‘Chinatown’ screenwriter Robert Towne dies aged 89
Robert Towne, the screenwriter known for writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Roman Polanski’s 1974 neo-noir mystery film Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, has died at the age of 89.
Chinatown is widely considered to be one of the best screenplays ever written and Towne had also written the sequel movie, 1990’s The Two Jakes, which also starred Nicholson. Elsewhere, Towne had drawn acclaim for his efforts on Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail and Shampoo, as well as the Tom Cruise-starring movies Days of Thunder, The Firm and the first two films in the Mission: Impossible series.
A total of four Academy Award nominations came Towne’s way through a truly memorable career that also saw him take the director’s role on a handful of occasions, including the films Personal Best, Without Limits, Tequila Sunrise and Ask the Dust.
Beyond his own writings or directorial works, Towne had occasionally used his prowess as a narrative artist as a script doctor and notably contributed to a series of corrections on Bonnie & Clyde and even Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather.
However, concerning the latter effort, for which he wrote the film’s garden scene between Al Pacino and Marlon Brando, he was not officially credited, at least until Coppola thanked him at the 1973 Oscars and admitted that the moment was “very beautiful”.
Lee Grant, the star of Shampoo who won the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar for her effort in Ashby and Towne’s film, wrote on Twitter of the late screenwriter, “His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic & entirely originally [sic]. He gave me the gift of Shampoo. He gave all of us the gift of his words & his films. There isn’t another like him. There won’t be again.”
It’s perhaps Chinatown for which Towne is best known, though, and Towne once admitted that he had to fight with director Roman Polanski pretty much “every day over everything” in order to get his vision of the story to match up with what Polanski wanted to put on the screen.
In 2013, Towne spoke of his writing career with the Writer’s Guild of America, noting, “I’ve identified fishing with writing in my mind to the extent that each script is like a trip that you’re taking – and you are fishing. Sometimes, they both involve an act of faith. Sometimes it’s sheer faith alone that sustains you because you think: ‘God damn it, nothing – not a bite today. Nothing is happening.'”
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