Robert Towne, Legendary Hollywood Screenwriter of 'Chinatown,' Dies at 89

Robert Towne, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Shampoo,” “The Last Detail” and other blockbuster films whose work on “Chinatown” became a model for the art form and helped define the jaded appeal of his native Los Angeles, has died. He was 89.

Towne died “peacefully surrounded by his loving family” Monday at his home in Los Angeles, his publicist Carri McClure told CBS News in a statement. She did not provide a cause of death.

In an industry that gave rise to snarky jokes about the status of screenwriters, Towne enjoyed for a time a prestige comparable to that of the actors and directors with whom he worked. Through his friendships with two of the biggest stars of the 1960s and 1970s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the seminal films of an era when artists held an unusual level of creative control. A rare “auteur” among screenwriters, Towne managed to bring to the screen a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles.

“It's such an illusory city,” Towne told The Associated Press in 2006. “It's the western edge of America. It's kind of a place of last resort. It's a place where, in a word, people go to fulfill their dreams. And they're always disappointed.”

Recognizable in Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Oscar for “Chinatown” and was nominated three other times, for “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo” and “Greystoke.” In 1997, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.

“His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic and entirely (original),” “Shampoo” actor Lee Grant said of X.

Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz in Los Angeles and moved to San Pedro after his father's clothing store business closed due to the Great Depression. His father changed the family name to Towne.

Towne's success came after a long period of work in television, including “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 classic show-business story, he owes part of his breakthrough to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. While Beatty was working on “Bonnie and Clyde,” he brought Towne in to revise Robert Benton and David Newman's script and brought him in to film the movie in Texas.

Towne’s contributions were uncredited in the credits of “Bonnie and Clyde,” the iconic 1967 crime film, and for years he was a valued ghostwriter. He helped on “The Godfather,” “The Parallax View” and “Heaven Can Wait,” among others, and described himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning but not pitch the whole game.” But Towne was credited by name on Nicholson’s macho “The Last Detail” and Beatty’s sex comedy “Shampoo,” and was immortalized in “Chinatown,” the 1974 Depression-era thriller.

“Chinatown” was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as JJ “Jake” Gittes, a private investigator assigned to follow the husband of Evelyn Mulwray (played by Faye Dunaway). The husband is the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, played by Evelyn's ruthless father, Noah Cross (John Huston).

Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne has resurrected the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but has presented Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey through a grander, more insidious portrait of Southern California. The clues pile up in a timeless detective story and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up in one of the most repeated lines in cinema history, words of grim fatalism that a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”

The story of Chinatown has itself become a kind of detective story, explored in producer Robert Evans’ memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture; Peter Biskind’s East Riders, Raging Bulls, a history of 1960s and ’70s Hollywood; and Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye, which is entirely about Chinatown. In The Big Goodbye, published in 2020, Wasson claims that Towne was largely aided by a ghostwriter, his former college roommate Edward Taylor. According to The Big Goodbye, for which Towne declined to be interviewed, Taylor did not ask to be credited on the film because his “friendship with Robert” mattered more.

Studios gained more power after the mid-1970s, and Towne's reputation declined. His own efforts as a director, including “Personal Best” and “Tequila Sunrise,” had mixed results. “The Two Jakes,” the long-awaited sequel to “Chinatown,” was a commercial and critical disappointment when it was released in 1990 and led to a temporary falling out between Towne and Nicholson.

Around the same time, he agreed to work on a film far removed from the artistic aspirations of the 1970s, the Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer production “Days of Thunder,” starring Tom Cruise as a race car driver and Robert Duvall as his crew chief. The 1990 film went over budget and was widely panned, though its admirers include Quentin Tarantino and countless racing fans. And Towne's script popularized a phrase Duvall used after Cruise complained about being hit by another car: “He didn't hit you, he didn't bump you, he didn't push you. He brushed you.”

“And to rub, son, is to run.”

Towne later worked with Cruise on The Firm and the first two Mission: Impossible films. His most recent film was Ask the Dust, a Los Angeles-set story he wrote and directed, which was released in 2006. Towne has been married twice, the second time to Luisa Gaule, and has two children. His brother, Roger Towne, has also written screenplays, including The Natural.