Robert Towne, Oscar-winning writer of Chinatown, dies

Robert Towne, who won an Academy Award for his original script for Chinatown, has died at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.

Towne died on Monday surrounded by family, said publicist Carri McClure. She declined to comment on any cause of death.

In an industry which gave birth to rueful jokes about the writer’s status, Towne for a time held prestige comparable to the actors and directors he worked with.

Through his friendships with two of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1960s and ‘70s, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, he wrote or co-wrote some of the signature films of an era when artists held an unusual level of creative control.

The rare “auteur” among screen writers, Towne managed to bring a highly personal and influential vision of Los Angeles onto the screen.

“It’s a city that’s so illusory,” Towne told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview.

“It’s the westernmost west of America. It’s a sort of place of last resort. It’s a place where, in a word, people go to make their dreams come true. And they’re forever disappointed.”

Recognisable around Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Oscar for Chinatown and was nominated three other times, for The Last Detail, Shampoo and Greystroke. In 1997, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America.

His success came after a long stretch of working in television, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E and The Lloyd Bridges Show, and on low-budget movies for “B” producer Roger Corman.

In a classic show business story, Towne owed his breakthrough in part to his psychiatrist, through whom he met Beatty, a fellow patient. As Beatty worked on Bonnie and Clyde, he brought in Towne for revisions of the Robert Benton-David Newman script and had him on the set while the movie was filmed in Texas.

Towne’s contributions were uncredited for Bonnie and Clyde, the landmark crime film released in 1967, and for years he was a favourite ghost writer. He helped out on The Godfather and Heaven Can Wait among others and referred to himself as a “relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game.”

But Towne was credited by name for Nicholson’s macho The Last Detail and Beatty’s sex comedy Shampoo and was immortalised by Chinatown, the 1974 thriller set during the Great Depression.

Influenced by the fiction of Raymond Chandler, Towne resurrected the menace and mood of a classic Los Angeles film noir, but cast Jake Gittes’ labyrinthine odyssey across a grander and more insidious portrait of southern California.

Clues accumulate into a timeless detective tale, and lead helplessly to tragedy, summed up by the one of the most repeated lines in movie history, words of grim fatalism a devastated Gittes receives from his partner Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell): “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown.”