DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. We're going to remember screenwriter Robert Towne, who died last week at the age of 89. In the 1970s, a great decade for movies, he established himself as one of Hollywood's best screenwriters. Film critic Pauline Kael described him as a flaky classicist with an ear for unaffected dialogue, and a gift for never forcing a point. Towne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for "Chinatown," a story of murder, corruption, family scandals and a scheme to control the drought-stricken water supply of Los Angeles. Jack Nicholson starred as Jake, a private investigator, with John Huston as Noah Cross, a millionaire in on the water scheme, and more. Here's a scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHINATOWN")
JACK NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) Going to be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they're paying for water that they're not going to get.
JOHN HUSTON: (As Noah Cross) Oh, that's all taken care of. See, Mr. Gittes; either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water.
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) How are you going to do that?
HUSTON: (As Noah Cross) By incorporating the valley into the city - simple as that.
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) How much are you worth?
HUSTON: (As Noah Cross) I've no idea. How much do you want?
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) No, I just want to know what you're worth - over $10 million?
HUSTON: (As Noah Cross) Oh, my, yes.
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
HUSTON: (As Noah) The future, Mr. Gittes. The future.
BIANCULLI: Towne also was nominated for his screenplay for the film "The Last Detail," again starring Jack Nicholson, and for the film "Shampoo," which starred Warren Beatty as a hairdresser who can't stay faithful to any one woman. In this scene, his girlfriend, played by Goldie Hawn, has found another woman's earring in his apartment. She confronts him about his infidelities.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SHAMPOO")
WARREN BEATTY: (As George Roundy) That's why I went to beauty school. I mean, they're always there, and I can't - I just - I - you know, I don't know what I'm apologizing for. So sometimes I [expletive]. I go into that shop, and they're so great-looking, you know, and I'm doing their hair, and they feel great and they smell great, or I could be out on the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stop light or go into an elevator, or I - there's a beautiful girl. I don't know. I mean, that's it. It makes my day. I mean, it makes me feel like I'm going to live forever, and as far as I'm concerned, with what I'd like to have done at this point in my life, I know I should have accomplished more, but I got no regrets. I mean, Jesus, 'cause I - I mean, I - (sighing) maybe that means I don't love him. Maybe it means I don't love you. I don't know. Nobody's going to tell me I don't like him very much.
BIANCULLI: In addition to writing his own screenplays, Towne was brought in as a script doctor for "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Godfather." We'll hear later about the scene in "The Godfather" that he wrote. In 1982, he wrote and directed the film "Personal Best," about a lesbian relationship between two athletes competing for the Olympics, and when Terry Gross talked to him in 1988, he had just written and directed the thriller "Tequila Sunrise." She asked him about writing "Chinatown."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS: As a screenwriter and director, you have to work with silences in movies, and I think you've used silence very effectively both as a screenwriter and director. In "Chinatown," for instance, there are scenes where Nicholson is trailing, for instance, Faye Dunaway, and, I mean, there isn't any dialogue in that, but it's very gripping, and you had to imagine that in your mind. In "Personal Best," there are sequences where there really isn't a lot of dialogue at all. It's very visual. It's very - it's interactive between the two characters. Does silence have a different meaning when you're writing and when you're directing, and is it frustrating, as a writer, to write silences in?
ROBERT TOWNE: No, it's - I think that so much of screenwriting is what I guess you would call, if you were an architect, negative space. In screenwriting, what you don't say is at least as important as what you do say. I don't find it frustrating at all. I find it demanding. It's a discipline, to try to imagine exactly how much you don't want said, and one of the benefits, of course, of directing is that you can control that. It is a difficult thing to control - you can put it on the page, but you can't really control how it's going to be implemented, which, of course, is a reason for directing yourself.
GROSS: You wrote the screenplay for "Chinatown." Roman Polanski directed it. Polanski played a small role in the film. He played the part of a henchman who's hired to intimidate Nicholson to get off the case, and what Polanski does is take out a pocket knife, stick it into Nicholson's nose and basically slit his nostril open. Whose idea was it to cast Polanski in the role? Was it yours or his?
TOWNE: I think that was Roman's idea.
GROSS: The line that you gave him to say was, know what happens to nosy fellows? They lose their noses. Why did you want to cut the nose? It seems like such an interesting, really offbeat way of hurting somebody (laughter).
TOWNE: Well, again, I was looking for a way to do something that I felt would appeal to your imagination, in terms of just a tiny little violent act that was scary. I really didn't want to go into the kinds of violence that had been rife throughout films at that time. I wanted to have a minimal amount of violence, but I wanted to suggest that it was nevertheless a very violent world out there, so I thought of something that I would really hate to have happen to me (laughter), and it was that, and it seemed appropriate for a detective anyway - a detective who is, you know, like a hound, you know, sniffing out the trail of some kind of criminal or villain. It just seemed like the perfect thing to do.
GROSS: What was very subversive about it is that it meant that Jack Nicholson, the leading man, had a bandage on his nose for half the movie, and even when he took the bandage off, he had a big cut and stitches on his nose.
TOWNE: Well, once again, in most movies, you can see people fight in a way that would have crushed skulls, created probably, you know, quadriplegics on - with both combatants, and they emerge unscathed from the battle, and continue to go out throughout the film with a bruise here or there which disappears in the next scene. Well, in fact, that doesn't happen. I mean, if somebody gets hurt, it hurts. Just a tiny little slit in your nose can really smart, and it can affect the way you look and feel for weeks - and, in this case, for the rest of the movie. It was just an attempt to - just like "Chinatown" was an attempt to deal with a real crime that, you know, involves something as seemingly prosaic as land and water, that little act of violence was an attempt to suggest that you can really hurt people by doing almost nothing at all, just a tiny little slit of their nose.
GROSS: I want to ask you a little bit about writing a climactic scene, a scene in which there's really a turning point in the story or in their character development. In "Chinatown," the real turning point scene, or at least one of them, is when Faye Dunaway reveals that the woman whose identity she's been hiding is really her daughter, as a result of an incestuous relationship. Her father - the Faye Dunaway father - had raped her when she was 15, and I want to just play a clip from this scene and then ask you a little bit about the considerations in writing this kind of climax.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHINATOWN")
FAYE DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) I don't know what you are talking about. This is the craziest and most insane thing...
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) Stop it. I'm going to make it easy for you. You were jealous. You had a fight. He fell. He hit his head. It was an accident, but his girl is a witness. So you had to shut her up. You don't have the guts to harm her, but you got the money to keep her mouth shut. Yes or no?
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) No.
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) Who is she? And don't give you that crap about your sister because you don't have a sister.
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) I'll tell you. I'll tell you the truth.
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) Good. What's her name?
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) Katherine.
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) Katherine who?
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) She's my daughter.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAND SLAPPING)
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) I said I want the truth.
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) She's my sister.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAND SLAPPING)
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) She's my daughter.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAND SLAPPING)
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray) My sister, my daughter.
(SOUNDBITE OF HAND SLAPPING)
NICHOLSON: (As Jake Gittes) I said I want the truth.
(SOUNDBITE OF GLASS SHATTERING)
DUNAWAY: (As Evelyn Cross-Mulwray, crying) She's my sister and my daughter.
GROSS: It's really such a dramatic way of bringing across that revelation and to have - especially with the slaps in between. You know, I don't know if people can make that out (laughter) in the clip that we heard. But can I ask you about planning that - writing that climax and if you had written in the slaps, if you thought that that would add to the drama of the moment?
TOWNE: Well, yes, they were written in. I think that any revelation of any kind is only credible, particularly one that is shameful. At least whether or not there's any moral stigma attached to it, it certainly is embarrassing for the Faye Dunaway character to have to admit to it. The only way you're going to believe that what she says is true is if she's reluctant to talk about it, and that's putting it mildly. I think that as a general rule, anything that you want an audience to believe is something that a character has to reveal reluctantly. Any kind of free and easy revelation is one that I think we automatically suspect is not true. We just - you know, glibness is - whether or not it is in fact true, it's certainly dramatically true that glibness is generally tantamount to insincerity.
GROSS: "Chinatown" has one of the most often repeated lines of recent film history, and that is just about the last line of the film. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. And that's said by one of Nicholson's assistants after everything's gone wrong, after Faye Dunaway has been killed and the evil father is free. How did you come up with that line? Did you realize it would have as much resonance as it did and that people would be repeating it for years after?
TOWNE: No. But the line was intended to be what it is, and I guess it just worked. "Chinatown" itself, I guess, is a sort of metaphor for the futility of good intentions. You simply - individual actions don't necessarily matter even though we'd like them to, even though we'd all like to be like Rambo and think we could singlehandedly win a war that we lost. And "Chinatown" suggests that a good man or a man who is not necessarily good all the time but would like to do something decent has his hands full when he tries to disentangle the Gordian knot that is really the kind of thing that most of us have to disentangle if we're going to do anything decent.
And most of us - ever since we've seen popular entertainments like James Bond, where he's licensed to kill, have always felt that, yes, we've kind of worshiped the job. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. We got to get those - you know, we've got to destroy the city in order to save it. We've got to win at all costs. And I think that you have to reach a point where you say, do I have to win at all costs? Is it - am I going to be saving more than I'm destroying?
BIANCULLI: Screenwriter and director Robert Towne speaking to Terry Gross in 1988 - more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JERRY GOLDSMITH'S "THE CAPTIVE")
BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1988 interview with screenwriter and director Robert Towne, who died last week at age 89. His screenplays include "Chinatown," "Shampoo, "The Last Detail" and "The Firm," and he was an uncredited contributor on many 1970s film classics, including "Bonnie And Clyde," "McCabe And Mrs. Miller," "The Parallax View" and "The Godfather."
GROSS: In a way, in Hollywood, one of the ways you got your start was as a script doctor. You were brought in to solve problems on movies that, I guess, had serious problems with them. You were brought in as a script doctor for "Bonnie And Clyde" and for "The Godfather." Could you give me an example of the type of problem you were brought in to solve on...
TOWNE: Well, I mean...
GROSS: ...One of those two screenplays? Yeah.
TOWNE: On "The Godfather," it was - there had never been a scene in the novel that existed between Marlon and Al Pacino. They were the father whose favorite son was the one that was to take over as the head of this criminal family. There had never been a scene where he was able to sit down and say, you're going to take over, and this is what it's going to be. And they needed it. And suddenly, they came to the point where they were going to lose Marlon in 24 hours, and they didn't have that scene. And they didn't have that scene. And they basically, as it was originally suggested to me, wanted a scene where the father let the son know he loved him. And it was my job to go in and write that scene, which I did by suggesting that the father's concern for his son and his son's future and his need to take over, because he was the only one who was fit to take over this criminal business, was so great that he was obsessively worried about all the day-to-day details of bodyguards and phones and tapped phones. And through expressing that concern, he let his son know that he was bitterly sorry that he had to pass on the dubious honor of being the head of the family. And the son let the father know that he accepted because it was inevitable. And I wrote the scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE GODFATHER")
MARLON BRANDO: (As Don Corleone) Your wife and children - are you happy with them?
AL PACINO: (As Michael Corleone) Very happy.
BRANDO: (As Don Corleone) That's good. I hope you don't mind the way I keep going over this Barzini business.
PACINO: (As Michael Corleone) No, not at all.
BRANDO: (As Don Corleone) It's an old habit. I spend my life trying not to be careless. Women and the children can be careless, but not men. How's your boy?
PACINO: (As Michael Corleone) He's good.
BRANDO: (As Don Corleone) You know, he looks more like you every day.
PACINO: (As Michael Corleone) He's smarter than I am. Three years old - he can read the funny papers.
BRANDO: (As Don Corleone) Read the funny papers. I want you to arrange to have a telephone man check all that calls go in and out of here because, you know, it could be anyone...
PACINO: (As Michael Corleone) I did it already, Pop. Pop, I took care of that.
BRANDO: (As Don Corleone) Oh, that's right. I forgot.
PACINO: (As Michael Corleone) What's the matter? What's bothering you? I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it. I'll handle it.
GROSS: Were there directors who let you - on the set, let you sit in before you started directing yourself? And I ask this knowing that a lot of times, screenwriters aren't really welcomed on the screen because the director wants to be able to make choices himself or herself without the screenwriter standing over their shoulder and making their own suggestions.
TOWNE: I have always been - maybe it's because I started so much of my work by doing rewrites that I didn't have the kind of threatening cache of the originator of a piece of material, which I think is always a threat to a director since it reminds him that he's in the role of, basically, an interpretive artist. And since I wasn't in that position, I was less of a threat in the early stages of my career. And it did allow me to be on sets. I was expected to be on sets because I was rewriting, very often, on a daily basis and had to be there with the pages for everyone to go over what I'd done to see if it was going to work. So I automatically spent a great deal of time on sets. Almost every director I ever worked with not only allowed me on the set but insisted on it.
GROSS: Is that how you learned how to direct by watching?
TOWNE: I don't know how anybody learns to direct. I suppose the best training I had was how I learned to write, by being in acting classes and watching really fine actors improvise. I think that not only helped me in terms of screenwriting, but it probably was the single best training I had to work with actors in movies.
BIANCULLI: Robert Towne speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. The prolific and influential screenwriter died last week at age 89.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CHINATOWN")
PERRY LOPEZ: (As Escobar) Go home, Jake. I'm doing you a favor.
BRUCE GLOVER: (As Duffy) Come on, Jake.
JOE MANTELL: (As Walsh) Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
LOPEZ: (As Escobar) All right, come on. Clear the area - on the sidewalk.
(SOUNDBITE OF JERRY GOLDSMITH'S "LOVE THEME FROM CHINATOWN (END TITLE)")
BIANCULLI: Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new horror movie prequel "A Quiet Place: Day One." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF TOMMASO AND RAVA QUARTET'S "MONDO CANE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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