone kept ringing. The Hollywood producer Gerald Ayres summed up Towne’s subtleties: “He had this ability, in every page he wrote and rewrote, to leave a sense of moisture on the page, as if he just breathed on it in some way. There was always something that jostled your sensibilities, that made the reading of the page not just a perception of plot, but the feeling that something accidental and true to the life of a human being had happened there.”
Robert Schwartz was born in 1934. His parents Lou and Helen were of Romanian and Russian descent. The child grew up in the town of San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, where a corrupt 1930s irrigation scheme that ruined Towne’s grandfather would inspire his script for Chinatown. Towne’s father changed the family’s name in an attempt to ward off antisemitic prejudice and, with the profits from his ladies’ clothing store, prospered as a property developer.
After attending Chadwick School, Towne studied philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont and began taking acting classes in 1958 along with Nicholson, James Coburn and Richard Chamberlain. He described it as essential training for a writer, “to have a feeling for what was effective dramatically, what was effective in terms of dialogue and just what people could and couldn’t say to be effective”.
Another in the class, Roger Corman, soon turned to directing and offered Towne a break writing screenplays for what would become cult B-movies, such as The Last Woman on Earth (1960). Corman retained Towne’s services on several films, including a 1964 adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story The Tomb of Ligeia, starring Vincent Price. His remedy for dealing with Towne’s laxity on deadlines involved locking him in a motel room with a typewriter and a box of his favourite slimline cigars until the work was done.
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Towne’s portal to the big league came courtesy of his reworking of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). He improved the narrative and dramatic effect by shifting scenes, adding realistic details, and shaking over it all some piquant extra dialogue. With violence to the fore, it was an iconoclastic statement, mindful of Vietnam, that caught the zeitgeist.
He would burnish his growing reputation as Hollywood’s hippest screenwriter with Drive, He Said (1971), directed by Nicholson. Towne then adapted Darryl Ponicsán’s novel The Last Detail — a picaresque tale directed by Hal Ashby about two sailors who are detailed to escort a sailor to prison, and elect to show him a good time on the way.
For Shampoo (1975), a comedy about a womanising Beverly Hills hairdresser, Towne laboured so long in trying to create a satisfying structure that a frustrated Warren Beatty seized it from him at the end of 1973. With the production date looming, Beatty refashioned the work in his mould for direction by Ashby. Not for the first time Towne was furious, but the result was a hit.
Such vexations were always tempered by the other possibilities keeping Towne’s mind awhirr. While walking on a beach in the late Seventies, his eye was caught by female athletes training for the Moscow Olympics. He imagined two rival athletes who have a lesbian affair. The result, starring Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly, was Personal Best (1982). With the film way over budget and with Hollywood strike action looming, the producer shut down the production. Towne believed in it so much that he raised the cash to make the film by selling Warner Bros the rights to his much-cherished script for Greystoke, based on Edgar Rice Burrough’s original story about the legend of Tarzan. It would be made into a film directed by Hugh Hudson (obituary, February 10, 2023) many years later, although not much of his original script remained. He regarded it as the best script he ever wrote and the biggest disappointment of his career.
His directorial debut on Personal Best also resulted in the collapse of his marriage to the designer Julie Payne owing to his affair with Donnelly. His wife, whom he had married in 1977, filed for divorce. During the ugly custody battle for their daughter, Katharine, Towne was dropped by Donnelly and consoled himself by moving in with Personal Best’s other star, Hemingway. In 1984 he married Luisa Gaule, with whom he had a daughter, Chiara.
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By the early Eighties it was an open secret in Hollywood that Towne was seeking chemical assistance for his all-night writing vigils. He was known in the studios as “Ol’ write a line, snort a line”, but continued to produce scripts. Tequila Sunrise (1988), with Mel Gibson and Kurt Russell, a drug dealer and cop both with an eye on Michelle Pfeiffer, was a box-office hit and Days of Thunder (1990) led to an unlikely friendship with its star, Tom Cruise.
Cruise enlisted his help on The Firm (1993), a version of John Grisham’s gripping bestseller. He then collaborated with Cruise on souped-up versions of the television series Mission: Impossible (1996) and its sequel four years later. Cruise also produced Without Limits (1998), written and directed by Towne, about the celebrated American runner Steve Prefontaine, who took part in the 1972 Munich Olympics and died in a car crash in 1975.
Yet Towne’s career in Tinseltown remained somewhat chequered after the enormous promise of Chinatown. He had conceived the film as a trilogy and his attempt to make the second film, The Two Jakes, with Towne in the director’s chair, collapsed in acrimony in the mid-Eighties. It was eventually made in 1990, with Nicholson now directing, but it was panned as incomprehensible.
Reflecting on his career, he said philosophically that he had learnt that “all scripts get rewritten”, but never seemed to find the process any less painful. Many noted the crowning irony that after proving to be so adept at streamlining other scripts, Towne was often unable to resist overwriting his own.
Even so, in the end he was magnanimous enough to admit that Polanksi was right about changing the ending to Chinatown.
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Robert Towne, screenwriter and director, was born on November 23, 1934. He died of undisclosed causes on July 1, 2024, aged 89
