Robert Towne, the screenwriting icon who won an Academy Award for his original script for “Chinatown,” died Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89. His publicist Carri McClure announced the news on Tuesday.
In a screenwriting career launched in 1960 as a writer for low-budget producer-director Roger Corman , Towne earned an early reputation in Hollywood as a sought-after “script doctor,” stepping in to do uncredited work on troubled screenplays for movies such as “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972). Towne had yet to become a legend of the New Hollywood era of filmmaking when he saw a 1969 photo essay in West, the Los Angeles Times’ old Sunday magazine. Titled “Raymond Chandler’s L.
A.,” it featured recently shot photographs of Los Angeles locales taken as if it were still the late 1930s and ‘40s heyday of Chandler’s fictional hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe, including an evocative photo of a vintage convertible parked next to an old streetlight outside Bullocks Wilshire, the landmark Art Deco luxury department store on Wilshire Boulevard. Towne, a Los Angeles native born during the Depression, said in a 2008 Writers Guild Foundation interview that he was amazed that “you could still recapture the L.
A. that I vaguely remembered by the judicious selection of locations around the city, many of which I knew.” “That got me started thinking.
” Indeed, Towne often acknowledged that the photo essay was a catalyst for wri.
