Robert Towne, who has died aged 89, wrote a dazzling hat-trick of screenplays that helped define the great American cinema of the 1970s: The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975). He also did extravagantly paid work as a script doctor, adding a scene or a few pages of dialogue to other writers’ screenplays, or completing what is known in the industry as a “polish”.
If a script was flawed or lacking, directors and studios went to Towne. “You must adopt the first precept of Hippocrates, which is to do no harm,” he said about this sideline. “You try to extend the material, not to impose yourself on it.” Sometimes, as with The Godfather (1971), he could provide a pick-me-up to a patient that was already fighting fit. In other cases, such as Armageddon (1998), he could do little more than slap a sticking plaster on a broken leg.
Among the screenplays that bore his name, the most accomplished was Chinatown, a noir thriller about the battle over water rights in 30s Los Angeles; Towne wrote the part of the private eye Jake Gittes for his friend and former roommate Jack Nicholson.
The writer was nonplussed when asked about the routine use of Chinatown in film-school classes. “We weren’t trying to write a screenplay that was perfectly structured,” he said. “We were just trying to make it make sense.”
The first draft took Towne nine months to write and ran to almost 180 pages; it was considered unintelligible by the film’s director, Roman Polanski, and its producer, Robert Evans. The final version, which Polanski finessed and rewrote in tandem with Towne, won an Academy Award.
“Up to the very last moment, I was one of those who thought Chinatown was going to be a disaster,” Towne later admitted. One contentious point was the ending. The original script closed with Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) killing her revolting father, Noah Cross (John Huston), by whom she had had a daughter. “You knew that Evelyn was going to have to stand trial and you knew that she wasn’t going to be able to tell why she did it,” he explained. “But it was bitter-sweet in the sense that one person, at least, wasn’t tainted – the child.”
Polanski disagreed. “I knew that if Chinatown was to be special, and not just another thriller where the good guys triumph in the final reel, Evelyn had to die,” the director insisted. “Its dramatic impact would be lost unless audiences left their seats with a sense of outrage at the injustice of it all.”
Towne observed correctly that Polanski’s ending represented “the tunnel at the end of the light” but conceded: “Chinatown would have been a disaster without him.”
Born in Los Angeles, he was the elder of two sons of Helen and Lou Schwartz, and spent his early childhood in the fishing port of San Pedro, California. His father, who owned a women’s clothing store before finding success in real estate and moving the family to Palos Verdes, where Robert went to Chadwick school, later changed the family name.
After studying philosophy and literature at Pomona College in Claremont, California, graduating in 1956, Towne served a stint in the army before doing odd jobs including working as a tuna fisherman.
In 1958 he attended an acting workshop where Nicholson was one of his classmates. Both men became part of Roger Corman’s stable of actors and writers. Towne wrote Corman’s science-fiction film The Last Woman on Earth (1960), in which he also acted under the pseudonym Edward Wain, and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). During the same period he also wrote for television series including The Outer Limits and The Man from UNCLE.
Another important figure in Towne’s career was the actor Warren Beatty. Towne did some rewriting work on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) for which he was listed as “special consultant”. He and Beatty later collaborated on the screenplay for the satirical comedy Shampoo and Love Affair (1994), while Towne did uncredited writing on other Beatty films: The Parallax View (1974), Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Reds (1981).
He also contributed to Nicholson’s directing debut, Drive, He Said (1971) and was called upon by Francis Ford Coppola, another Corman protege, to write a small but vital scene for The Godfather.
Late in the day, Coppola realised that there was no conversation between the ageing Mafia boss, Don Corleone (Marlon Brando), and his formerly respectable son, Michael (Al Pacino). Towne solved the problem with a long and poignant exchange that showed, he said, “the transfer of power … It was successful because Francis had done wonderful work, he knew what he wanted, but he didn’t really know, at that point, how to do it.”
Towne was thanked in Coppola’s acceptance speech when the screenplay won an Oscar in 1973.
There was an unexpected delay in the making of the scabrous comedy The Last Detail due to wrangles over the screenplay’s profanity count. (David Begelman, then head of Columbia Pictures, asked Towne: “Wouldn’t it be better if you used 20 ‘motherfuckers’ rather than 40?”) This left the writer with time on his hands, which he filled by writing Chinatown. After Shampoo, Towne did not have another screenplay credit for seven years, though his doctoring work piled up: The Missouri Breaks and Marathon Man (both 1976), and the Goldie Hawn comedy-drama Swing Shift (1984), were among the scripts in which he had an invisible hand.
He was also busy writing a screenplay that he hoped would provide him with his directing debut: Greystoke, a realistic retelling of the Tarzan story.
“As I wrote it, at least 70 minutes or so would have been silent with apes and a child. The problems of trying to delineate character through movement without much dialogue interested me.” But the film was never made in that form and provided him with his greatest professional heartache.
In 1982, he wrote and directed Personal Best, an intense and intelligent portrait of the lesbian relationship between two athletes. When that film drastically exceeded its budget, he was only able to retain control over the material by signing away his rights to Greystoke.
A messy court case later ensued, in which he filed a $110m suit against Warner Bros, and claimed to be so poor that he was forced to live in a guest house. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) was eventually directed by Hugh Hudson. “The only unalloyed disappointment was the loss of Greystoke,” Towne said later. “It bore no relation to what I consider the best script I’d ever written.” Rather than have his own name on the film, he put forward his dog, PH Vazak, for a screenwriting credit. The dog’s reaction to being nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay was not recorded.
Towne’s directing career was characterised by intelligent passion projects. He wrote and directed the smart, stylish thriller Tequila Sunrise (1988), starring Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer, and another athletics-based drama, Without Limits (1998), with Billy Crudup as the distance runner Steve Prefontaine.
He also directed his own adaptation of John Fante’s novel Ask the Dust (2006), which had been on the boil since the 70s. The film starred Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek and was produced by Tom Cruise, for whom Towne had already written Days of Thunder (1990), The Firm (1993), Mission: Impossible (1996) and Mission: Impossible II (2000).
It was a source of consternation for Towne that his proposed sequels to Chinatown, following Jake Gittes into other eras and cases, experienced such turbulence. The third, Gittes vs Gittes, was never made, while the second, The Two Jakes, began filming under Towne’s direction in 1985, only for the production to be shut down when a major casting risk – putting the producer Robert Evans in one of the leading roles – proved to be disastrous as well as unorthodox. Nicholson finally directed Towne’s script in 1990.
In 2006, Towne was the subject of a documentary by the artist Sarah Morris. In 2013, he became a staff writer and consulting producer on the final series of the acclaimed television series Mad Men. For all the tales of excess that surrounded him in his heyday (he was reportedly known as “write-a-line, snort-a-line Towne”), he maintained a certain level-headedness about his craft.
“A movie, I think, is really only four or five moments between two people,” he said. “The rest of it exists to give those moments their impact and resonance.”
He is survived by his second wife, Luisa Gaule, and their daughter, Chiara, as well as a daughter, Katharine, from his first marriage, to the actor Julie Payne, which ended in divorce, and his brother, Roger.