Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and other acclaimed films whose work on “Chinatown” became a model for the art form and helped define the pampered appeal of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne “passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family” Monday at his Los Angeles home, his publicist Carri McClure told CBS News in a statement. She did not provide a cause of death.
In an industry that gave rise to sad jokes about the status of the writer, Towne enjoyed for a time a prestige comparable to that of the actors and directors with whom he worked. Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the defining films of an era when artists had an unusual degree of creative control. A rare “auteur” among screenwriters, Towne managed to bring to the screen a deeply personal and influential vision of Los Angeles.
Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for AFI
“It’s such an illusionary city,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west in America. It’s kind of a last resort. It’s a place where, in short, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re always disappointed.”
Towne is recognizable in Hollywood by his high forehead and full beard. He won an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three more times, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, like the characters he created, was sharp, iconoclastic and utterly (original),” said “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant in X.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s clothing store closed due to the Great Depression. His father changed the family name to Towne.
Towne’s success came after a long period of work in television, including “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and in low-budget films for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a classic show-business story, he owed his breakthrough partly to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. While Beatty was working on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought Towne in for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and kept him on the set while the film was being shot in Texas.
Towne’s contributions went uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the groundbreaking crime film released in 1967, and for years he was a favored ghostwriter. He worked on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait,” among others, and called himself “a relief pitcher who could pitch an inning but not the whole game.” But Towne was credited for Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized in “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as JJ “Jake” Gittes, a private investigator hired to follow Evelyn Mulwray’s (Faye Dunaway) husband, chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who finds Gittes caught up in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence embodied by Evelyn’s ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).
Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne revived the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but cast Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey against a grander, more insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues pile up in a timeless detective story, helplessly leading to tragedy, summed up in one of the most repeated lines in cinema history, words of grim fatalism that a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
The backstory of “Chinatown” has itself become something of a detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a history of Hollywood in the 1960s and ’70s; and in Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” devoted entirely to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” published in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne received extensive help from a ghostwriter — former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to “The Big Goodbye,” for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor did not ask for credit on the film because his “friendship with Robert” was more important.
As the studios gained power after the mid-1970s, Towne’s standing declined. His own attempts at directing, including “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had mixed results. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a commercial and critical disappointment when it came out in 1990 and led to a temporary estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Around the same time, he agreed to work on a film far removed from the arthouse aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer production “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over-budget and largely panned, though it was also admired by Quentin Tarantino and legions of racing fans. And Towne’s script popularized a phrase Duvall used after Cruise complained that another car had hit him: “He didn’t hit you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t push you. He rubbed you.”
“And rubbing, son, is racing.”
Towne later worked with Cruise on “The Firm” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” films. His most recent film was “Ask the Dust,” a Los Angeles-set tale that he wrote and directed and which came out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two children. His brother, Roger Towne, also wrote screenplays; his credits include “The Natural.”
