"Chinatown" Screenwriter Robert Towne Dies

[Pink Freud]

From tonight's L. A. Times:
"Towne earned an early reputation in Hollywood as a sought-after “script doctor,” stepping in to do uncredited work on troubled screenplays for movies such as “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972).

Towne had yet to become a legend of the New Hollywood era of filmmaking when he saw a 1969 photo essay in West, the Los Angeles Times’ old Sunday magazine. Titled “Raymond Chandler’s L.A.,” it featured recently shot photographs of Los Angeles locales taken as if it were still the late 1930s and ‘40s heyday of Chandler’s fictional hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe, including an evocative photo of a vintage convertible parked next to an old streetlight outside Bullocks Wilshire, the landmark Art Deco luxury department store on Wilshire Boulevard.

Towne, a Los Angeles native born during the Depression, said in a 2008 Writers Guild Foundation interview that he was amazed that “you could still recapture the L.A. that I vaguely remembered by the judicious selection of locations around the city, many of which I knew.”

“That got me started thinking.”

Towne and director Roman Polanski famously battled bitterly over "Chinatown's" downcast denouement, which was right out of 1940s/50s film noir...but filmed in muted color. Towne wanted Evelyn Mulwray, cornered with their young daughter by her incestuous father Noah Cross in Chinatown, to shoot Cross and safely whisk the girl to a friend's home in Mexico.

Instead, Polanski --- who has suffered his mother's death to Nazis and his wife's slaughter by the Manson family --- made the ending, aptly, right out of Oedipus...and it wrecks. It's devastating.

I first saw the movie at the old Stadium Cinema in mid-October 1974....just four excruciating days after my First Great Love came over to inform me, after 3 years together, that we were through. The movie hit me like a ton of bricks. I saw myself as Jake Gittes, well-intentioned, but naively doomed. My former love's new man was, in so many ways, Noah Cross. And, like in life, the bad guy prevailed.

Years later I learned the plot propelling the movie --- the Owens Valley water scam --- was essentially true. Then I fulfilled a lifelong bucket list dream by living 10 years in SoCal...and visiting, from the movie:
--- Point Fermin, where Gittes spies on Hollis Mulwray watching for water misdirection into the ocean...during a drought;
--- Ida Sessions' apartment, where a sharp eye will detect her SAG membersip card, showing she was hired to act as Mrs. Mulwray;
--- Stone Canyon Reservoir, from where Hollis Mulwray was pulled;
--- the girls school which was the retirement home housing Noah Cross's unsuspecting new millionaires through land fraud;
--- the astounding Bradbury Building downtown, which housed Gittes's office;
--- the graceful arched footbridge, lily pads and canoes of "Echo Park: Water again", where Gittes photo'd his marital investigation prey;
--- the Oakland Drive in Pasadena home of the Mulwrays with the saltwater pond that was infamously "bad for glass";
--- the Canyon Drive house where Gittes trailed Evelyn Mulwray to discover the sister/daughter/sister/daughter she hid;
--- the central rotunda at L. A. City Hall, where Hollis Mulwray declared he "won't make the same mistake twice", alluding to the St. Francis Dam disaster that ruined the real career of William Mulholland; and where Ron Howard's father Rance, as an embittered farmer, led his thirsty herd of sheep inside to angrily ask Mulwray who was corrupting him.
--- after moving to Encino I lived one block from Balboa Blvd., at whose weirs-layered terminus the stolen water from the Owens Valley, after 233 miles, finds its purloined home.

About 11-12 years ago I attended the TCM Classic Film Festival on Hollywood Boulevard, and was in the audience at the TCL Chinese Theater for host Robert Osborne's live interviews from the stage with Robert Towne and producer Robert Evans.....and then we watched "Chinatown" on that big, historic screen. Another check-off from the bucket list.

[edwin drood]

Chinatown is one of the best films of all time, imo. Also, Towne was uncredited on several Warren Beatty films; The Parallax View, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait and Reds. Also the terrific Marathon Man. A great writer indeed.

[Pink Freud]

"edwin drood" post_id=12775064 time=1720130831 user_id=338610]
Chinatown is one of the best films of all time, imo. Also, Towne was uncredited on several Warren Beatty films; The Parallax View, Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait and Reds. Also the terrific Marathon Man. A great writer indeed.

I'm reading "Going To the Movies", a scripting book by Syd Field, whose 4-hour seminar I attended in Van Nuys (only $175, thanks to Groupon). He said the first time he saw "Chinatown" he went "meh". Then Syd learned the engine of the movie was the real-life corruption that stole water from the Owens Valley, involving Mayor Fred Eaton, Water & Power Supe William Mulholland ("Hollis Mulwray"), coming fresh off the St. Francis Dam disaster; L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler, and a powerful land developer/police board president (i.e., the Noah Cross character).

He saw the film again and pronounced it a masterpiece, perfectly emulsifying a sordid rape story with divorce investigator Jake Gittes's moral indignation and the building of a modern metropolis through fraud. Field noted every single line of dialogue, start to finish, is a through-line clue to the shattering denouement. However.....there was one potent line mistakenly snipped: In the very first scene, in Gittes's office, a distraught Curly (Burt Young), seeing photos of his wife's affair, blurts out "I want her murdered", to which Jake replies "Curly, you're not rich enough to kill somebody and get away with it." Sadly, that exchange didn't make the final cut.

Towne would work quickly and economically as a script doctor. However, on his own screenplays he'd keep producers waiting for months, then turn in a phone-book size tome. Polanski rented a house for several months with Towne to work on "Chinatown" --- originally a 3-hour slog--- , who always brought his huge dog along, peeing all over the house and driving Polanski nuts with the odor.

This is the same dog who got an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay on "Greystoke" as P. H. Vazak --- Towne took his name off the movie and inserted his dog's name rather than going the Alan Smithee route.

Strangely, in his book "The Big Goodbye", about the genesis of "Chinatown", author Sam Wasson insists Towne's most trusted and prolific --- always paid; never credited --- co-writer was his college chum Edwin Taylor. Wasson spoke to neither Towne nor Taylor for his book, getting much of his dish from Towne's bitter ex-wife Julie Payne.

Oddly, re "Shampoo", Towne got the idea for Warren Beatty's womanizing, oversexed hairdresser from Fred Astaire's final regular dance partner Barrie Chase, whom Towne romanced for awhile. The model for that Beatty character was Chase's ex-husband.

Fun fact: I've written here before that I attended the 50th anniversary screening of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the AMPAS HQ, attended by most surviving cast members, including Barrie Chase. She was 79 at the time....and still gorgeous.

[Pink Freud]

Correction: Edward Taylor, not Edwin Taylor, was author Sam Wasson's purported co-writer with Towne on "Chinatown" and other works. Edward Taylor died in 2013, seven years before Wasson's "The Big Goodbye" was published.