SFIFF: Robert Towne

I spend much of Saturday afternoon and evening with screenwriter Robert Towne and several hundred of his fans. Towne won this year’s Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting.

After clips from films he’d written (and in some cases directed), Towne sat down with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir foundation. Their talk went on so long that only one member of the audience was able to ask a question.

A few highlights:

Muller asked Towne when he realized he had arrived. He pinpointed his uncredited work on Bonnie and Clyde. He had already written screenplays for Roger Corman, and some TV, but one scene from that 1967 hit was the first time something he wrote ended up on screen as he had written it. “Screenwriting is an act of prophecy. You’re guessing. When it turns out [as you imagined], you get a sense of confidence.”

He digressed from a question to bring up Greystoke, which he called “the best script I ever wrote, although that wasn’t the script that was shot.” He called it the “biggest professional regret of my life,” and gave the credit to his dog. He promised to get back to it and discuss it in more detail, but never did.

Of course Muller asked about the three films from the mid-1970s for which he’s best known: The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo. Towne told us that the Detail script bounced around Hollywood for quite some time, much praised but unsold, and how that frustration led to Chinatown, then Shampoo. “I found myself in ’72 with three scripts I had written that weren’t being made. I thought my [professional] life was over.” Eventually, he’d win three Oscar nominations and one Oscar for those scripts.

About the directors of those films: Hal Ashby (Detail, Shampoo) was a “great watcher. All he needed was truth on film. He was an editor.” Roman Polanski, on the other hand, “was the most gifted director I’ve worked with. He was an impossible little shit.”