Robert Towne RIP

Robert Towne has passed.

Though Bonnie And Clyde made his name, he continued to do uncredited work in its wake. When Francis Ford Coppola picked up an Oscar for The Godfather, he thanked “Bob Towne, who wrote the very beautiful scene between Marlon [Brando] and Al Pacino in the garden.” That might’ve been the push Towne needed because afterward, he scored a hat trick of nominations and mainstream success. 1973’s The Last Detail, 1974’s Chinatown, and 1975’s Shampoo all received nominations, with Chinatown being the only winner. Even better: Those movies actually carried his name.

After Chinatown, Towne returned to script doctoring, getting uncredited work on Marathon Man, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and Swing Shift…. After the Two Jakes debacle, Towne slowed his output considerably as he returned to critical and box office success. He began working with Tom Cruise, penning the scripts for his films Days Of Thunder, The Firm, and the first two Mission: Impossible movies. He also directed Without Limits, a biopic about distance runner Steve Prefontaine, which Cruise produced.  

I re-watched Without Limits as part of Donald Sutherland’s wake last week, and for me it holds up as a story while carrying some of the 70s sensibility into the late 1990s. Of the rest Chinatown is surely one of the great screenplays of all time. The impact of the uncredited work is hard to measure, but he evidently had an impact on many of the most important films of the 1970s. I haven’t seen Personal Best or the Two Jakes or Shampoo but hey, that’s why we have streaming…