Robert Towne is the man Hollywood calls when a film runs into a problem. The Oscar-winning writer talks to Michael Dwyer
Legendary. Accolades fly freely in the hyperbole of Hollywood, massaging egos with all the transparent phoniness of cheap special effects. Robert Towne is one of those rare film industry veterans worthy of being described as legendary after all his adventures in the screen trade. Now 71 and still working with characteristic diligence and passion, Towne has been through the Hollywood mill, first as an actor whose work was undistinguished and much later as a director with an output of just four films in 24 years.
Where Towne has forged his reputation is as a screenwriter, and very few of his peers can match his flair, intelligence and imagination. And he has made a remarkably significant contribution behind the scenes as one of Hollywood's leading script doctors - the experts called in, usually in a panic and without getting a screen credit, to add or polish scenes.
The organisers of Galway Film Fleadh wisely invited Towne to present the event's annual screenwriting masterclass last weekend.
When we met on the eve of his masterclass, I asked him to summarise his advice for aspiring screenwriters. "Do your damnedest to get involved with things and people that you really care about," he says, "because, like marriage, it's not easy. You're going to be sorely tried."
Towne looks bemused when I quote novelist John Fante's description of him as being "as tender as a kitten, and as crafty as a fox." In the early 1970s, when Towne was researching his screenplay for Chinatown, he discovered Fante and his work, beginning an epic quest to bring Fante's 1939 novel, Ask the Dust, to the screen. Towne finally got to direct the film last year, with an understated Colin Farrell playing a struggling Italian writer in 1930s Los Angeles. A gorgeous production, it was released here last month.
"I thought Colin was wonderful in it," Towne says. "In fact, the first actor I talked to about the role was Al Pacino, but that was back in 1971, when he was the right age for the part. And then in 1990 Johnny Depp was going to do it, but I couldn't get it made. It took years and years to raise the money."
Ask the Dust is set around the time when Towne was born in Los Angeles. When he was growing up, was he acutely aware of living in the capital of the film industry? "Not at all," he says. "I grew up in San Pedro, which is in the Los Angeles harbour, and I grew up with fishermen. It was like a foreign seaport. It was rare that the parents of my friends spoke English as their first language. I worked as a commercial fisherman out of San Pedro when I was a kid. I was on one of the tuna clippers. It was a wonderful way to grow up. Of course, I saw a lot of movies then, just like every other kid at the time."
TOWNE'S ENTRÉE TO movies came in the 1950s when he enrolled at Jeff Corey's acting class in Los Angeles. A fellow student was Jack Nicholson, then 18 and working as a messenger boy at the Hanna-Barbera animation company.
"It was quite a class," Towne says. "There was Dick Chamberlain, Martin Landau, Sally Kellerman and Roger Corman, and James Dean was just a year or two ahead of us, although I never got to meet him. I had no serious ambitions as an actor. I was always going to be a writer, but writers, producers and directors all went to that class. That's where I met Roger Corman and he gave me my first writing job. It was something called Fraternity Hell Week. When they went to revise the script, they took scissors to it to cut it up. They lost all the pieces and that was the end of my first script."
After that inglorious debut as a screenwriter, Towne acted in some of Corman's early no-budget films and worked for peanuts as a writer for him. "Actually, I would have been hard pressed to be able to afford peanuts with what I made from those jobs," Towne laughs. "But it an invaluable experience for me and for all the other people starting out at the time and working for Roger - Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, John Milius, Jonathan Demme . . ."
Warren Beatty, then a fast-rising young actor, read and liked a western screenplay Towne had written for Corman. "He didn't want to work for Roger, but Warren and I became friends and that's when we started talking about Shampoo. That was in 1966, and he also had a script. It was Bonnie and Clyde. I liked it enormously, which not a lot of people did. I encouraged him to get it made and I eventually ended up working on some scenes in it for him."
Bonnie and Clyde now ranks among the greatest achievements in cinema. "It's a very radical film," Towne says. "It was a shock to people, especially that stunning ending. The funny thing is that the initial reviews just panned the film. Time magazine dismissed it and a month later put it on the cover as the vanguard of the new cinema. The thing about Bonnie and Clyde was that they really were rebels, whereas James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause was not really a rebel but a reformer, someone who wanted to make his father more human, understanding and loving. He was not out to bring down the establishment, but Bonnie and Clyde was a film about rebellion, about tearing down the established order as symbolised by the banks."
Beatty was just 30 when he produced and starred in the film. "I remember they had a preview screening in Westwood," Towne says. "Warren had a reputation as a ladies' man, and people didn't take him seriously at the time. When his name came up as the producer of the film, there were titters in the audience. When the movie ended, there was a silence I've never experienced in cinema before or since. The lights went up and nobody moved. You could hear a pin drop. The studio people were terrified because they didn't know what this meant, but I knew it was a good response."
After all his years in the industry, Towne has good reason to be cynical about Hollywood studio executives. I put it to him that it's hard to imagine a film as complex as Chinatown, Roman Polanski's masterpiece that won Towne an Oscar in 1974, getting the green light from a Hollywood studio these days. "Oh no, it wouldn't be made," Towne says, shaking his head in despair. "I hate to think of what the notes the studio executives would be giving on that script today. It just wouldn't happen. One of the reasons why there were so many good American movies in the 1970s was that the studios were still owned by individuals in those days, and there wasn't this phalanx of executives and readers giving notes to people who gave notes to people who gave notes to people like me."
IN 1975, A year after Chinatown was released, Towne's long-in-gestation Shampoo was screenplay was filmed, and this sophisticated social satire featured Beatty as a Beverly Hills hairdresser sexually involved with many of his women clients whose husbands suspect nothing as they assume every hairdresser is gay.
"There was a group of hairdressers in Los Angeles at the time," Towne says, "and they were all oddly gifted guys with a sense of design. And they were all straight, which made them quite unique. A girlfriend of mine, who had been married to one of them, told me about him. They had divorced, but she still went to him every week to get her hair done. I was intrigued, and I watched him at work - the only rooster in the hen house. That was the beginning of Shampoo."
AS TOWNE DEVELOPED his own screenplays, he built a reputation as a script doctor, contributing crucial elements, such as the garden scene between Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in The Godfather.
"Sometimes they want you to rework one scene, and then it could be much more extensive than that. I got a mad call one night from Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and they needed a critical scene between Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman for Crimson Tide. I added that scene where they talk about the nature of war, and their opposition on that subject sets up the potential conflict between them for the rest of the film. I wrote that scene down the phone because they needed it right away.
"My next door neighbour is Sydney Pollack and one day he was taking in his garbage cans and asked if I could give him a hand. I thought he wanted help with his garbage cans, but he wanted me to give a hand with The Firm, which he was about to direct at the time."
Script-doctoring can be a lucrative profession, Towne admits. "It's a lot of pressure because they need it when they need it, usually when a film is just about to go into production."
The downside is when another writer doctors your own original screenplay, as Towne learned after years of painstaking research on the revisionist 1984 Tarzan movie, Greystoke. "That's the saddest single event of my life," he says without hesitation. "I wanted to continue working on that screenplay, but I had to give it up because I was completing Personal Best, which I directed. I took my name off Greystoke because they changed a screenplay that meant too much to me." As a protest, he put his dog's name, PH Vazak, instead of his own on the movie's credits. "I felt bad about that because I think my dog was entitled to a better film. He was a wonderful dog. When the screenplay got an Oscar nomination, the studio didn't know who PH Vazak was, and they kept sending him invitations to luncheons and functions for the nominees. But PH didn't go to the Oscar ceremony."
Towne is now immersed on a new screenplay, Fertig, based on the true story of a kindred independent spirit. "Wendell Fertig was an odd character, a mining engineer in the Philippines during the 1930s," he explains. "He was snapped up by the military as war loomed large with Japan. When he got orders to surrender, he felt that, as an engineer given a military commission, he was not obliged to surrender, so he hid in the hills. Even though he had very little military experience, he gradually formed a guerrilla movement that unified all the disparate tribes and grew to 38,000 men and successfully resisted the Japanese. It's a strange and fascinating story. And a Hollywood studio is doing it. They actually came to me with the story."