Robert Towne: A Portrait of the Artist as a Hollywood Screenwriter

Robert Duvall, Robert Towne, and Tom Cruise on the set of Days of Thunder (1990). (Photo: Don Simpson)

Robert Towne, who died July 1, at age 89, at his Los Angeles home, established irrefutably that a screenwriter could operate as an artist. Unlike literati such as Ben Hecht and Dorothy Parker, who separated movies from their real work, and writers who catered to directors, the way Jules Furthman did to von Sternberg and Hawks, and Frank Nugent to John Ford, Towne initiated and nurtured projects that fascinated him, and he fought to get his visions on the screen.

Towne elevated his chosen form by developing a style of his own, as intricate, expressive and plainspoken as Thornton Wilder’s or Mark Twain’s. He used sly indirection, canny repetition, unexpected counterpoint, and even a unique poetic vulgarity to stretch a scene—or an entire script—to its utmost emotional capacity. He changed how Americans hear themselves, whether with the vocabulary of everyday obscenity (in 1973’s The Last Detail) or the feel-good mantras of domesticated hedonism (“You’re great”; “George is great”; “Jill is great”; “Everything is going to be great”), given satiric edge in 1975’s Shampoo.

Even before he became a writer-director, he proved to be a lush visual artist with an eye for the kind of images that hit the left and right sides of the brain simultaneously. So he altered how Americans see themselves, too, from the Paradise Lost of SoCal exurbs circa 1937 in Chinatown (1974) to the moneyed, mobile sex-scape of Beverly Hills circa 1968 in Shampoo.

As a writer-director, Towne didn’t achieve the clout and popularity of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, or John Huston, whose genius as auteurs subsumed the brilliance of their scripts. But he was a superb filmmaker who depicted Depression L.A. as an Edward Hopper Nowhere Land in Ask the Dust (2006) and caught the quotidian transcendence and zig-zag motions of grass-roots athletic life in Personal Best (1982) and Without Limits (1998). In Tequila Sunrise (1988), he bathed drug-running and amorous one-upmanship in the irradiating glow of L.A.’s South Bay coast. Towne’s intoxicating blend of the neo-romantic and the neo-noir has never been matched.

Coming of age in the 1950s, when, as he put it, “a writer was either a playwright, a poet or a novelist” and a screenwriter was “somewhere between a pimp and a prostitute,” Towne brought passion, intelligence, and an inimitable, sinewy magic to Hollywood filmmaking. He was known for creating multiple engrossing storylines and a cavalcade of distinctive supporting characters, then hammering out the shooting scripts of masterpieces like Chinatown and Shampoo in marathon drafting sessions with director Roman Polanski and producer Warren Beatty, respectively. Polanski, aware of the difference between writing and directing, didn’t ask to share credit on the screenplay; Beatty did, though as Pauline Kael noted, he mostly “contributed ideas and worked on the structuring with [Towne].”

Towne threw himself into the collaborative process. As he wrote in a journal containing his early vision of Shampoo, “A movie is like a necklace—its beauty is only when it’s all strung together—too often everyone involved looks at the individual stones—at the expense of the necklace itself. And a script—it’s not really a blueprint, it’s a mine. You really have to dig around in it to find the richest veins.”

Each new script required a leap of faith. To Towne, “It wasn’t a matter of ‘you’ve got to see it to believe it,’ but you’ve got to believe it to see it.” Another artist with a similar credo, Michelangelo, said, “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” For a different, modern medium, Towne said he believed the most important part of a script was its idea, and that “it wasn’t something I needed to invent. It was something I needed to discover and bring from the timeless world of ideas—of Being—into the time-fraught world of Becoming, where some mad fool of a director would take it one step further and turn it into a movie.” After two decades of screenwriting for directors as banal as Buzz Kulik (1968’s Villa Rides) and as astute as Hal Ashby (The Last Detail, Shampoo), Towne became a mad fool of a director himself.

Julie Christie and Warren Beatty in Shampoo (1975). (Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection)

His surname at birth was Schwartz, but when Robert was four years old, his father changed the family name to match the Towne Smart Shop, his dress store in San Pedro. Raised first in “Pedro,” the seaport town he considered home, and then in upper crust Rolling Hills, Towne went to the Chadwick Seaside School and University High School. He worked for months on a tuna boat (the source of some early short stories) and majored in Philosophy and English at Pomona College. Towne then moved to L.A., where before and after his mandatory Army stint he took Jeff Corey’s storied acting class along with his instant friend and sometime roommate Jack Nicholson. “Jeff’s class really taught me many things, but one of them was who was an actor and who wasn’t,” Towne told me in May, “and I realized that I wasn't an actor.” On the other hand, there was Nicholson. “And from the beginning I told him, I said, ‘Jack, you're going to be a big actor.’ I was the only one saying it, but I saw it so clearly. And of course he loved hearing it.” Towne thought Nicholson’s talent was unmistakable, but “nobody else seemed to see it at the time.”

Another Corey classmate, Roger Corman, handed Towne his first movie jobs: writing and acting in Last Woman on Earth (1960) and acting in Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961). He soon began contributing to episodic TV shows like The Outer Limits, Breaking Point and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (all 1964), and he riffed on Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” in his script for The Tomb of Ligeia (also 1964), the final entry in Corman’s big-screen series of Poe adaptations.

Along the way, Towne became known as Hollywood’s champion script surgeon. Producer/star Warren Beatty, who’d liked a Western script Towne had written for Corman, ignited Towne’s mystique when he asked him to perform some expert interventions on Robert Benton and David Newman’s script for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, starring Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Benton and Newman had the smarts to see that their Depression-set story of celebrity outlaws and fugitives from justice could, in 1967, encapsulate Americans’ violent and anarchic urges to wreak havoc on hollow pieties and conventions. Beatty and Penn wanted fresh eyes for final revisions, so Towne became their “Special Consultant” and rewriter. He re-focused and intensified the script, homing in on Clyde Barrow’s impotence with Bonnie Parker as a source of emotional suspense. (The team had already eliminated a menage à trois among Bonnie, Clyde, and their getaway man, C.W. Moss, played by Michael J. Pollard.) Towne sharpened pages of dialogue and, with Penn, refined the film’s nuances and structure.

Towne rearranged a mood-swinging sequence in which the gang steals a mortician’s (Gene Wilder’s) car and takes him and his gal (Evans Evans) on a joyride—until Wilder kills the gaiety by admitting he’s an undertaker. Towne decided that this scene should take place before Bonnie declares, “I wanna see my mama.” Then Towne gave Mama a mordant line to cap the whole manic-depressive interlude: when Clyde tells her that Bonnie plans to live nearby, her mom replies, “You try to live three miles from me and you won’t live long, honey.” Beatty and Towne became close friends and creative partners.

An acquaintance from the Corman days, Francis Ford Coppola, solidified Towne’s reputation when he deputized him to crystallize the relationship between Brando’s Don Vito Corleone and Al Pacino’s Michael in The Godfather (1972). In his notebook for the film, Coppola had written: “We may have to do better in the definitive scene between the old and the new don.” But amid the pressures of a risky and elaborate production, he couldn’t improve it himself. Towne responded with one of the greatest scenes in cinema—a remarkably moving father-and-son communion that filters paternal love through the Don’s grasp of gangland politics and the limits of the American Dream. One of Towne’s career-long goals was to move American screenwriting beyond manufactured Tinseltown fantasies in which the hero always finds a parking space or says, “Keep the change,” every time he buys a paper or a coffee. What he often achieves, as in this Godfather scene, is closer to demotic poetry than reinvented melodrama. Don Vito sets out to caution Michael about the homicidal power-plays sure to ensue after the Don’s death: “So, Barzini will move against you first.” But Towne, having experienced the impact of jagged, meditative rhythms and pauses in Corey’s acting class, interrupts the Don’s train of thought with ruminations about his personal habits (“I like to drink wine more than I used to; anyway, I’m drinking more”) and emotional concerns (“Your wife and children, are you happy with them?”). When Don Vito repeats himself once too often, Towne knows when to get to the point. Michael draws close to his father and asks, “What’s the matter? What’s bothering you?” That’s when the Don pours out his soul: “I knew that Santino was goin’ to have to go through all this. And Fredo was . . . well. But I never wanted this for you. I work my whole life, I don’t apologize, to take care of my family, and I refused to be a fool dancing on a string held by all those big shots. I don’t apologize—that’s my life, but I thought that—that when it was your time, that—that you would be the one to hold the strings.” Towne homed in on the image of a puppetmaster from the novel’s cover art, where it signifies the Godfather’s own power. But Towne conceives his version from Vito’s point of view: the puppetmaster personifies America’s homegrown elites, and the image manifests the Don’s aspirations for his favorite son. Towne multiplies the ironies. And simultaneously stabs at our hearts.

Towne’s writing sparked and ultimately canonized the most individualistic male stars of the 1960s and 1970s: Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, who were otherwise opposites in their personae, temperaments and skills. Nicholson, at his best as a salty, eccentric Everyman, exemplifies the talkative American, relishing dry drawn-out jokes and playful, goading badinage. Beatty, a natural, heroically handsome leading man, complicates his charisma with dithery streaks of self-doubt, stammering bashfulness and idealism, and surprisingly shrewd calculations. In Towne’s scripts, their speeches, casual and simple in language yet vivid and revelatory in their dramatic effect, are so intimately keyed to the performers that, even on the page, they bring to mind the actors and their nervy, vernacular characters: Nicholson as Billy "Badass" Buddusky in The Last Detail, Jack again as J. J. Gittes in Chinatown and Warren as George in Shampoo.

Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail (1973).

These alliances resulted in a rapid succession of contemporary classics. In his note-perfect script for Ashby’s Last Detail, Towne excises any hint of sentimentality from the service dramedy about career Navy men (Nicholson, Otis Young) conducting a sad-sack sailor (Randy Quaid) to prison, where he’ll serve a hefty eight-year sentence for damnably petty theft. In an extraordinary and groundbreaking orchestration of profanity, Towne captures the noisy desperation of Americans caught in soul-killing jobs. Nicholson, as Signalman First Class Buddusky, embraces Towne’s colloquial eloquence, especially when he reacts to a bar-man’s threat to call the Shore Patrol on the three of them by slamming down his side-arm on the bar and sneering, “I am the mother-fucking Shore Patrol, motherfucker.” (To savor Towne’s art, consider the corresponding line in the source book by Darryl Ponicsan: “We are the Shore Patrol.”)

Towne’s original screenplay for Chinatown, rooted in his love and hate for prewar Los Angeles, embeds a hard-boiled mystery in an iconoclastic history of real estate and water grabs in Southern California—a commercial rape of the land that mirrors the incestuous rape of the movie’s female lead. Towne transforms the archetypes of the woman of mystery (Dunaway, again) and the tough-tender private eye (Nicholson, again) into a tragic heroine and a slick, savvy, yet fundamentally honest urban operator with an unexpected streak of hard-knocks nobility and a flash of mordant wit. At one point, Nicholson’s Gittes, who’s had a nostril slashed, complains to Dunaway’s Evelyn Mulwray, “I goddamn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.” The comic line is primal yet elegant—simplicity itself.

Any given page of Chinatown or Shampoo contains the feel and meaning of the film in miniature—a testament to Towne’s deep personal engagement as well as his Hollywood Renaissance artistry. When Gittes snoops his way through an upscale old folks’ home, he asks, “Do you accept anyone of the Jewish persuasion?” “I’m sorry, we don’t,” replies the manager. “Don’t be sorry,” says Gittes; “neither does dad.” Towne learned about genteel anti-Semitism growing up as a secular L.A. Jew (his father and mother descended, respectively, from Rumanian- and Russian-Jewish stock). In a cherished family story, when his younger brother’s buddy announced that his mother let him play with the Townes because they were “high-class Jews,” Robert’s mom sent the boy home with a message: “Tell your mother we’re not high-class Jews; we’re just ordinary Jews.” Towne’s cousin Edward Zuckerman led the group that bought the Brentwood Country Club in 1947 and made it a prime Jewish alternative to “restricted” country clubs like Wilshire and Los Angeles.

Long before he became a writer-director, Towne displayed the enigmatic quality Pauline Kael called “film sense”—an instinct for meshing words and movement, drama and imagery, rock-solid character and surging lyric flights. Towne comes up with ruling metaphors that grow in our minds and elucidate the action, the way “Chinatown” comes to mean a toxic ethical fog. Towne’s dramatic imagination operates both verbally and visually. In the moral climax of Chinatown, Gittes compels the film’s rapacious land baron, Noah Cross (John Huston), to justify the murder that has cleared a path for L.A.’s takeover of the San Fernando Valley: “Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?” Cross answers: “The future, Mr. Gitts [sic]! The future!” Towne sets their confrontation near a manufactured tide pool, a salt-water pond that the murder victim, who believed that tide `pools were the source of life, built in his backyard. The crisp, bold dialogue, the lived-in characterizations and the evocative setting meld into a scene of blood-freezing vitality. Towne’s widely publicized dispute with Polanski—the director chose an unremittingly bleak ending over the writer’s more complex one—did not damage their mutual esteem. Fourteen years later, Polanski hired Towne to do a rewrite job on the Harrison Ford thriller Frantic (1988).

During an extensive 1981 interview with journalist John Brady for the book The Craft of the Screenwriter, Towne balked when Brady said, “With Shampoo you shattered a common notion—that male hairdressers are generally gay.” For Towne, George the hairdresser “is a rebel in the sense that he doesn’t want to deny himself.” Otherwise, said Towne, “the film is filled with people who settle for things. They settle for things because they feel they should, or because they are told they should, or because they are afraid not to.” George is “dumber than the rest of them, in a way. He doesn’t even know enough to settle for things, and he's lived his life in a certain sybaritic way. But there’s nothing corrupt or crude about the guy at all. He’s very sweet.” 

For Beatty, who again produced and starred, Towne conceived a Restoration comedy for the tail end of the sixties counterculture. He wittily and exuberantly contrasted the upfront hedonism and sensual craft of Beatty’s chic stylist and irrepressible Don Juan with the spirit-sapping rules and regs of bankers and the hypocritical social networking of L.A.’s economic and political players on the eve of Nixon’s election in 1968. Beatty, splendid when his characters are pushed against the wall, achieves his peak performance when Shampoo’s George is forced to explain himself: "I go into that shop and they're so great lookin', you know, and I – I’m doing their hair and they feel great and they smell great. Or, I could be out on the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stoplight or go into an elevator or -- I -- it's a beautiful girl -- I -- I don't know -- I mean, that's it! It makes my day. I mean, it makes me feel like I'm gonna live forever.” As Towne succinctly explained to interviewer Brady: “He fumbles, but he gets it out.”

Jack Nicholson in Chinatown (1974), now available in 4K UHD.

Towne and Nicholson’s friendship/partnership didn’t survive the disappointment of their Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes (1990). Set to direct it in 1985, Towne had cast their friend Robert Evans, Chinatown’s producer and Paramount’s former production chief, as the film’s second Jake, a postwar L.A. tract developer. But Towne lost faith in Evans’ ability to pull off the role and fired him. The production fell apart before shooting began. Four years later, Nicholson directed a partially rewritten script, with narration by another writer. Towne and Evans reconciled but Towne and Nicholson never did.

Towne and Beatty reached their nadir when they clashed over the Beatty-produced Love Affair (1994), a remake of Leo McCarey’s classic 1939 tearjerker with Beatty and Annette Bening in roles originated by Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne. Towne hoped to hone the material to a contemporary edge: he wanted to set the couple’s meet-cute on a fat farm. Beatty aimed to duplicate the gestalt of the original, an apex of the “You’ll laugh! You’ll cry!” kind of movie. Still, Towne and Beatty’s bond re-asserted itself and endured. “I’ve known writers like Tennessee Williams, Bill Inge, Paddy Chayefsky, Noel Coward,” Beatty has said. “And if I had the opportunity to reincarnate any of them, I’d still take Bob Towne.”

“What I’ve always responded to is movement,” Towne told me in 1997. “Character is automatically expressed more quickly and eloquently through movement than through dialogue.” At the same time, he loved classic American movies for “succinct dialogue that’s revelatory of just about everything, plus the movement.” One example he cited was John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (script by Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller). “The whole movie was about Henry Fonda doing the dance on the post and walking up and down the street—and it should have been. And the dialogue was wonderful, some of the most off-the-wall dialogue I’ve ever heard in the movies: Fonda asks the bartender if he’s ever been in love, and the bartender says, ‘No, I’ve been a bartender all my life.’”

Towne fused kinetic and verbal art when he leapt into writing-directing with Personal Best and created a unique, peerless coming-of-age film. He embedded his gifts for dramatic structure and natural speech into the tactile elements of movies. In this one-of-a-kind sports film, what could have been a clichéd story about a track-and-field ingénue (Mariel Hemingway) falling in love with an established female competitor (Patrice Donnelly) and then outstripping her became an earthy dithyramb about sportswomen figuring themselves out in the most vital and elemental ways. Closeups of the twisty mid-riffs of high-jumpers or the pumping thighs and determined faces of the pentathletes scaling a towering sand-dune registered with an eloquence that played off the taciturn eloquence of Scott Glenn’s coach. Glenn could only say, “You've got more speed than you or anybody knows about, strength to body weight that's unreal.” Towne’s eye then zeroed in on Hemingway’s body and told us what all that really means. Ignoring reductive debates about identity and gender, Towne followed Hemingway’s character through a same-sex relationship and into a heterosexual affair as if either choice were as natural as the other. He also made her pursuit of excellence tangible, as if his camera could detect the spirit in the flesh. Towne interwove the competitive purity of Olympic-caliber track-and-field contestants and the sexual fluidity of his two heroines’ prolonged adolescence. Personal Best, a spectacular debut, kicked off an underrated writing-directing career of unusual variety, ambition and distinction. In 1981, when Towne showed me a close-to-final cut of Personal Best, I told him the highest compliment I could pay him was in a sentence from James Agee: “This is one of the most visually alive and beautiful movies I have ever seen; there is a wonderful flow of fresh air, light, vigor, and liberty through every shot.”(I didn’t know then that Towne idolized Agee.)

As a writer-director, Towne proved a virtuoso at threading words and movement, not just in Personal Best but also in Tequila Sunrise (1988), a rhapsodic SoCal crime-and-love story. Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell and Michelle Pfeiffer give glittering star performances as (respectively) a drug dealer struggling to go straight, the cop on his tail who is also his friend, and the high-end restaurant manager drawn at different times to both. In Personal Best, Towne’s long lenses captured micro-details like the sweat beads dropping at an athlete’s feet, and his use of varying film speeds isolated and intensified the moments of truth within a whirlwind race. In Without Limits (1998), Towne deployed these dazzling visual strategies to dramatize the collision of two athletic philosophies. Long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup) feels he can be an honest athlete only as a constant front-runner. His wise coach, Bill Bowerman (Donald Sutherland), tries to teach him that marshaling his strength can be a virtue. Towne turned it into a gem about two-way mentorship, on the run.

Towne’s subtlest work as a writer-director came in 2004. That’s when he finally got the chance to film his adaptation of a book and author he’d championed since 1971: John Fante’s 1939 novel, Ask the Dust. (The film was released in early 2006.) With the help of his two stars, Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, Towne turns Fante’s tale of a struggling Italian-American writer (Farrell) obsessed with a Mexican waitress (Hayek) in 1930s Los Angeles into a vibrant Apache dance and manages to recreate the deviltry and grunge of Depression-era L.A. in a sprawling set built in Cape Town, South Africa. Towne’s Ask the Dust may still be too literary to soar as a film, but it gave him the satisfaction of conjuring a dense and poignant pre-war L.A. atmosphere, doing his best for a personal hero, and realizing a dream project that retained its mysterious glow.

Mariel Hemingway in Personal Best (1982).

Towne was loyal to mentors and to friends and collaborators in front of and behind the camera (including cinematographers Conrad Hall, who shot Tequila Sunrise and Without Limits, and Caleb Deschanel, who shot Ask the Dust and parts of Personal Best.) His pal Curtis Hanson made L.A. Confidential, the one great follow-up to Chinatown, in 1997, but it might not have happened if Towne hadn’t boosted his career a decade before. In the mid-1980s, Paramount put Hanson’s script for The Bedroom Window into turnaround. Hanson told Towne that he was struggling to set it up elsewhere with himself directing—“and Robert just went crazy,” Hanson told me in 1988. “Over the course of a holiday weekend, he got the go-ahead at Fox." Eventually, with Towne's help, Hanson made this entertaining thriller at the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group and reaped decent business and mostly positive reviews.

Given Towne’s generosity, it was excruciating to witness the widespread embrace of the assertion in the book The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020) that his best friend from Pomona College days, Edward Taylor, was his uncredited co-writer from the mid-1960s on. The book’s author, Sam Wasson, bases his argument almost entirely on the testimony of Towne’s embittered first wife, Julie Payne (they married in 1977, divorced in 1982), Taylor’s surviving family (he died in 2013), and Wasson’s Payne-guided reading of the early Chinatown notes, outlines, and drafts that she deposited in the Margaret Herrick Library. As a writer, Wasson, ineptly, imitates Towne’s supple prose, I suppose, and reduces it to doggerel: “The Santa Anas were blowing the last days of October 1973, swathing the city in lethargy and an unright [sic] argument of fog and sun certain tense Angelenos inherited from the sky.” As a historian, Wasson fails to indicate that he never spoke to Towne. Did he actually attempt to interview Towne? If so, how hard did he try? Did he approach Luisa, Towne’s wife of 40 years? Or did he decide it would make for a juicier book if he backed Payne’s savage views of Towne’s character, professionalism, and talent? Wasson acknowledges that “in a rare public reference to Taylor,” Towne called him his “Jiminy Cricket, Mycroft Holmes, and Edmund Wilson.” Wasson doesn’t accept that Towne is saluting Taylor as a conscience and a brilliant sounding-board and editor—not his co-writer. But anyone who reads the stash independently, and comprehends what a writer does, can see for himself/herself: Taylor helped Towne clarify his thoughts as they exchanged notes, scene lists, and outlines, but there is no demonstrated literary quality in any of Taylor’s contributions.

Wasson accuses Towne of hiding Taylor’s assistance, but how “rare” is Towne’s reference to his brainy friend? In Brady’s The Craft of the Screenwriter, Towne said, “I have three close friends—Ed Taylor, Curtis Hanson, and [blacklisted screenwriter/TV writer] Dick Collins—who have helped me through my scripts and through my life over the years.” Towne’s fulsome praise for Taylor as Jiminy/Mycroft/Edmund appeared not just in a limited-edition publication of the script (1983) but also, eleven years later, in the movie pages of the industry town’s daily paper, the Los Angeles Times, and then, nineteen years later, in the Library of America anthology, Writing Los Angeles. (Towne also credited Taylor as his “Executive Associate” on Personal Best and “Assistant to Mr. Towne” on Tequila Sunrise.)

Like his peer Bo Goldman (Melvin and Howard, Shoot the Moon), Towne kept active as a script doctor and sometimes hit paydirt, handing Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington a standout debate about the futility of contemporary war in the first-rate submarine thriller Crimson Tide (1995). Early on, Towne took his name off The New Centurions (1972), but we can hear his voice in a potent climactic speech by George C. Scott: he revamps the Myth of Sisyphus as a grungy, sardonic anecdote about a cop’s response to a recurring crank call. Towne’s fingerprints are all over Cisco Pike (1971), a shaggy yet harrowing counterculture nightmare about a financially needy and demented cop (Hackman, again) extorting Cisco (Kris Kristofferson), a musician and former drug dealer, into selling an ill-gotten cache of high-grade weed. The film conveys a pusher’s self-satisfaction and street cunning and the era’s creeping nihilism. It catches the moment when the air goes out of hip Baby Boomers’ collective high. (In June, Towne told me that in retrospect he should have kept his name on that one.)

Despite a creative climate that turned forbidding in the 1980s, Towne stayed relevant for decades. He forged a creative bond with Tom Cruise with the flavorful, if necessarily formulaic, script for Days of Thunder (1990), a Top Gun-meets-NASCAR extravaganza that bursts with stock-car braggadocio and veracious local color; it’s Quentin Tarantino’s favorite big-budget racing picture. Towne was a major part of the creative team that turned the legal thriller The Firm (1993) into Cruise’s most entertaining vehicle, partly by crafting piquant supporting parts for the likes of Holly Hunter, Gary Busey, Ed Harris, David Strathairn, and, of course, Hackman. Cowriting Mission: Impossible (1996) with David Koepp and penning Mission: Impossible II (2000) by himself enabled Towne to pepper spy vs. spy romantic acrobatics and adventure with the gallant derring-do he loved in swashbucklers of yore—after all, Cruise’s Ethan Hunt is, like Leslie Howard’s Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), a master of disguise—and the eroticism of Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946).

Several engaging Towne scripts went unproduced, including his scintillating remake of The 39 Steps, which re-imagines the hero of Hitchcock’s 1935 masterpiece, Robert Donat’s Richard Hannay, as a disreputable, Mel Gibson-like film star whose movie posters function as wanted posters. Towne sustained his biggest body blow when, in negotiations to complete Personal Best, he lost control of his ultimate dream project, Greystoke (1984), his ape-centric retelling of Tarzan of the Apes. An animal lover (particularly a dog lover), Towne intended Greystoke to be his magnum opus about the perilous and glorious intersections of the human and animal worlds. But starting with the pompous new title— Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes—Towne hated the way director Hugh Hudson alternately inflated and brutalized his script. The film earned Towne his fourth Oscar nomination for best screenplay (the others included The Last Detail and Shampoo; he won for Chinatown). In the credits, Towne substituted “P.H. Vazak”—the kennel name of Hira, his beloved Komondor—for his own name.

Like Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures of slaves, in which epic physiques strive to liberate themselves from solid rock, Towne’s unfinished Tarzan script bristles with imaginative energy, its images of the jungle’s anti-peaceable kingdoms coiled to spring off the page. Towne is a deceptively understated and unpretentious artist—he conjured an indelible catchphrase with words as simple as “Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown.” But at his most inspired he is the Michelangelo of screenwriters.

Michelangelo's The Young Slave. (Photo courtesy of Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze)

– Michael Sragow has been the movie critic for many publications, including Rolling Stone and The Baltimore Sun. He is the author of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master and a contributing writer to Air Mail and Film Comment. He edited two volumes of James Agee’s prose for the Library of America, and his documentary credits include writing and coproducing Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers and cowriting and coproducing Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen.