Mr. Towne was no stranger to the pleasures and perils of that hedonistic time. His first marriage, to the actress Julie Payne, ended bitterly after he had affairs with each Patrice Donnelly and Mariel Hemingway, who co-starred as monitor athletes within the first movie he directed, the 1982 box-office flop “Private Finest.” (There have been additionally rumors of rampant cocaine use on the set.) His profession started an extended decline at about the identical time, though he by no means stopped writing.
Mr. Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz on Nov. 23, 1934, in Los Angeles, and spent his early years within the blue-collar fishing port of San Pedro, Calif. When he was about 7, he noticed his first film, “Sergeant York.” He later mentioned he obtained hooked on films that day.
His father, Lou, owned a girls’s clothes retailer however had his eye on larger issues. He modified the household title from Schwartz to Towne, obtained into the actual property enterprise, and finally moved together with his spouse, Helen, and their two sons to the gated neighborhood of Rolling Hills in prosperous Palos Verdes, Calif.
Robert attended the unique Chadwick Faculty there, then studied philosophy and English at Pomona School, graduating in 1956. Whereas taking an appearing class, he met one other aspiring thespian, Jack Nicholson. The 2 would develop into shut associates and collaborators, though they might finally fall out over the making of a sequel to “Chinatown.”
Mr. Towne started his profession writing for tv reveals like “The Outer Limits” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and for Roger Corman’s B-movie manufacturing facility. He each wrote and acted in “The Final Lady on Earth” (1960), a usually bare-bones Corman manufacturing. Extra prestigious work, a lot of it uncredited rewrites of others’ scripts, quickly adopted.
His “Chinatown” Oscar didn’t come with out agony. The film focuses on a non-public eye, Jake Gittes (Mr. Nicholson), who uncovers an advanced scheme by which energy brokers in Thirties Los Angeles plan to get wealthy by controlling the drought-stricken metropolis’s water provide. The film’s darkish undertow comes from Gittes’s discovery that the murdered water commissioner’s spouse, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), gave start to a daughter after being raped by her diabolical father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
