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Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay author of “Shampoo,” “The Final Element” and different acclaimed movies whose work on “Chinatown” turned a mannequin of the artwork type and helped outline the jaded attract of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.
Towne “handed away peacefully surrounded by his loving household” Monday at his residence in Los Angeles, his publicist Carri McClure, advised CBS Information in a press release. She didn’t present a reason for loss of life.
In an trade which gave beginning to rueful jokes in regards to the author’s standing, Towne for a time held status corresponding to the actors and administrators he labored with. By his friendships with two of the largest stars of the Sixties and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote a number of the signature movies of an period when artists held an uncommon stage of inventive management. The uncommon “auteur” amongst display screen writers, Towne managed to carry a extremely private and influential imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles onto the display screen.
“It is a metropolis that is so illusory,” Towne advised The Related Press in a 2006 interview. “It is the westernmost west of America. It is a kind of place of final resort. It is a spot the place, in a phrase, folks go to make their desires come true. They usually’re without end upset.”
Recognizable round Hollywood for his excessive brow and full beard, Towne received an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three different instances, for “The Final Element,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he obtained a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
“His life, just like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and fully (unique),” mentioned “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant on X.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s enterprise, a costume store, closed down due to the Nice Melancholy. His father modified the household title to Towne.
Towne’s success got here after an extended stretch of working in tv, together with “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Present,” and on low-budget motion pictures for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a basic present enterprise story, he owed his breakthrough partly to his psychiatrist, by way of whom he met Beatty, a fellow affected person. As Beatty labored on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he introduced in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set whereas the film was filmed in Texas.
Towne’s contributions have been uncredited for “Bonnie and Clyde,” the landmark crime movie launched in 1967, and for years he was a favourite ghost author. He helped out on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait” amongst others and referred to himself as a “aid pitcher who may are available for an inning, not pitch the entire recreation.” However Towne was credited by title for Nicholson’s macho “The Final Element” and Beatty’s intercourse comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set through the Nice Melancholy.
“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a non-public detective requested to comply with the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (performed by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Division of Water and Energy and Gittes finds himself caught 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 resurrected the menace and temper of a basic Los Angeles movie noir, however forged Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey throughout a grander and extra insidious portrait of Southern California. Clues accumulate right into a timeless detective story, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by one of the crucial repeated strains in film historical past, phrases of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his accomplice Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Overlook it, Jake, it is Chinatown.”
The again story of “Chinatown” has itself change into a form of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Child Stays within the Image”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a historical past of Sixties-Seventies Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s “The Huge Goodbye,” devoted solely to “Chinatown.” In “The Huge Goodbye,” revealed in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost author — former faculty roommate Edward Taylor. In accordance with “The Huge Goodbye,” for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor didn’t ask for credit score on the movie as a result of his “friendship with Robert” mattered extra.
The studios assumed extra energy after the mid-Seventies and Towne’s standing declined. His personal efforts at directing, together with “Private Finest” and “Tequila Dawn,” had blended outcomes. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a industrial and important disappointment when launched in 1990 and led to a brief estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.
Across the identical time, he agreed to work on a film far faraway from the art-house aspirations of the ’70s, the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer manufacturing “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a race automobile driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over finances and principally panned, though its admirers embody Quentin Tarantino and numerous racing followers. And Towne’s script popularized an expression utilized by Duvall after Cruise complains one other automobile slammed him: “He did not slam into you, he did not bump you, he did not nudge you. He rubbed you.
“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.'”
Towne later labored with Cruise on “The Agency” and the primary two “Mission: Unattainable” motion pictures. His most up-to-date movie was “Ask the Mud,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that got here out in 2006. Towne was married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and had two kids. His brother, Roger Towne, additionally wrote screenplays, his credit embody “The Pure.”
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