Robert Towne, legendary Hollywood screenwriter of

Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay author of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and different acclaimed movies whose work on “Chinatown” grew to become a mannequin of the artwork type and helped outline the jaded attract of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.

Towne “passed away peacefully surrounded by his loving family” Monday at his dwelling in Los Angeles, his publicist Carri McClure, advised CBS News in an announcement. She didn’t present a trigger of loss of life.

In an business which gave beginning to rueful jokes in regards to the author’s standing, Towne for a time held status similar to the actors and administrators he labored with. Through his friendships with two of the largest stars of the Sixties and ’70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some 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 deliver a extremely private and influential imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles onto the display screen.

“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne advised The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a sort of place of last resort. It’s a place where, in a word, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re forever disappointed.”

Recognizable round Hollywood for his excessive brow and full beard, Towne gained an Academy Award for “Chinatown” and was nominated three different instances, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he obtained a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.

“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” 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 as a result of of the Great Depression. His father modified the household identify to Towne.

Towne’s success got here after a protracted stretch of working in tv, together with “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “The Lloyd Bridges Show,” and on low-budget films for “B” producer Roger Corman. In a traditional present enterprise story, he owed his breakthrough partially 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 “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game.” But Towne was credited by identify for Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s intercourse comedy “Shampoo” and was immortalized by “Chinatown,” the 1974 thriller set through the Great Depression.

“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 Department of Water and Power 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 traditional 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 essentially the most repeated traces in film historical past, phrases of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his companion Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

The again story of “Chinatown” has itself develop into a sort of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture”; in Peter Biskind’s “East Riders, Raging Bulls,” a historical past of Sixties-Seventies Hollywood, and in Sam Wasson’s “The Big Goodbye,” devoted completely to “Chinatown.” In “The Big Goodbye,” printed in 2020, Wasson alleged that Towne was helped extensively by a ghost author — former faculty roommate Edward Taylor. According to “The Big 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 “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had blended outcomes. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a business and significant disappointment when launched in 1990 and led to a short lived estrangement between Towne and Nicholson.

Around 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 automotive driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film was famously over funds 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 automotive slammed him: “He didn’t slam into you, he didn’t bump you, he didn’t nudge you. He rubbed you.

“And rubbin,′ son, is racin.'”

Towne later worked with Cruise on “The Firm” and the first two “Mission: Impossible” movies. His most recent film was “Ask the Dust,” a Los Angeles story he wrote and directed that 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.”