Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Chinatown” and considered one of the greatest screenwriters of all time, has died at the age of 89.
Towne, a screenwriter whose other films “Shampoo” and “The Last Detail” were nominated, died Monday at his Los Angeles home surrounded by his family, a spokesman said, without disclosing the cause of death.
Known in Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Academy Award for his performance in Chinatown and was nominated three times for films such as The Last Detail, Shampoo, and Greystroke. In 1997, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.
His success came after years of working on TV shows like The Man from UNCLE and The Lloyd Bridges Show, as well as low-budget films for B-movie producer Roger Corman. In a typical show business story, his breakthrough also came from a psychiatrist, through whom he met fellow patient Warren Beatty. When Beatty was working on Bonnie and Clyde, he invited Towne to help with revisions to Robert Benton and David Newman’s script, and had him on set while the movie was being shot in Texas.
Towne’s contributions were uncredited in the groundbreaking 1967 crime film “Bonnie and Clyde,” but he was a favorite ghostwriter for many years. He helped out on films like “The Godfather” and “Heaven Can Wait,” calling himself “the relief pitcher who can pitch one inning but pitch the whole game.” But Towne is credited on Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo,” and he was immortalized in the 1974 Depression-era thriller “Chinatown.”
Towne’s script has since become a staple in screenwriting classes, but it also serves as a lesson in how movies are made in general, and the risks of attributing a film to a single point of view. Towne worked closely with Roman Polanski to revise the story, and has admitted to having heated arguments with the director about the film’s devastating ending; Polanski pushed for the ending, and Towne later agreed it was the right choice. (No one is officially credited as a writer for the film’s iconic line, “Forget it, Jake, this is Chinatown.”)
But the idea started with Towne, who turned down the chance to adapt The Great Gatsby to work on Chinatown, after reading Carey McWilliams’ 1946 book Southern California: An Island on Land.
“There’s a chapter in the film called ‘Water Water Water,’ which was a revelation to me, and I thought, ‘I’ll try to do a film about a crime that’s right in front of everyone’s eyes,'” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2009.
Chinatown’s background has been explored as a kind of detective novel in producer Robert Evans’ memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture, Peter Biskind’s history of 1960s and 1970s Hollywood East Riders, Raging Bulls, and Sam Wasson’s book dedicated to Chinatown, The Big Goodbye. In The Big Goodbye, published in 2020, Wasson claims that Towne received significant 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 a credit on the film because his “friendship with Robert” was more important.
From the mid-1970s onwards, as studio power grew, Towne’s status declined. Towne’s own directorial efforts, such as Personal Best and Tequila Sunrise, had mixed results. The long-awaited sequel to Chinatown, The Two Jakes, was released in 1990 but was a commercial and critical disappointment, leading to a rift between Towne and Nicholson.
Around the same time, he agreed to make Days of Thunder, a film produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer that was a far cry from the arthouse films of the ’70s. The film starred Tom Cruise as a race car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was notoriously overbudget and largely panned, though Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans praised it.
Towne subsequently co-starred with Cruise in The Firm and the first two Mission: Impossible films. Most recently, he wrote and directed Ask the Dust, a Los Angeles-set story released in 2006. Towne has been married twice, first to Luisa Gaul, and has two children. His brother, Roger Towne, is also a screenwriter whose credits include The Natural.
Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father’s dress shop closed during the Great Depression. (His father changed his surname to Towne.) Towne had always loved writing, and his proximity to the Warner Brothers Theatre and his reading of the works of critic James Agee inspired him to pursue a career in film. Towne also worked on tuna fishing boats for a time, and often spoke about the influence that had on him.
“I equate fishing and writing in my mind. Each script is like a trip that I’m on, and then I’m fishing,” he told the Writers Guild of America in 2013. “Sometimes they both involve an act of faith… Sometimes it’s just pure faith that sustains you, because you think, ‘Damn, I have nothing. I’m not going to catch any fish today. Nothing’s going to happen.'”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
