Robert Towne, who received an Oscar for his Chinatown authentic screenplay and was nominated for his Shampoo, The Final Element and Greystoke scripts, died Monday at his residence. He was 89.
PR agency McClure & Associates introduced the information on behalf of Towne’s household.
Towne additionally earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and WGA awards for Chinatown, the L.A.-set 1974 thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It was one among three Writers Guild Awards he received throughout his profession, together with Shampoo and the drama sequence Mad Males, on which he was a consulting producer in the course of the last seventh season. He additionally was nominated for The Final Element (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1985). He was honored with the guild’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1997.
Considerate and delicate spoken, Towne was a perfectionist who hated studio conferences and script notes and famously would disappear for months to work on a scene. He coveted his relationships with stars together with Nicholson and Warren Beatty and had a novel reward for capturing their persona in display characters — witness Chinatown or The Parallax View. Exasperated when a threatened writers strike shut down pre-production on the latter, he responded to requests for a rewrite by sending his giant canine with a notice stating, “That is all that I can provide.”
Born on November 23, 1934, Towne acquired his begin along with his screenplay for 1960’s Final Lady on Earth earlier than writing for such early-’60s TV sequence as The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Lloyd Bridges Present. He went on to work with Roger Corman on movies together with The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) and later co-penned with Sam Peckinpah the 1968 Mexican Revolution movie Villa Rides starring Yul Brynner, Robert Mitchum and Charles Bronson.
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Towne did touch-up script work on The Godfather, Bonnie and Clyde and another essential movies of the period, however his breakthrough got here with The Final Element. The navy dramedy starred Nicholson as a Navy man tasked with escorting a inexperienced recruit (Randy Quaid), who has been court-martialed for a petty offense, to the brig over the course of every week. Otis Younger, Clifton James and Carol Kane co-starred. That movie would arrange Towne’s career-defining screenplay the next yr.
Directed by Roman Polanski and produced by Robert Evans, Chinatown informed the story of California’s water-rights wars of the early 1900s. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards together with Finest Image, however solely Towne would win amid that yr’s dominance by one other Paramount Footage basic, The Godfather Half II.
Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in ‘Chinatown’
Everett
At its inception, Chinatown appeared like a dream undertaking. As Peter Bart — who was VP Manufacturing at Paramount Footage in the course of the period — wrote in a 2020 column for Deadline, then-rising star Nicholson had developed a friendship with Towne throughout manufacturing of Straightforward Rider and implored him to create a Raymond Chandler-style style detective story for him. Towne confided that concept to Evans, then manufacturing chief at Paramount, who was wanting to increase his portfolio as a producer, with the added compensation.
Whereas Evans coveted a Towne-Nicholson collaboration as his first solo manufacturing credit score, there was a catch: He didn’t need to make a film about both China or Chinatown. Towne patiently defined that Chinatown was solely “a mind-set,” whose intricacies concerned incest, homicide and a scheme to steal a rising metropolis’s water provide.
Unmoved, Evans instructed Towne to desert Chinatown, providing as an alternative a payday of $175,000 to adapt The Nice Gatsby. Towne angrily identified {that a} screenplay based mostly on the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel could be much more complicated than Chinatown.
RELATED: Robert Evans Dies: ‘Chinatown’ Producer Who Ran Paramount During ‘Godfather’ Years Was 89
To show his level, Towne turned his again on Paramount, as an alternative borrowing $10,000 to hire a bed-and-breakfast cabin on Catalina Island the place he would begin writing. Whereas he relished his freedom, it proved illusory.
Over time, Towne would discover himself re-crafting his story with steering from a succession of contributors with sturdy opinions. First got here Nicholson, who had concepts in regards to the characters however felt that the specifics of dialogue weren’t related. Subsequent got here the Poland-born Polanski, who confessed he was baffled by the subplots of Los Angeles politics. Lastly there was Evans, who discovered the narrative impenetrable.
One recurring subject of disagreement was violence. Just a few years earlier, Polanski had skilled the homicide of his pregnant spouse Sharon Tate by the hands of the Manson Household, and he now insisted that the violence could be express in his new film, not implied. “If a filmmaker tries to keep away from upsetting individuals, that might be immoral,” he argued. Even the bodily combat between Nicholson, as Jake Gittes, and Dunaway, as Evelyn Mulwray, could be graphic in its execution — as would the notorious nose-slicing scene.
Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes in ‘Chinatown’
Everett Assortment
As soon as manufacturing was completed, additional disagreements ensued. The ending was re-written, the unique rating deserted. Nicholson felt the “look” of the movie as a complete was “too brilliant.” When Chinatown lastly screened for critics, doubts vanished. The reception was ecstatic and the film declared an immediate basic. Watch the movie’s authentic trailer beneath.
Towne then co-penned with Paul Schrader The Yakuza, Sydney Pollack’s crime drama starring Mitchum, Ken Takakura and Brian Keith.
Warren Beatty and Julie Christie in ‘Shampoo’
Everett Assortment
His subsequent movie, 1975’s Shampoo, was one other business and important hit. Starring Beatty as a Beverly Hills hairstylist and playboy who goals of opening his personal salon, its big-name solid additionally included Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant and Jack Warden.
In the course of the Nineteen Seventies, Towne additionally did script-doctor work on Beatty’s directorial debut Heaven Can Wait, together with different screenplays together with Orca, The Missouri Breaks and Parallax View.
Towne later wrote and made his directorial and producing debut with Private Finest, the 1982 sports activities drama starring Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly as lesbian athletes making an attempt to make the Staff USA Olympic workforce, a lot to the dismay of their coach (Scott Glenn). It ranked amongst AFI’s High 300 sports activities motion pictures of all time. He later would direct and co-write one other sports-related drama function, 1998’s With out Limits, starring Billy Crudup because the ill-fated distance runner Steve Prefontaine.
Christopher Lambert in ‘Greystoke’
Warner Bros/Everett Assortment
Towne continued to pen screenplays all through the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, together with the 1990 Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes, once more starring Nicholson. His wrote the screenplay for the 1984 Tarzan story Greystoke, starring Christopher Lambert, with a watch to direct. However the poor monetary exhibiting of Private Finest led Warner Bros handy the helming reins to Hugh Hudson, who was scorching off Finest Image Oscar winner Chariots of Fireplace.
Towne was angered by the transfer and had his title taken off the Greystoke screenplay — opting as an alternative to credit score the script to P.H. Vazak, his sheepdog. It went on to attain an Tailored Screenplay Oscar nom for Vazak, making him the one canine ever to be so honored. It additionally was the primary Academy Award nom for any Tarzan movie.
After that, Towne proceed to work on different individuals’s scripts earlier than his subsequent writing and directing gig on the 1988 drug-crimes drama Tequila Dawn, starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell. He then penned the script for Days of Thunder, the highly regarded, very loud Jerry Bruckheimer-Don Simpson NASCAR drama directed by Tony Scott and starring Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Robert Duvall and Quaid.
Towne additionally wrote the screenplays for 3 different Cruise-led motion pictures within the ensuing years: Pollack’s The Agency (1993), based mostly on the John Grisham novel and co-starring Jeanne Tripplehorn and Gene Hackman; Brian De Palma’s franchise-starting mega-actioner Mission: Not possible (1996); and its 2000 sequel Mission: Not possible 2, helmed by Hong Kong motion icon John Woo.
In between, Towne and Beatty wrote the tailored screenplay for Love Affair (1994), a remake that starred spouses Beatty and Annette Bening, together with 12-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn in her last display position.
Towne’s last function script was Ask the Mud, the 2006 Colin Farrell-Salma Hayek romantic drama that he tailored from the John Fante novel. He additionally directed it.
In 2019, Deadline revealed exclusively that Towne was teaming with David Fincher and Netflix to work up a pilot script for a Chinatown prequel sequence. The concept behind the prequel was to deal with a younger Jake Gittes as he plies his enterprise in a city the place the rich and corruption includes land, oil and gangs.
Info concerning a celebration of life ceremony can be introduced at a later date.
Right here is the Chinatown trailer:
