A great ending can be the hardest thing for a writer. For Robert Towne — who died Tuesday, having written and reshaped some of the most important films of the 1970s — finding the best way to wrap up a film was a career-long challenge. In the script that earned him an Oscar, the downbeat “Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown ” finale was famously Roman Polanski’s idea.
And yet, there’s undeniable poetry in Towne’s passing: The Oscar winner died 50 years (and two weeks) after “Chinatown” opened, basking in the fresh round of appreciation that the half-century anniversary brought. Towne was a natural raconteur whose stories were every bit as rich as his screenplays — as evidenced by an in-depth Variety interview that ran last month — and whose best writing often went uncredited. For those who weren’t around to have witnessed Towne’s transformative impact on American cinema in the 1970s, it’s fair to say that he brought reality to an industry built on fantasy.
That didn’t stop him from later going on to work on the first two “Mission: Impossible” movies, but his instinct was to make films that reflected the world he knew — to write characters who swore (“The Last Detail”) and stumbled (“Chinatown”) and seduced (“Shampoo”) the way real people did. For many, those three films, released within 14 months’ time, encapsulate Towne’s talent, representing a clear-eyed critique of American culture at a time of moral and political turbule.
