Robert Towne Dies: Oscar-Winning ‘Chinatown’ Screenwriter Was 89

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Robert Towne, who won an Oscar for his Chinatown original screenplay and was nominated for his The Last Detail, Shampoo and Greystoke scripts, died Monday at his home. He was 89.

PR firm McClure & Associates announced the news on the part of Towne’s family.

Towne also earned BAFTA, Golden Globe and WGA awards for Chinatown, the L.A.-set 1974 thriller starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It was one of three Writers Guild Awards he won during his career, along with Shampoo and the drama series Mad Men. He also was nominated for The Last Detail (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1985). He was honored with teh guild’s Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement in 1997.

Born on November 23, 1934, Towne got his start with his screenplay for 1960’s Last Woman on Earth before writing for early-’60s TV series including The Outer Limits, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Lloyd Bridges Show. He went on to work with Roger Corman on films including The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) and later co-penned with Sam Peckinpah the 1968 Mexican Revolution film Villa Rides, starring Yul Brenner, Robert Mitchum and Charles Bronson.

Towne did touch-up script work on The Godfather and some other important films of the era, but his breakthrough came with The Last Detail. The military dramedy starring Nicholson as a Navy man tasked with escorting to the brig a green recruit (Randy Quaid) who has been court-martialed for a petty offense. Otis Young, Clifton James and Carol Kane co-starred. That film would set up Towne’s career-defining screenplay the following year.

Directed by Roman Polanski and produced by Robert Evans, Chinatown told the story of California’s water-rights wars of the early 1900s. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture, but only Towne would win amid that year’s dominance by another Paramount Pictures classic, The Godfather Part II.

At its inception, Chinatown seemed like a dream project. As Peter Bart wrote in a 2020 column for Deadline, Nicholson — then a rising young star — had developed a friendship with Towne during production of Easy Rider and now implored him to create a Raymond Chandler genre detective story for him. Towne confided that idea to Evans, then production chief at Paramount, who was eager to expand his portfolio as a producer, with the added compensation.

While Evans coveted a Towne-Nicholson collaboration as his first solo production credit, there was a catch: He didn’t want to make a movie about either China or Chinatown. Towne patiently explained that Chinatown was only “a state of mind,” whose intricacies involved incest, murder and a scheme to steal a city’s water supply.

Unmoved, Evans instructed Towne to abandon Chinatown, offering instead a payday of $175,000 to adapt The Great Gatsby. Towne angrily pointed out that a screenplay based on the Gatsby novel would be even more confusing than Chinatown.

To prove his point, Towne turned his back on Paramount, and borrowed $10,000 to rent a bed-and-breakfast cabin on Catalina where he would start writing. While he relished his freedom, it proved illusory.

Over time, Towne would find himself re-crafting his story with guidance from a succession of contributors with strong opinions. First came Nicholson, who had ideas about the characters but felt that the specifics of dialogue were not relevant. Next came the Polish-born Polanski, who confessed he was baffled by the subplots of Los Angeles politics. Finally there was Evans, who found the narrative impenetrable.

One recurring topic of disagreement: violence. Only two years earlier, Polanski had experienced the murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson Family, and he now insisted that the violence would be explicit in his new movie, not implied. “If a filmmaker tries to avoid upsetting people, that would be immoral,” he argued. Even the physical fight between Nicholson, as Harry Gittes, and Dunaway, as Evelyn Mulwray, would be graphic in its execution.

Once production was finished, further disagreements ensued. The ending was re-written, the original score abandoned. Nicholson felt the “look” of the film as a whole was “too bright.” When finally screened for critics doubts vanished. The reception was ecstatic, the movie declared an instant classic.

Towne then co-penned with Paul Schrader The Yakuza, Sydney Pollack’s crime drama starring Mitchum, Ken Takakura and Brian Keith.

His next film also was the commercial and critical hit Shampoo (1975), starring Warren Beatty as a Beverly Hills hairstylist and playboy who dreams of opening his own salon. The starry cast also included Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant and Jack Warden.

During the 1970s, Towne also did script-doctor work on Beatty’s directorial debut Heaven Can Wait, along with other screenplays including Orca, The Missouri Breaks and The Parallax View.

Towne later wrote and made his directorial and producing debut with Personal Best, the 1982 sports drama starring Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly as lesbian athletes trying to make the Team USA Olympic team, must to the dismay of their coach (Scott Glenn). It ranked among AFI’s Top 300 sports movies of all time.

Towne continued to pen screenplays throughout the 1980s and ’90s, including the 1990 Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes, again starring Nicholson. His wrote the screenplay for the 1984 Tarzan tale Greystoke with an eye to direct. But the poor financial showing of Personal Best led Warner Bros to hand the helming reins to Hugh Hudson, who was hot off Best Picture Oscar winner Chariots of Fire in 1981.

Towne was angered by the move and had his name taken off the Greystoke screenplay — opting instead to credit the script to P.H. Vazak, his dog. It went on to score an Adapted Screenplay Oscar nom for “Vazak,” the canine. It was the first Academy Award nom for any Tarzan film.

Information regarding a celebration of life ceremony will be announced at a later date.

MORE TO COME…

Peter Bart contributed to this report.