Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenplay author of Shampoo, The Last Detail and other 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, died Monday surrounded by household at his house there, mentioned publicist Carri McClure.
She declined to touch upon any trigger of loss of life.
In an trade which gave beginning to rueful jokes concerning 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 most important 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 degree of inventive management.
The uncommon auteur amongst screenwriters, Towne managed to convey a extremely private and influential imaginative and prescient of Los Angeles onto the display screen.
“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne informed 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 received an Academy Award for Chinatown and was nominated three other instances, for The Last Detail, Shampoo and Greystroke. In 1997, he acquired a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.
His 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 basic present enterprise story, he owed his breakthrough partially to his psychiatrist, by means 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 (*89*)-David Newman script and had him on the set whereas the film was filmed in Texas.
From ghostwriter to Hollywood icon
Towne’s contributions have been uncredited for Bonnie and Clyde, the landmark crime movie launched in 1967, and for years he was a favorite ghost author. He helped out on The Godfather 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 in the course of the Great Depression.
Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J.J. “Jake” Gittes, a personal detective requested to comply with the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (performed by Faye Dunaway). The husband is chief engineer 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 basic Los Angeles movie noir, however solid Gittes’s 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 the one of essentially the most repeated strains in film historical past, phrases of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his associate Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Towne’s script has been a staple of movie writing courses ever since, though it additionally serves as a lesson in how films typically get made and within the dangers of crediting any movie to a single viewpoint. He acknowledged working carefully with Polanski as they revised and tightened the story and that he argued fiercely with the director over the movie’s despairing ending — an ending Polanski pushed for and Towne later agreed was the correct alternative.
No one has formally been credited for writing “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”