Robert Towne

Robert Towne died a week ago, Tuesday.  He was 89, which surprised me, because I’ve always thought of him as being more or less my age.  Probably because he managed to capture so effectively a kind of consciousness that seems particularly ours, this generation, a neo-noir sensibility, the shadow of Viet Nam and the Cold War.

Chinatown is of course his most famous script, and it led the death notices.  Bill Goldman, another celebrated screenwriter we lost not so long ago, remarked that his obituary would lead with Butch Cassidy, although he was credited on two dozen pictures, and acknowledged to have worked on thirty others.  Bob Towne is credited on nineteen features, and uncredited on at least as many, at last count.  He took money under the table as a script doctor on any number of projects.

The best-known movies he worked on, without a formal writing credit, are Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather.  Francis Ford Coppola, accepting his screenplay Oscar for Godfather, went out of his way to share Towne’s contribution.  Towne did unspecified work on The Missouri Breaks, Marathon Man, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and 8 Million Ways to Die.  He wrote Greystoke, wanting to direct it himself, but had to surrender the script because of money problems.  He was grievously unhappy with the finished picture, and took his name off the screenplay.  When it was nominated for the Oscar, he used his dog’s name. 

He directed four of his own scripts.  The first, Personal Best, released in 1982, is a jock picture, about track and field, and I myself have a real soft spot for it.  Siskel and Ebert put it on their Top Ten list, but it tanked at the box office.  Was it the lesbian angle?  Seems hard to credit; it’s all very innocent and sort of summer camp –there’s a fair amount of locker-room nudity, but Porky’s it ain’t.

Towne’s second movie as a writer-director is Tequila Sunrise.  Terrific title, for openers, the Eagles song.  Next, there was star power, Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kurt Russell.  Third and last, though, it’s easily the most generic of Robert Towne scripts: Cagney and Pat O’Brien as kids together, who grow up on opposite sides of the law.  And the studio imposed a happy ending; as originally written, Mel’s character was a moth to the flame, he didn’t live to see the credits.

It’s hard, with all due respect, to see Without Limits and Ask the Dust, the two later pictures Towne wrote and directed, as other than vanity projects.  Now, these days there’s really no such thing.  You pitch a movie, and convince the suits you can give them a return on their investment.  And apparently a story about the runner Steve Prefontaine was convincing enough (Without Limits).  It’s sort of curious that it bookends Personal Best.  I don’t know that you can say the same of Ask the Dust, an honest effort, but it simply doesn’t take wing.  Salma Hayek glows in the dark; Colin Farrell is in the wrong movie.    

You can only wonder if it’s just the breaks, somehow.  I look at Walter Hill, and John Milius, for example, both a little younger than Towne, but both guys who toiled in the trenches.  (Towne’s first two feature credits are for Roger Corman grindhouse pictures; Milius started out at American International, a longtime poverty row independent.)  Hill got lucky, and was picked up by the majors, his second produced screenplay was The Getaway.  He moved into the director’s chair with his sixth script.  

He’s kept writing and directing and producing.  Milius a slightly different kettle of fish.  A lot of scripts and stories, not anywhere near as many features as a director – seven only, so far.  But like Towne, he’s also worked uncredited.  Get this.  Dirty Harry, Jaws, the second Indiana Jones, Red October, Saving Private Ryan.  I’m thinking they kept pursuing commercially successful stuff, and maybe Bob Towne did too, but somehow less energetically.  That can’t be right.

Robert Towne’s last screen credit is Mission: Impossible 2, in 2000.  There are half a dozen projects since, for Mel Gibson, for David Fincher, but they didn’t get off the ground, for whatever reason.  It seems weird to me.  Did people stop knocking, or did he simply decide not to answer the door?  Dunno. 

Guy wrote some God damn good movies, though.  Which isn’t a bad epitaph, at all.

“I want to write a movie for Jack.”
“What kind of movie?”
“A detective movie.”
“What’s it about?”
“Los Angeles. In the ‘30’s. Before the war.”
“What happens?”
“I don’t know.  That’s all I know.”

(Quoted by Ty Burr, The Washington POST, 07-03-2024)

The Scientist and the Man in Black

Call this the third in my extremely occasional series of reviews of non-fiction books.  As before I am including two at no extra cost.
Forensics by Val McDermid, is a terrific guide to the science of crime-solving.  McDermid was a reporter before she became a best-selling crime writer and it shows. She gives you just enough of the technology, while focusing on the people, and often on the history.

For example, the chapter on entomology begins with the earliest recorded case of insects being used in the investigation of a crime.  In China in 1247 a man was found murdered with, it was determined, a sickle.  The coroner ordered all 70 men in the area to stand together with their sickles.  Flies immediately detected what the eyes couldn't, identifying the guilty man by landing on his weapon to feast on traces of blood.

There are chapters on fire scene investigation, pathology, toxicology, digital forensics, and much more.  McDermid tells of heroic scientists, and others who botched their work, usually out of over-confidence.  Sometimes their mistakes ruin, or even end, the lives of suspects.

One horror story is that of Colin Stagg, an Englishman who seemed a perfect match for a forensic profiler's description of the man who killed a woman in a London park in 1992.  The cops tried hard to prove he was the man, even introducing him to a policewoman who claimed to be attracted to him and into rough sex.  Astonishingly, this guy who had apparently never had a successful relationship with a woman, offered to give her what she said she wanted.  Clearly proof of guilt!


The judge politely called the prosecution's theory of the case "highly disingenuous" and dismissed it.  The policewoman took early retirement for PTSD, and Stagg was awarded a ton of money because his name was so ruined he couldn't find work.  In 2008 another man was convicted of the murder, based on DNA evidence.

The last chapter is about giving courtroom evidence, which most of the scientists appear to hate.  I suppose if an attorney was going to try to make me seem incompetent and dishonest I wouldn't like it either.

But I do like Forensics, and highly recommend it.

Unlike all the other books I have reviewed in this series, As You Wish by Cary Elwes has nothing to do with crime.  But it certainly has something to do with writing, specifically one of the best-written movies of all time. If you aren't a fan of The Princess Bride you may stop reading right now (and never darken my towels again, as Groucho Marx said).

Cary Elwes, of course, played Westley in that movie and, to celebrate its 25th anniversary he has published his memoir of the filming of the show.  If you love this flick you will relish his stories.  For example:

*William Goldman, who wrote the novel and the script (which for many years was considered by Hollywood one of the best unfilmable scripts around) was terrified that director Rob Reiner would butcher his darling work.  On the first day of filming the sound man picked up a strange noise.  It was Goldman, at the other end of the set, praying.



*Remember the sword fight between Inigo Montoya and the Man in Black?  Except for the swing on the horizontal bar, there were no stunt doubles (well, I have my doubts about Patinkin's flying somersault).  You are seeing four months of daily training with Olympic fencers and a solid week of filming.

*Wallace Shawn, who  played Vizzini, was terrified that Reiner was going to replace him.  Making things worse, the vagaries of film scheduling meant that his first scene was his most complicated: the Battle of Wits.

* Remember the scene where the six-fingered man strikes Westley with the butt of his sword and he falls down unconscious?  That wasn't acting.  He woke up in the hospital.

*When Andre the Giant (who played Fezzik, of course) was a child in rural France he outgrew the school bus, so every day he was driven to school by the only man in town who owned a convertible: the playwright Samuel Beckett.

So, if you love this movie, read this book.  To do otherwise would be... (say it with me) inconceivable.