As those who have suffered through a broadcast of an Academy Awards ceremony know, the acceptance speeches can all sound the same, with people thanking, in no particular order, the people who worked on the film with them, their families, God, and so on. However, every once in a while, you get an unexpected element in those speeches. For example, when Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (at the time, it was called Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) for The Godfather – which wasn’t a sure thing, given that up to that point, Cabaret seemed to be sweeping the awards – in his acceptance speech, Coppola mentioned another screenwriter who had written a crucial scene for the movie that helped make the movie the success it was. That screenwriter was Robert Towne, who died on July 1 at 89 years of age.
Towne, born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles on November 23, 1934, was the son of a clothing store owner and land developer (the latter of which may have been a conscious or unconscious influence on his most famous screenplay, Chinatown). Apparently, when he saw the movie Sergeant York, which came out when he was seven, Towne (his father changed the family name from Schwartz) became infatuated with movies. After graduating from Pomona College, Towne decided to try his luck as an actor and a writer. He took a class taught by Jeff Corey, a character actor who may be best remembered for playing Sheriff Bledsoe in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and that’s when he met Jack Nicholson, who became one of the most important figures in his life. Also in the class was the late Roger Corman, who ended up giving Towne work acting and/or writing in such films as Last Woman on Earth, The Tomb of Ligeia (which Towne would later claim he worked harder on than any script he wrote), and A Time for Killing. Though Towne would later take his name off the film, it attracted the attention of Warren Beatty, who would become another important figure in his life.
A Time for Killing came out in 1967, which was the same year Bonnie & Clyde, arguably the first film of the “New Hollywood” era, came out. Beatty, who both starred in and produced the movie, invited Towne to the set of the shoot. Although Towne would later joke he was brought there to referee the arguments between Beatty and director Arthur Penn (which, to be sure, came out of creative disagreements rather than any hostility between the two), Towne did end up working as a script doctor on Robert Benton and David Newman’s screenplay, removing a menage a tois relationship between Bonnie (Faye Dunaway), Clyde (Beatty), and W.D. (Michael Pollard), and making changes to the structure of the film, most crucially moving the scene where Bonnie visits her mother (Mabel Cavitt) to near the end of the movie to add a sense of foreboding to the story.
Though Towne would later co-write the script for the 1968 western Villa Rides with Sam Peckinpah, most of his work for the next few years was script doctoring. Drive, he Said (1971) marked the directorial debut of Nicholson, and although it doesn’t quite hang together, it’s one of the few movies about the protest movement of the time that feels genuinely connected to the events. Towne also appeared in the movie as Richard, the cuckolded husband of Olive (Karen Black), and I will admit his acting is undistinguished. He also doctored Cisco Pike (1972), one of the most underrated movies of the 1970’2. Kris Kristofferson plays the title character, a former drug dealer trying to make a go as a musician, but failing (rather ironic casting, as Kristofferson became a successful musician), and who gets sucked back into the drug business by crooked detective Leo Holland (Gene Hackman). Though Towne quarreled with writer/director Bill L. Norton, he did make the crucial decision of adding the character of Holland to the movie, and also beefed up the character of Sue (Black again), Cisco’s girlfriend, and Towne would later admit he liked the ensuing movie. But it was The Godfather, as well as Coppola thanking Towne in his acceptance speech, that put Towne in the spotlight.
Fans of The Godfather know a scene Coppola struggled with was the scene where Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and Michael (Al Pacino) sit together after Michael has taken over as head of the family. It’s this scene where Vito confesses he wished he had been able to make sure Michael had gone down the path of the straight and narrow:
Vito: I knew that Santino was going to have to go through all this, and Fredo, well, Fredo was…but I never wanted this for you. I worked my whole life – I don’t apologize – to take care of my family. And I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all of those big shots. I don’t apologize. That’s my life. But I thought that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the strings. Senator Corleone. Governor Corleone. Something.
That was Towne’s contribution to the film (Towne also worked on the scene where Michael tells his brothers he wants to kill Captain McClusky (Sterling Hayden) and Virgil Sollozzo (Al Lettieri)). As you can see, it shows how Towne not only has a knack for writing dialogue, but also in screenplay structure. That contribution helped that scene between Vito and Michael one of the most memorable parts of the film, coming right before Vito dies and Michael ruthlessly takes on the other five families, and it helped make Towne’s reputation, which led to getting his own scripts filmed.
First up was an adaptation – The Last Detail (1973), directed by Hal Ashby and based on the novel by Darryl Poniscan. Columbia, the studio that released the movie, was nervous about financing it because of all the profanity until Nicholson, whom Towne had shaped the main character of Signalman Billy L. “Badass” Buddusky for, got involved. Towne stuck closely to the novel for the most part, but he removed Buddusky’s wife, made him less of an intellectual, and more importantly, allowed the character to live to the end. As for the profanity (which, it should be clear, is not as shocking as it was at the time – you’ll here more of it in a film directed by Martin Scorsese or written by David Mamet than in this film), Towne argued that it was necessary to show how powerless Buddusky, his friend Gunner’s Mate Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young), and Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) – the prisoner Buddusky and Mulhall are escorting to the navy’s prison – are, and how swearing was the only way they could exhibit any power. And it works – Nicholson gives what may be his best performance, and he’s helped immeasurably by Ashby’s direction and Towne’s script, which shows how, for all of his bluster, Buddusky really does have a heart, yet done without sentimentality. Towne followed that with the movie that won him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and what is unarguably his most famous credit, Chinatown.
In William Goldman’s book Which Lies Did I Tell? More Adventures, he mentions one of Towne’s peculiarities as a writer – when Towne was given a script doctoring job (at Beatty’s request, he did uncredited work around this time on The Parallax View), he always turned it in on time, but when he was writing his own screenplays, things took much longer. Chinatown was one example. Towne had been inspired by reading the book Southern California Country: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams, a magazine article about Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, and the true story of William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power when it constructed an aqueduct in the 1900’s to bring water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles (though Mulholland did not meet the same fate Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the character based on him, did). Towne thought it would be interesting to construct a movie around the theft not of an object, but an essential force for life. But it took Towne a long time to balance the story of the land getting raped with the story of villainous businessman Noah Cross (John Huston) raping his daughter Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway). As Sam Wasson revealed in his book The Big Goodbye, about the making of Chinatown, Towne received help with finishing the script from Edward Taylor, his old college roommate, but Taylor declined credit.
More famously, Towne clashed with director Roman Polanski about the script – the film was originally going to be narrated by Jake Gittes (Nicholson), the private eye who’s the major character of the film, but Polanski cut that out, and whereas Towne’s original ending had Evelyn shoot Cross dead and go to jail, Polanski insisted on the famous ending where the police gun down Evelyn as she’s trying to get away with Katherine (Belinda Palmer), her sister and her daughter, and Cross gets away while Jake can only look on as one of his associates says, “Forget it, Jake – it’s Chinatown.” Towne would later insist his problem with Polanski’s ending was not the fact it was an unhappy ending, but that he felt it was melodramatic, though he would later change his mind and realize it’s part of why the movie works so well. Along with that ending, the most famous parts of the movie are Evelyn’s shocking admission to Jake about Katherine (“She’s my sister and my daughter!”) and Cross’ declaration, “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time in the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Towne would later say in an interview concerning another movie that he enjoyed melodrama because it allowed him to entertain audiences without being heavy-handed, as well as playing with the gap between appearance and reality, and any feelings the viewer might have about Polanski aside, Chinatown is certainly one of the best illustrations of that principle. It also gave Towne his only Academy Award, for Best Original Screenplay.
Shampoo, which Towne co-wrote with Beatty and which teamed him once again with Ashby, was another project that took a while. Beatty had conceived the idea in the 1960’s of a compulsive Don Juan and the resulting hang-ups – originally, that was the premise of What’s New, Pussycat? (1965), which Beatty was originally going to make with Woody Allen, until Allen’s script rewrites led Beatty to leave the project – and when Beatty brought the idea to Towne, Towne came up with the idea of making the main character of George (Beatty) a hairdresser, to buck the stereotype of male hairdressers always being gay. On the surface, Shampoo seems like just another sex comedy (updating a Restoration comedy to modern-day Beverly Hills), as George juggles relationships with Jill (Goldie Hawn), his actress girlfriend, Felicia (Lee Grant, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance), who’s married to Lester (Jack Warden), the banker George hopes will finance the shop he wants to open, and Jackie (Julie Christie), Lester’s mistress and George’s ex-girlfriend, whom he still has feelings for. But again, there’s more going on underneath the surface. The movie starts on Election Day in November of 1968, when Richard Nixon won the presidential election, and Beatty and Towne show how Lester, and others like him who voted for Nixon, showed up and cared about the election results, while those who didn’t really care, like George, didn’t show up and vote, which might have made the difference between Nixon winning or Hubert Humphrey, whom Nixon was running against, winning. Not only that, but if this type of story was told today, George would gradually find redemption and settle down with either Jill or Jackie being his one true love (along with opening his own shop), but Beatty and Towne know redemption is never that easy, and so George does not get any of the women at the end, and his future is up in the air (the ending was inspired by a real-life breakup Towne had with a girlfriend).
Unfortunately for Towne, his future was up in the air as well, though it wasn’t immediately apparent. He followed Shampoo with The Yakuza (1975), which came from Paul Schrader and his brother Leonard. Originally, Robert Aldrich was going to direct, but when star Robert Mitchum didn’t want him on the film, Sydney Pollack replaced him, and brought Towne in to rewrite the movie. Neither Schrader nor Towne was happy with the finished film – Schrader thought Pollack strove for a poetic realism that was at odds with the gritty film he was trying to write – but while the film is another example of a story of non-Western culture told through the eyes of a white guy, I think Pollack shows respect for the Japanese culture he’s depicting, Mitchum, Ken Takakura (as a gangster Mitchum’s character has a history with), and Richard Jordan (as Mitchum’s friend), among others, are terrific, and for all the criticism Pollack received for being a sentimental middlebrow filmmaker, his films rarely had outright happy endings, and he helps make the bittersweet ending of this film work.. While the film wasn’t a big hit with audiences or critics, it has since gained admirers, most notably Quentin Tarantino, who called it Mitchum’s last great performance.
After that, while Towne did a number of uncredited script doctor jobs (on such films as Marathon Man (1976), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Heaven Can Wait (1978), and Reds (1981), where he was an uncredited consultant), he worked on what he hoped would be his directorial debut (like many screenwriters, he wanted to direct to protect his scripts) and what he thought was the his magnum opus, Greystoke. Based on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel “Tarzan of the Apes”, this was arguably the first attempt at a “gritty reboot” of a franchise (Tarzan movies had been made as relatively high-budget B-movies during the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s), or at least a more realistic version of the story of a man and nature. However, when Towne ran over budget on the film that did become his directorial debut, Personal Best (1982) (more on that film below), thanks in part to an actor’s strike, he had to give up directing Greystoke, and Hugh Hudson, fresh off Chariots of Fire, became the director instead and brought in Michael Austin to rewrite the script – Towne would take his name off the film and use the name of his dog, P.H. Vazak, on the film instead. Greystoke (with the added subtitle The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes) was eventually released in 1984, and while it made its money back and got decent reviews, I found it rather pompous and staid, and most people probably remember it today as the film where Glenn Close dubbed the voice of Andie MacDowell (who played Jane) to hide her southern-accented voice.
Personal Best was not a box office hit, but it’s a much better film. It came out of Towne’s research and interest in human movement while he was writing Greystoke, and it’s about two female track and field stars – Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (real-life track and field athlete Patrice Donnelly) – who become romantically involved with each other while training for the 1980 Olympics (which the U.S. would boycott). Towne captures the details of being in track and field, and the work involved (Kenny Moore, who ran track and field at the University of Oregon, appears in the movie as Denny Stiles, a swimmer Chris takes up with after she breaks up with Tory, and Moore also served as a consultant on the film). More than that, however, this showed Towne able to think visually while not relying overly on one of his main gifts. When I think of Towne’s films, I think of some of the best dialogue I’ve seen and heard, even when it’s in speeches, as with the speech Vito gives to Michael that I quoted above, or the creative use of profanity in The Last Detail (when a bartender Buddusky tangles with threatens to call the shore patrol, Buddusky responds by slamming a billy club on the counter and yelling, “I am the mother****ing shore patrol, mother******!”), or the dialogue I quoted from Chinatown above, or George’s speech to Jill when he admits to sleeping around with several women In Shampoo (“Maybe that means I don’t love ’em. Maybe it means I don’t love you. I don’t know. Nobody’s going to tell me I don’t like ’em very much”). But while in Personal Best, Towne does give a speech to Chris and Tori’s coach Terry Tingloff (Scott Glenn) when he grouses about the issues he has to deal with when coaching women (“Do you actually think that Chuck Noll has to worry that Franco Harris is gonna cry ’cause Terry Bradshaw won’t talk to him?”), mostly, he uses naturalistic dialogue on focuses on the physical activities of the athletes, from training to doing the actual meets to their off-field activities. Towne’s film came under fire in the LGBT community at the time for the fact Chris goes from being involved with a women to being involved with a man (without any over indication she might be bisexual), but Towne avoids a judgmental tone, and doesn’t try to make us feel Chris is “normal” because she’s with a guy.
Another passion project later led to disappointment and heartache for Towne. The Two Jakes was going to be a sequel to Chinatown, with Towne directing and writing the script, Nicholson reprising his role as Jake Gittes, Robert Evans, who had produced Chinatown, playing Jake Berman, and oil being the subject rather than water (Nicholson later claimed this was part of a trilogy that would explore the 20th century history of Los Angeles through the character of Gittes – Towne would later dispute this). However, Towne became dissatisfied with Evans as an actor and wanted to fire him, and when Nicholson chose Evans instead of Towne, it ruptured the friendship Towne had with both of them. After a few false starts, Nicholson took over directing The Two Jakes, and it was released in 1990. While of course it’s a disappointment compared to Chinatown, like The Godfather Part III (another long-gestating sequel released that same year), it’s better than you might think, thanks in part to the ever-reliable Nicholson and a terrific performance by Meg Tilly as a grown-up Katharine Mulwray.
Before that was released, and after doing a few more script doctor jobs (including 8 Million Ways to Die (1986) for Ashby, and Frantic (1988) for Polanski), Towne was eventually able to return to the director’s chair with Tequila Sunrise (1988). Commercially it was the most successful film Towne was credited on, making over $100 million at the box office and almost five times its budget. Critics were more mixed on the film – Roger Ebert wrote “there are times when the movie seems to be complicated simply for the purpose of puzzlement”, and even Pauline Kael, a Towne fan who liked the movie overall, called it “much too derivative and vague to be a successful crime melodrama” – but my feelings about Mel Gibson (who plays the main role, Dale “Mac” McKussic) aside, and despite Towne clashing with Warner Brothers over the ending (Towne wanted Mac to die at the end, but the studio overrode him), I think it’s a terrific film. The story is again a melodrama – Mac is a retired drug dealer who’s being reluctantly pursued by Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell), his best friend and a narcotics lieutenant, and both of them are in love with Jo Ann Vallenari (Michelle Pfeiffer), who owns a restaurant – but Towne makes it work. Part of it is the performances he gets (while Towne and Pfeiffer clashed throughout filming, she gives a terrific performance), but another part is that dialogue. You got the feeling Towne was pouring his heart and soul into what the characters were saying, whether it’s Mac explaining why no one likes that he’s quit dealing drugs (“My wife, she wants my money. Her lawyer agrees, and mine likes getting paid to argue with him”), Nick trying to win Jo Ann back (“And what I didn’t figure is you’re not like me. You’re honest, kind, and principled, and I trust you”), or Carlos (Raul Julia) getting angry after he feels Mac betrays him (“Friendship is all we have! We chose each other! How could you f*** it up?”). And I think the movie is constructed well.
Like many filmmakers and actors who were part of the new Hollywood movement of the late 1960’s through the mid-1970’s, Towne struggled in the ensuing decades, both with his personal life (he battled drug addiction himself, and went through several failed relationships, including a divorce) and his professional life. For the latter, in addition to his script doctor work, Towne developed another professional relationship, this time with Tom Cruise, who first met him on Days of Thunder (1990), Cruise and director Tony Scott’s attempt to replicate the box office success of Top Gun from four years earlier. While the film avoids the rah-rah militarism of Top Gun, and was another box office success despite going over budget (Tarantino is a fan of this too), for me, it’s an empty film that’s typical of the movies produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson throughout their partnership (that is not a compliment). Cruise would work again on a Towne-penned film when Pollack brought Towne in to help David Rayfiel (Pollack’s writing partner) to adapt John Grisham’s novel The Firm (playwright David Rabe is also credited, as he was the first one to write a screenplay, though Pollack insisted he didn’t use any of Rabe’s work), with much better results (along with Joel Schumacher’s adaptation of The Client, I think it’s the best movie version of one of Grisham’s novels, and an entertaining movie).
You can see Towne’s hand in what I think are the two best scenes in the movie, both involving Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman), who serves as a mentor to young lawyer Mitch McDeere (Cruise), and Abby McDeere (Jeanne Tripplehorn), Mitch’s wife. In an added subplot to the movie, Avery tries to hit on Abby, which she rebuffs, but when she finds out Avery will not be scuba diving while in the Cayman Islands (which complicates Mitch’s plan to have Avery’s files copied so he can give them to the FBI), Abby goes to the Cayman Islands herself and pretends to let Avery seduce her while she slips him a mickey. Before he passes out, Avery gets angry and wonders what Abby is really doing there, to which Abby, after trying to lie, admits part of the truth – she’s there to get even for the fact Mitch cheated on her when he was in the Caymans, and for letting the firm (which she now knows is a mob front) ruining their lives. As he’s passing out, Avery says, “It’s better than the alternative – that you wanted to be with me.” The other scene comes after the firm’s enforcer, Bill DeVasher (Wilford Brimley) has phoned Avery when he awakes to let him know Abby’s copied his files. When the phone call ends, Abby tries to keep up the masquerade of the two of them having slept together, but Avery simply says, “Don’t,” finds out Abby did everything to help Mitch (“That’s better than getting even with him”), tells Abby the girl Mitch slept with while in the Caymans was a setup by the firm, and warns Abby to leave before the firm finds her. Before she does, Abby, moved, asks him, “What will they do to you?”, to which Avery simply replies, “Whatever it is, they did it a long time ago.” It’s one of the finest acting moments of Hackman’s career (Tripplehorn is his equal), but Pollack and (I presume) Towne deserve credit as well.
It would be nice to write that Towne ended his career on a high note. Sadly, that would not be the case. His other collaborations with Cruise, the first two Mission: Impossible movies, seemed mechanical, despite some thrilling scenes in the first one (thanks to director Brian DePalma), and the second one (directed by John Woo, who wasn’t able to bring his trademark style to play) ripped off the plot of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films, Notorious. At Beatty’s request, Towne also worked on Glenn Gordon Caron’s Love Affair (a 1994 remake of the 1939 film directed by Leo McCarey, which McCarey also remade more famously in 1957 as An Affair to Remember), which also reteamed Beatty with his off-screen wife Annette Bening (they had previously appeared together in Bugsy, from 1991, where they had fallen in love), and while the movie had a strong first half, it became overly sentimental in the second. Towne also was one of many writers (along with Tarantino) who doctored Scott’s Crimson Tide (1995), a submarine thriller with Hackman and Denzel Washington, which many people liked more than I did (I found too slick and pseudo-profound). More disappointing was Towne’s fourth effort as writer/director, Ask the Dust (2006), adapted from the novel by John Fante. It was another Los Angeles-set tale about a doomed love affair between a writer (Colin Farrell) and a waitress (Salma Hayek) around the time of the 1933 earthquake in Long Beach, but the movie seemed lifeless and enervated, as if Towne no longer had it in him to make movies. At least Towne’s third movie as director, Without Limits, proved to be a great one (as Claude and I have already discussed).
Still, even though Towne never wrote for movies again (while working under Corman, Towne had also written for such TV shows as The Outer Limits and The Man from U.N.C.L.E, and he returned to TV as a consulting producer on Mad Men), his legacy is assured from working on four of the best movies of the 1970’s (three as a writer or co-writer, one as a script doctor), and having written and directed three terrific films as well. Screenwriters have often been treated like the scum of Hollywood, but writers like Towne elevated screenwriting to an art form. That’s not a bad legacy to have.