The Firm Archives - Words and Movies Podcast

R.I.P., Gene Hackman

Ever since the movies became a business in the U.S. (which started way back in the silent era), the men behind them sold an image not only of the U.S., but of glamour and beauty, which extended to the people that appeared on-screen. Many of the best movies ever made in Hollywood then (and even now), to be sure, featured glamorous-looking men and women doing glamorous things. Yet at the same time, during the studio era, there was also room for character actors (men and women) who could work with those glamorous men and women and hold their own with them. As the studio era ended in the 1960’s, there were more and more movies being made by people who, instead of casting the glamorous-looking men and women in leading roles, cast people who looked like the character actors in leading roles (regrettably, this was mostly white men), and some of those who looked like character actors could hold the screen like those leading men and women of the studio era. One of the best in that category was Gene Hackman, who died February 26 of this year at the age of 95.

Hackman had said he knew he wanted to be an actor ever since he was 10 and had become a fan of movies, particularly ones with James Cagney and Errol Flynn, his favorite actors, though it took him a while to get there. A couple of years after his parents divorced (his father left them), he joined the Marines (after lying about his age), serving for four and a half years (after WWII) in China, Hawaii, and Japan. After working in various jobs in New York, he attended the University of Illinois on the G.I. Bill, where he studied journalism and TV production before dropping out and moving to Los Angeles. There, he got involved in theater at the Pasadena Playhouse and met Dustin Hoffman, who remained a close friend for the rest of his life. Hackman and Hoffman often mentioned they were both voted “Least Likely to Succeed” by their classmates, he worked odd jobs when he couldn’t get acting gigs, and for the next several years, he got guest roles on such TV shows as The Defenders and Naked City and bit roles in movies such as Lilith and Hawaii. It was his bit part in the former, however, that would eventually change Hackman’s life.

As Buck Barrow with his brother Clyde (Warren Beatty) in Bonnie & Clyde.

Though Lilith was not a big hit, Warren Beatty, who was the star, remembered and liked working with Hackman, so when he was finally able to get Bonnie & Clyde made, Beatty convinced director Arthur Penn to cast Hackman as Clyde Barrow’s brother Buck (in one of those tantalizing what-could-have-been twists, Hackman was also originally cast as Mr. Robinson in The Graduate, which would have put him opposite Hoffman, but director Mike Nichols fired him about three weeks into rehearsal for being too young). Claude and I have already talked about Bonnie & Clyde, and while Hackman’s not the best reason to see the movie, he brings a bolt of energy to it whenever he’s on-screen, from when Buck first appears while reuniting with Clyde all the way until his death scene. The movie also shows one of Hackman’s most distinctive traits, his laugh, which is hearty in this performance, but would later become a chuckle that Hackman could make inviting or threatening. Beatty and Faye Dunaway (Bonnie) may have emerged as the stars of the movie, but Hackman proved he could hold his own with them.

As Eugene Claire, coach to David Chappellet (Robert Redford), in Downhill Racer.

Being older than Hoffman (as well as their mutual friend Robert Duvall, whom they both lived with for a time when all three were struggling actors), Hackman was already being cast in authority figures. One of the best of these was as the ski coach in Downhill Racer, Michael Ritchie’s terrific drama about downhill skiing. As Eugene Claire (Eugene was Hackman’s real first name), coach to the title character, David Chappellet (Robert Redford), Hackman was playing what at first seemed to be the stock role of the coach who tries to teach the maverick athlete to be a team player. It’s what Hackman does with the role that makes it interesting. As you might expect from this type of movie (though it’s not an “inspirational” sports movie, as Chappellet is a jerk who never gets redeemed at the end), Claire has a few speeches (“No one races unless I say so. That’s why I’m here. That’s why they made me the coach”), but what makes them work is Hackman never feels he has to prove his authority. He just delivers the speeches without any bull, whether talking with Chappellet, the other skiers on the team, or making his pitch to sponsors. When writing about Uncommon Valor, one of those “we-could-have-won-in-Vietnam-if-it-wasn’t-for-the-goddamn-liberals” movies that was so popular during the Reagan era, Pauline Kael wrote Hackman “offers a range of held-in, adult emotion that you don’t expect”, and that could also describe his performance here.

Though Hackman would also show he was capable of playing a less flamboyant role with his performance in Gilbert Cates’ I Never Sang for my Father (a stagy but compelling adaptation of the play by Robert Anderson, with strong performances by Hackman – possibly channeling his feelings towards his own father – Melvin Douglas, and Estelle Parsons, doing better here, in my opinion, than when she had played Hackman’s wife in Bonnie & Clyde), it was playing another authority figure that finally made him a star. A lot has been written about Hackman’s turn in William Friedkin’s The French Connection, including how Friedkin had been turned down several times when trying to cast the role of maverick detective Popeye Doyle, how Hackman took the role because he thought it would let him emulate Cagney, and how he quickly became uncomfortable with the violence of Popeye’s world. Still, no matter what you think of the film – though I’m far from being a fan of Friedkin, I do agree this is one of his best films, even if, like other movies of the time, its casual acceptance of the drug war as a good thing doesn’t age well for me – Hackman’s performance as Popeye remains one of the best of his career. You can see the charge Hackman brings to the role, such as when Popeye’s confusing a suspect by saying he’s going to nail him “for picking your feet in Poughkeepsie”, or, during the famous car chase scene, how he reacts when he’s trying to avoid pedestrians on the road, or when he’s playing cat-and-mouse with Charnier (Fernando Rey), the main bad guy, at the subway station. But while Popeye the character may have been brutal, again, Hackman made him seem real instead of just another macho action hero.

While I’m afraid I’m not a fan of Hackman’s turn as the minister who sacrifices himself to save other passengers in the disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure (Hackman himself would admit it was a “money job”), the next few years brought some of his best performances. He reunited with Ritchie for Prime Cut, a bizarre but compelling crime drama where he played Mary Ann, a crooked meatpacker who crosses paths with mob enforcer Devlin (Lee Marvin), and his go-for-broke performance not only fits with the tone of the film, but matches well against Marvin’s quiet but powerful one. Hackman also worked well as a crooked cop blackmailing singer and former drug dealer Kris Kristofferson into dealing again in Bill L. Norton’s underrated Cisco Pike. And he showed he could also be funny in a scene-stealing cameo as the blind hermit in Mel Brooks’ loving parody of Universal Horror films, Young Frankenstein. However, it was three other films Hackman did during this period – Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow in 1973, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation in 1974, and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves in 1975 – that represented the peak of his career.

In the first, Hackman plays Max, an ex-con who’s trying to hitchhike to Pittsburgh to set up a car wash business, and ends up with Francis (Al Pacino), a former sailor trying to get to Detroit to see his son. As with many of his roles at the time, Hackman is playing big, whether he’s pausing before getting up from the kitchen table until he belches, or fighting with the same convict (Jerry Reed) who beat up Francis, or dancing in a bar to the tune of the song “The Stripper”, but again, it all seems natural rather than showing off, and it’s balanced against more quiet moments, as when he reacts to Francis having a nervous breakdown at the end. By contrast, in the second, Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who tries his best not to get involved with anything except his work, and who tries not to give anything away about his life until he gets involved in the case involving the couple (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) he’s investigating. Most of Hackman’s performances, before and afterwards, depended on his physicality, but as Harry, Hackman is incredibly still, both with his facial expressions and the way he holds himself together, especially when being challenged or threatened (especially by one of his employers, played by Harrison Ford, or a rival surveillance expert played by Allan Garfield). The only thing that gives Harry any spark in his life is his love of jazz, whether he’s listening to it or playing along on his saxophone, and you see that spark in him, even at the end, when Hackman’s playing the sax in resigned acceptance of his fate. Finally, in the third, Hackman plays Harry Moseby, an ex-football player turned private eye who’s hired to find the missing daughter (Melanie Griffith) of an ex-actress (Janet Ward) and finds himself mixed up in murder and smuggling. Penn’s film is just now getting remembered as one of the best of the revisionist private eye movies of the 1970’s, and Hackman not only brings out the physicality of the role (as when he tangles with a young James Woods as Griffith’s friend), but also makes it believable Moseby is in over his head in every way.

Though all three movies were well-reviewed (and Hackman would consider the first two his favorite performances), none of them did well at the box office (though all three have gained in reputation over the years), which not only left Hackman depressed, but led him to take more of what he called “money jobs.” He turned down roles in such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Ordinary People (the one movie he regretted turning down) to star in movies such as Lucky Lady (directed by Stanley Donen), The Domino Principle (directed by Stanley Kramer), and March or Die (directed by Dick Richards), all considered career nadirs (Zandy’s Bride, which teamed him with director Jan Troell and actress Liv Ullmann, was a misfire, but not a money job – I haven’t seen Richard Brooks’ western Bite the Bullet, but Hackman thought a scene he did with Candace Bergen represented the best acting of his career, and Roger Ebert praised it). The first two Superman movies (shot simultaneously, though Richard Lester reshot much of the second one over Hackman’s objections) were also movies Hackman considered money jobs, and led him to retire from acting temporarily. In addition, I must confess I’ve never been a fan of Hackman’s conception of Lex Luthor as a comic villain (Clancy Brown’s voice performance of Luthor in Superman: The Animated Series and the two Justice League series’ that followed remains my favorite incarnation of the character). Still, there’s no denying Hackman does play the comedy well, from the chuckle he gives when Miss Tessmacher (Valerie Perrine) insults him, or the way he underplays his reaction when he sees Otis (Ned Beatty), his bumbling sidekick, has made a claim to part of his territory, or, in the second movie, when he double-crosses Superman (Christopher Reeve) and then, when it turns out Superman was counting on that in order to defeat Zod (Terrence Stamp), pretends it was all part of his plan.

Hackman was lured back to acting in 1981 with two roles. In the romantic comedy All Night Long, directed by Jean-Claude Tramont, he plays the night manager of a drugstore who becomes involved with the lonely wife (Barbra Streisand) of a firefighter. While the movie has its fans (including Kael), I confess it doesn’t quite work for me, though you can tell Hackman was invested in the material. Hackman then reunited with Beatty for Reds, his flawed but compelling look at the Communist revolution in the early years of the Soviet Union, and brings a charge to his scenes with Beatty as a former editor to John Reed (author of Ten Days That Shook the World). After that, with the exception of Under Fire and No Way Out (1987) – both of which Claude and I talked about – Hackman’s output in the rest of the decade, like other actors who broke through during the “New Hollywood” movement of the 1970’s, didn’t live up to his ability. I must admit it’s not entirely fair to lump Nicholas Roeg’s Eureka into that category, given it was taken away from him in the editing room, but while Hackman is good in the movie as usual, it’s a mess. I know there are fans of David Anspaugh’s Hoosiers, but I’m not one of them, though as with Uncommon Valor, Hackman’s underplaying makes his performances work, even if the movies don’t work for me. While in Bud Yorkin’s Twice in a Lifetime, Hackman played a part mirroring his own life – his character leaves his wife (Ellen Burstyn) for another woman (Ann-Margaret), though in real life, Hackman had gotten divorced before finding another woman – the movie is a paper-thin exploration of that. While Woody Allen’s Another Woman is the best of his Bergman homages, it only works thanks to the performances of such actors as Gena Rowlands (in the lead), Ian Holm (as her cold husband), and Hackman (as his best friend and the one she realizes she really loves). And Power (Sidney Lumet’s big business drama), Target (a spy thriller that reunited him with Penn), and Full Moon in Blue Water (a rare comedy that reunited him with his The Conversation co-star Teri Garr) were missed opportunities.

AS Anderson (with Brad Dourif as Deputy Sheriff Pell) in Mississippi Burning.

One of the ironies of Hackman’s career is while in real life he abhorred violence (he was a registered Democrat, though he admitted to admiring Ronald Reagan), most of his most famous roles involved his character committing violent acts. That was also true of the movie that earned him his fourth Oscar nomination (after Bonnie & Clyde, I Never Sang for my Father, and The French Connection, which earned him his first win, for Best Actor), Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning. I confess this is another film I’ve never been a fan of, as I feel it’s yet another movie about civil rights told from the point of view of whites and that diminishes African-Americans, it’s insulting in how it makes the FBI the heroes, given how much director J. Edgar Hoover loathed civil rights leaders, and with the exception of R. Lee Ermey’s mayor character, all the villains are portrayed as one-dimensional cartoons (though Brad Dourif, as usual, does a lot with a little). Given all that, I will admit the one good thing the movie does is its portrayal of the relationship between Hackman (as Anderson, a former southern sheriff turned FBI agent) and Frances McDormand (as the lonely wife of Dourif’s deputy sheriff Pell). Hackman believes McDormand knows something about the murder of three civil rights workers, so he talks to her at the beauty parlor she goes to, or her home, and Hackman shows his feelings for her again without overplaying (Parker, who rewrote Chris Gerolmo’s screenplay, had added a sex scene between the characters, but Hackman wisely talked him out of it). As for that violence, one of the most memorable scenes in the movie is when Anderson takes revenge on Pell for brutally beating his wife while in the barbershop, and while Parker overdoes the scene in shooting it, Hackman is utterly convincing the way he turns on a dime from being cheerful to intimidating and then violent.

As Sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven.

It was the reception to that scene – being the scene shown by the studio when promoting Hackman’s performance for the Oscars – that led Hackman to turn down directing an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs after he initially agreed to do it. It also led him to initially turn down Clint Eastwood’s offer to play Little Bill, the sheriff who runs his town with a iron fist, in Unforgiven (before that, Hackman appeared in three good, if not great, movies – The Package, Andrew Davis’ Cold War thriller where Hackman is pitted against Tommy Lee Jones, Postcards from the Edge, Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Carrie Fisher’s semi-autobiographical novel, where Hackman lends a charge to his two scenes as a film director, and Class Action, a rare case where Hackman played a character close to his political views (a crusading lawyer), and where he and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as his estranged daughter, made what could be routine material work). But when Eastwood, who had also made his name with violent movies (the Man with No Name trilogy and the Dirty Harry movies), convinced Hackman the movie – about Will (Eastwood), a reformed killer brought out of retirement to claim a bounty a group of prostitutes have taken on a cowboy who roughed one of them up – would be interrogating that violence, Hackman signed on, earning his second Oscar (for Best Supporting Actor) in the process. Little Bill doesn’t tolerate vigilantism in his town, but what makes Hackman’s performance resonate is the lengths he’ll go to stop that violence, from the way he humiliates English Bob (Richard Harris), a gunfighter whose reputation outstrips his abilities, or the way he beats Ned (Morgan Freeman), Will’s friend, or the way he humiliates Will. While I still think Jaye Davidson should have won that year (and don’t love Unforgiven the way others do), Hackman’s performance is one of his best.

As John Herod in The Quick and the Dead.

Hackman followed that with another great performance in Sydney Pollack’s The Firm, the first adaptation of one of John Grisham’s novels. In my obituary for Robert Towne (one of the screenwriters of the movie), I raved about the writing of Hackman’s last two scenes in the movie – he plays Avery Tolar, a crooked lawyer who serves as mentor to new lawyer Mitch (Tom Cruise) – but those scenes he has with Jeanne Tripplehorn (as Abby, Mitch’s wife) show acting as good as anything he did in Unforgiven. After that came three westerns – Walter Hill’s Geronimo: An American Legend, Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp, and Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead. Of the three, only Raimi’s movie holds up for me – unfairly dismissed at the time, it’s an enjoyable American attempt at a spaghetti western. And while John Herod, the evil leader of the western town, is a more cartoonish role than Little Bill, Hackman is able to be comic and dangerous at the same time, whether he’s taking on a fraud gunfighter (Lance Henriksen), a real one (Keith David), or expressing his anger with the townspeople. Hackman’s best scenes however, come with Russell Crowe (as Cort, a former member of Herod’s gang until he reformed to become a preacher), Leonardo DiCaprio (as The Kid, who claims to be Herod’s biological son, which Herod denies), and star and producer Sharon Stone (as the unnamed main character, who has a grudge against Herod). For Crowe, it’s when Herod admits he’s always wanted to duel against Cort in a gunfight – there’s a sexual tension Hackman brings to the scene that makes it all the more disturbing. In contrast, with DiCaprio, it’s when Herod tries to talk the Kid out of dueling with him, as well as the genuine look of regret on his face at the end of the duel. Finally, with Stone, it’s when Herod invites Lady to his house for dinner and tells her about his father, and the gleam in his eye that shows what a psychopath he really is.

After the three westerns came yet another movie other people like more than me, Tony Scott’s Crimson Tide, though as a submarine commander, Hackman does work well with Denzel Washington, who plays his second-in-command. Hackman then shifted again to comedy for his next two roles. In Get Shorty, Barry Sonnenfeld’s adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel, Hackman plays Harry Zimm, a B-movie producer who gets mixed up with Chili Palmer (John Travolta), a loan shark who comes to collect money from Zimm but who really wants to produce movies. Hackman’s not the funniest actor in the movie – Danny DeVito, as an egotistical movie actor inspired by Dustin Hoffman, is – but he’s not afraid to look foolish and weak, especially when he thinks he’s putting one over on mobster Ray “Bones” Barboni (Dennis Farina), only to find out just how wrong he is. For all the toughness Hackman often showed in his performances, his willingness to show his characters’ weak sides was one of the best sides of his talent. For many people, that also came out in his next comedy, The Birdcage, an English-language version of the French play La Cage aux Folles (filmed in France in 1978), where Hackman plays Kevin Keeley, a conservative senator unaware his daughter (Calista Flockhart) is engaged to be married to the son (Daniel Futterman) of a gay couple (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane). This is another movie I don’t like as much as others – I feel the laughs it goes for are easy (to be sure, I also think that of the French film) – but while Hackman’s character may seem at first to be one of those easy laughs at first (of course, he praises the Moral Majority and Pat Buchanan, and then has to escape the press by dressing in drag), Hackman again makes his character seem real instead of a caricature.

With the exception of his only foray into animation, voicing the villain in Antz, Hackman next turned to mostly thrillers (including Extreme Measures, which reunited him with Apted, Absolute Power, which reunited him with Eastwood, and Twilight – not the vampire movie, but a neo-noir directed by Robert Benton and co-starring Paul Newman and Susan Sarandon), the best of which was his second and final movie with Scott, Enemy of the State (which Claude and I already talked about). Though it’s a more high-octane version of The Conversation, I think Enemy of the State is both entertaining and thought-provoking, and though he doesn’t show up until almost halfway through the movie, Hackman is a big reason why, being convincing not just in the jargon he has to speak (when his character, Brill, is describing to lawyer Robert Dean (Will Smith) the technology the NSA is using) or the more physical aspects of the role (when he punches out Dean at one point).

Another one of the paradoxes of Hackman’s career is he was one of most prolific actors of his lifetime while also often expressing a desire to quit. *
2001 was the last time he appeared in more than one film that came out, in fact appearing in five – Gore Verbinski’s The Mexican (though that was a cameo), David Mirkin’s Heartbreakers (another comic turn), David Mamet’s Heist, John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines (a reversal from a Hackman movie I never saw, Bat *21, where in this case, he was the military officer trying to arrange the rescue of another downed officer), and best of all (as far as I’m concerned, though I liked Hackman in Heist), Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Hackman and Anderson apparently quarreled throughout filmmaking (Hackman would later admit he was bothered by the age difference between them, as well as the fact Anderson wrote Hackman’s part with Hackman in mind), but in playing Royal Tenenbaum, the down on his luck patriarch of a dysfunctional family who pretends he’s dying so he can get his family back, Hackman showed a joy in his scenes that’s infectious, especially in the scenes with his two grandsons (sons of his own estranged son Chas (Ben Stiller), while again not afraid to look foolish, especially in a lunch scene with his adopted daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), where he reveals how little he knows about her by claiming she doesn’t have a middle name, only to be proven wrong.

As Rankin Fitch (with Marguerite Moreau as Amanda Monroe) in Runaway Jury.

If Hackman had decided to retire after this movie, many of his fans (myself included) would have felt he was ending his career on a high note. However, that was not to be. His next movie was his third and final Grisham adaptation, Runaway Jury, which also marked the only time he and Hoffman ever appeared on-screen together, though they opposed each other in the film (Hoffman played Wendell Rohr, a lawyer who’s filed suit against a gun company on behalf of the widow of one of the victims, while Hackman played Rankin Fitch, a crooked jury consultant working on behalf of the gun company being sued). However, along with the fact this was yet another movie whose intentions were better than its execution, the one scene Hackman and Hoffman appear in together – a confrontation in the courthouse bathroom – came off as obvious and ham-handed (the one time Hackman and Duvall ever appeared on-screen together, in Geronimo: An American Legend, it was similarly underwhelming, though in that case, it was because it felt flat and uninspired). Welcome to Mooseport, which teamed him with Ray Romano, was his final film, and a comedy, but one that also fell flat. As with The Royal Tenenbaums, Hackman did not get along with the director (Donald Petrie), though he disputed the fact the quality of the movie (or lack of) was what led him to retire.

While Hackman would later claim the results of a stress test given by his doctor were what finally led him to quit acting for good, Hackman had expressed dissatisfaction with the film business for a long time, and with the methods of modern Hollywood (he often said he preferred working with directors like Eastwood, Penn and Pollack who didn’t feel the need to direct him, but let him find the character he was playing on his own). So while it was sad he didn’t go out on a high note (if Alexander Payne had been able to talk Hackman into appearing in Nebraska, in the role eventually played by Bruce Dern, that would have been a good movie to end on), at least he ended on his own terms (he would later narrate two documentaries dealing with the Marines). Besides, Hackman had other interests to occupy him. He had driven race cars, he helped design houses, he was a (voice-only) spokesman for United Airlines, he dabbled in painting and sculpture, and he wrote novels (three of them historical fiction novels that he co-wrote with undersea archaeologist Daniel Lenihan). As of this writing, the circumstances of Hackman’s death (along with his second wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, and their dog) remain cloudy, but what isn’t cloudy is his legacy on film (I’m not familiar with his theater work or his early TV work).

Of all the tributes that have been paid to him over the years, the ones that I feel capture Hackman best are from Parker – who, in an interview he did with Apted for American Film magazine, praised his ability to find the truth in everything he did – and Eastwood, who once told William Goldman on the set of Absolute Power (which Goldman wrote the screenplay for) that he liked working with Hackman because “I like working with actors who don’t have anything to prove.” Another one of the ironies of Hackman’s career is that he got into acting partly because he felt he did have something to prove (to everyone who rejected him), but he left behind a number of performances that showed how well he found the truth in everything he did.

Update: According to the authorities, Hackman’s wife passed away a week before he did from a virus, and as he had Alzheimer’s, he passed away from a heart attack related to that. It’s incredibly sad, and I hope both of them are reunited in a better place.

*-In the otherwise lame 1994 comedy PCU, there’s one good joke when a college student says his thesis will be based on what he calls the “Caine/Hackman theory,” which is that at any given time of any given day, a movie featuring either Michael Caine or Hackman will be on TV. (Click here to go back up.)

R.I.P., Robert Towne

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.

Towne in Drive, he Said (1971) with Karen Black.

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.

The Godfather (1972) – the famous scene between Michael (Al Pacino) and Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando).

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.