Getty Photographs/Fairfax Media
Robert Towne, who gained an Oscar for his Chinatown unique screenplay and was nominated for his The Final Element, Shampoo and Greystoke scripts, died Monday at his house. He was 89.
PR agency McClure & Associates introduced the information on the a part of Towne’s household.
Towne additionally earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and WGA awards for Chinatown, the L.A.-set 1974 thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It was certainly one of three Writers Guild Awards he gained throughout his profession, together with Shampoo and the drama collection Mad Males. He additionally was nominated for The Final Element (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1985). He was honored with teh guild’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1997.
Considerate and tender spoken, Towne was a perfectionist who hated studio conferences and script notes and famously would disappear for months to work on a scene. He coveted his relationships with stars together with Nicholson and Warren Beatty and had a singular present for capturing their persona in display characters — witness Chinatown or The Parallax View. Exasperated when a threatened writers strike shut down pre manufacturing on the latter, he responded to requests for a rewrite by sending his giant canine with a notice stating, “That is all that I may give.”
Born on November 23, 1934, Towne received his begin along with his screenplay for 1960’s Final Lady on Earth earlier than writing for early-’60s TV collection together with The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Lloyd Bridges Present. He went on to work with Roger Corman on movies together with The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) and later co-penned with Sam Peckinpah the 1968 Mexican Revolution movie Villa Rides, starring Yul Brenner, Robert Mitchum and Charles Bronson.
Towne did touch-up script work on The Godfather and another essential movies of the period, however his breakthrough got here with The Final Element. The navy dramedy starring Nicholson as a Navy man tasked with escorting to the brig a inexperienced recruit (Randy Quaid) who has been court-martialed for a petty offense. Otis Younger, Clifton James and Carol Kane co-starred. That movie would arrange Towne’s career-defining screenplay the next 12 months.
Directed by Roman Polanski and produced by Robert Evans, Chinatown advised the story of California’s water-rights wars of the early 1900s. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards together with Greatest Image, however solely Towne would win amid that 12 months’s dominance by one other Paramount Photos basic, The Godfather Half II.
At its inception, Chinatown appeared like a dream venture. As Peter Bart — who was VP Manufacturing at Paramount Photos through the period — wrote in a 2020 column for Deadline, then-rising star Nicholson had developed a friendship with Towne throughout manufacturing of Simple Rider and implored him to create a Raymond Chandler style detective story for him. Towne confided that concept to Evans, then manufacturing chief at Paramount, who was desirous to increase his portfolio as a producer, with the added compensation.
Whereas Evans coveted a Towne-Nicholson collaboration as his first solo manufacturing credit score, there was a catch: He didn’t need to make a film about both China or Chinatown. Towne patiently defined that Chinatown was solely “a mind-set,” whose intricacies concerned incest, homicide and a scheme to steal a metropolis’s water provide.
Unmoved, Evans instructed Towne to desert Chinatown, providing as an alternative a payday of $175,000 to adapt The Nice Gatsby. Towne angrily identified {that a} screenplay based mostly on the Gatsby novel can be much more complicated than Chinatown.
To show his level, Towne turned his again on Paramount, and borrowed $10,000 to lease a bed-and-breakfast cabin on Catalina the place he would begin writing. Whereas he relished his freedom, it proved illusory.
Over time, Towne would discover himself re-crafting his story with steering from a succession of contributors with robust opinions. First got here Nicholson, who had concepts in regards to the characters however felt that the specifics of dialogue weren’t related. Subsequent got here the Polish-born Polanski, who confessed he was baffled by the subplots of Los Angeles politics. Lastly there was Evans, who discovered the narrative impenetrable.
One recurring subject of disagreement: violence. Solely two years earlier, Polanski had skilled the homicide of his pregnant spouse Sharon Tate by the hands of the Manson Household, and he now insisted that the violence can be specific in his new film, not implied. “If a filmmaker tries to keep away from upsetting folks, that may be immoral,” he argued. Even the bodily battle between Nicholson, as Harry Gittes, and Dunaway, as Evelyn Mulwray, can be graphic in its execution.
As soon as manufacturing was completed, additional disagreements ensued. The ending was re-written, the unique rating deserted. Nicholson felt the “look” of the movie as a complete was “too brilliant.” When lastly screened for critics doubts vanished. The reception was ecstatic, the film declared an prompt basic.
Towne then co-penned with Paul Schrader The Yakuza, Sydney Pollack’s crime drama starring Mitchum, Ken Takakura and Brian Keith.
His subsequent movie additionally was the business and important hit Shampoo (1975), starring Beatty as a Beverly Hills hairstylist and playboy who goals of opening his personal salon. The starry forged additionally included Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant and Jack Warden.
Throughout the Nineteen Seventies, Towne additionally did script-doctor work on Beatty’s directorial debut Heaven Can Wait, together with different screenplays together with Orca, The Missouri Breaks and The Parallax View.
Towne later wrote and made his directorial and producing debut with Private Greatest, the 1982 sports activities drama starring Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly as lesbian athletes making an attempt to make the Crew USA Olympic crew, should to the dismay of their coach (Scott Glenn). It ranked amongst AFI’s High 300 sports activities motion pictures of all time.
Towne continued to pen screenplays all through the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, together with the 1990 Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes, once more starring Nicholson. His wrote the screenplay for the 1984 Tarzan story Greystoke with a watch to direct. However the poor monetary exhibiting of Private Greatest led Warner Bros handy the helming reins to Hugh Hudson, who was scorching off Greatest Image Oscar winner Chariots of Hearth in 1981.
Towne was angered by the transfer and had his identify taken off the Greystoke screenplay — opting as an alternative to credit score the script to P.H. Vazak, his canine. It went on to attain an Tailored Screenplay Oscar nom for “Vazak,” the canine. It was the primary Academy Award nom for any Tarzan movie.
After that, Towne proceed to work on different folks’s scripts earlier than his subsequent writing and directing gig on the 1988 drug-crimes drama Tequila Dawn, starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell.
Info relating to a celebration of life ceremony shall be introduced at a later date.
MORE TO COME…
