He was 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 the biggest stars of the s 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 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. Recognizable around Hollywood for his high forehead and full beard, Towne won an Academy Award for Chinatown and was nominated three other times, for The Last Detail, Shampoo and Greystoke.
In , he received a lifetime achievement award from the Writers Guild of America. Towne's success came after a long stretch of working in television, including The Man from U. In a classic show business story, he 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 , and for years he was a favorite ghost writer. He helped out on The Godfather, The Parallax View 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 immortalized by Chinatown, the thriller set during the Great Depression. Chinatown was directed by Roman Polanski and starred Nicholson as J. The husband is chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Gittes finds himself caught in a chaotic spiral of corruption and violence, embodied by Evelyn's ruthless father, Noah Cross John Huston.
