Robert Towne, screenwriter of 'Chinatown' and 'Shampoo,' dead: NPR

NEW YORK — Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Shampoo, The last detail and other films, the script for which Chinatown became a model of the art form and helped define the pampered appeal of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.

Towne died Monday surrounded by family at his Los Angeles home, publicist Carri McClure said. She declined to comment on the cause of death.

In an industry that gave rise to rueful jokes about the status of the writer, Towne enjoyed for a time a prestige comparable to that of the actors and directors with whom he worked. Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the defining films of an era when artists had an unusual degree of creative control.

A rare “auteur” among screenwriters, Towne managed to bring to the screen a very personal and influential vision of Los Angeles.

“It's such an illusionary city,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It's the westernmost west in America. It's kind of a last resort. It's a place where, in short, people go to make their dreams come true. And they're always disappointed.”

Towne is recognizable in Hollywood by his high forehead and full beard. He won an Academy Award for Chinatown and was nominated three more times for The last detail, Shampoo And GraystokeIn 1997, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.

“His life, like the characters he created, was sharp, iconoclastic and wholly (original),” said Shampoo actor Lee Grant in X.

Towne's success came after a long period of working in television, including The man from UNCLE And The Lloyd Bridges Show, and on low-budget films for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show business story, he owed his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. While Beatty was working on Bonnie and Clyde, He brought Towne in to review Robert Benton and David Newman's script and had him on set while the film was being shot in Texas.

Towne's contributions were not mentioned Bonnie and Clyde, the groundbreaking crime film released in 1967, and for many years he was a favorite ghostwriter. He helped write The Godfather, the parallax image And Heaven can wait and called himself, among other things, a “relief pitcher who could pitch an inning but didn't have to pitch the whole game.”

But Towne was singled out for Nicholson's macho style The last detail and Beatty's sex comedy Shampoo and was immortalized by Chinatown, the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.

Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as JJ “Jake” Gittes, a private investigator hired to follow Evelyn Mulwray's (Faye Dunaway) husband, chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who finds Gittes caught up in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence embodied by Evelyn's ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).

Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne revived the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but cast Gittes' labyrinthine odyssey against a grander, more insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues pile up in a timeless detective story, helplessly leading to tragedy, summed up in one of the most repeated lines in cinema history, words of grim fatalism that a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.”

Towne's script has since become a staple in film-writing classes, though it also serves as a lesson in how movies are often made and the risks of attributing a film to a single point of view. He would acknowledge working closely with Polanski as they revised and refined the story, and sparring with the director over the film's despairing ending — an ending Polanski insisted on and Towne later agreed was the right choice. (No one is officially credited with writing “Forget It, Jake, It's Chinatown.”)

But the concept started with Towne, who had turned down the chance to adapt The Great Gatsby in front of the screen so he could work on Chinatown, partly inspired by a book published in 1946, Carey McWilliams' Southern California: an island within the country.

“There was a chapter in it called 'Water, Water, Water,' which was a revelation to me. And I thought, 'Why not make a movie about a crime that's happening in front of everyone?'” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.

“Instead of a jewel-encrusted falcon, make it something as common as water taps, and turn it into a conspiracy. And after reading about what they were doing, dumping water and starving the farmers off their land, I realized the visual and dramatic possibilities were enormous.”

The background story of Chinatown has itself become something of a detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans' memoir, The child remains in the picture; in Peter Biskinds Eastern Riders, Raging Bulls, a history of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Sam Wasson's The big farewell, entirely dedicated to Chinatown. In The big farewell, published in 2020, Wasson claimed that Towne was extensively assisted by a ghostwriter — former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to The big farewell, for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor asked not to be mentioned in the film because his “friendship with Robert” was more important.

Wasson also wrote that the film's famous closing line came from a vice cop who had told Towne that crimes in Chinatown were rarely prosecuted.

“Robert Towne once said that Chinatown is a state of mind,” Wasson wrote. “Not just a spot on a map in Los Angeles, but a state of full consciousness almost indistinguishable from blindness. To dream you're in paradise and wake up in the dark — that's Chinatown. To think you've figured it out and realize you're dead — that's Chinatown.”

The studios gained power after the mid-1970s and Towne's standing declined. His own directing efforts, including Personal record And Tequila Sunrise, had mixed results. The two Jakes, the long awaited sequel to Chinatown, was a commercial and critical disappointment upon its release in 1990 and led to a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.

Towne's biggest regret, he said in the 2006 AP interview, was how Graystoke turned out. Towne wrote the film adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel Tarzan of the Apes and wanted to direct it. But production problems on Personal record bled in his hopes of Graystoke. Hugh Hudson, on the other hand, directed the 1984 film. And while Graystoke received three Oscar nominations, including one for Towne's screenplay, he was unhappy with the results. Towne adopted the name of his dog, PH Vazak, as his screenwriter, making Vazak an unlikely Oscar nominee.

Around the same time, he agreed to work on a film far removed from the arthouse aspirations of the 1970s, the Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer production Days of thunder, starring Tom Cruise as the race car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over-budget and largely panned, though it has also been admired by Quentin Tarantino and legions of racing fans. And Towne's script popularized a phrase Duvall used after Cruise complained that another car had hit him: “He didn't hit you, he didn't bump you, he didn't push you. He rubbed you.”

“And rubbing, son, is racing.”

Towne later worked with Cruise on The firm and the first two Mission Impossible films. His most recent film was Ask the dust, a Los Angeles story that he wrote and directed and which was released in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also wrote screenplays, his credits include The natural.

Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father's clothing store closed due to the Great Depression. (His father changed the family name to Towne.) He had always enjoyed writing and was inspired to work in films by the proximity of the Warner Bros. Theater and by reading the critic James Agee. Towne worked for a time on a tuna boat and often spoke of its impact.

“I've identified fishing in my mind with writing so much that every script is like a trip that you're on — and you're fishing,” he told the Writers Guild Association in 2013. “Sometimes they're both acts of faith. … Sometimes it's sheer faith that keeps you going, because you're like, 'Goddammit, nothing — not a bite today. Nothing's happening.'”