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RIP: Robert Towne, Writer of Chinatown, Dies at 89.
Writer-director Robert Towne, an Oscar winner for his original script for “Chinatown” and an acknowledged master of the art of screenwriting, has died. He was 89.
Towne died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, publicist Carrie McClure said in a statement.
During a long career that began in the 1960s, when he went to work as an actor and writer for B-movie director Roger Corman, Towne became one of the most sought-after script doctors in movie history, called on time and again to solve structural problems and create great moments for other people’s films.
Towne came to prominence in the 1970s with three critical and commercial hits released within a 14-month period: “The Last Detail” (1973), “Chinatown” (1974) and “Shampoo” (1975). All three screenplays were Oscar- nominated, with “Chinatown” winning in its year.
Hired as a “special consultant” by Warren Beatty for 1967’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” Towne restructured the picture to dramatize the outlaws’ impending doom. He also turned an inert family reunion scene with Beatty and Faye Dunaway into one of the picture’s emotional high points. Clyde’s charming bravado falls flat when Bonnie’s mother responds, “You try to live three miles from me and you won’t live long, honey.”
Director Arthur Penn was delighted with Towne’s work. “It helped Warren play the scene, and it certainly helped Faye and the mother,” Penn said.
Though most of Towne’s script doctoring went uncredited — for example, in “The Parallax View” (1974), “Marathon Man” (1976), “The Missouri Breaks” (1976) and “Heaven Can Wait” (1978) — he received a rare honor in 1973 when “The Godfather” director Francis Ford Coppola thanked him in his Oscar acceptance speech for scripting the touching and pivotal Pacino-Brando garden scene — a scene not in Mario Puzo’s book.
As Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, his seminal look at the Hollywood Young Turks of the ‘60s and ’70s, “Before the ’70s, screenwriters were disposable. If a project was going badly, the studio would throw another writer on the fire. Even they didn’t take themselves seriously. Towne’s was the first generation of Hollywood writers for whom scripts were ends in themselves, not way stations on the road to the great American novel. Towne’s forte was dialogue. ‘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,’ says producer Gerald Ayres, who would hire him to write The Last Detail. ‘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.’”
