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Giving Voice to the New Hollywood Revolution, ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Shampoo’ Writer Robert Towne Brought Honesty to Artifice
Peter Debruge on Robert Towne, the legendary 1970s screenwriter whose work for Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty and Tom Cruise revolutionized the craft.
The movie might not have taken place in Vietnam, but it was indirectly about that war, just as 1930s-set “Chinatown” used a decades-old case of institutional corruption to indict the greed Towne observed in his backyard (specifically, shady developers attempting to steamroll his corner of Benedict Canyon). Opening in the wake of Watergate, “Shampoo” wasn’t as well-regarded upon release as it is today, possibly because Towne and co-writer/star Warren Beatty tempered the feather-light sex farce (about a straight hairdresser who’s sleeping with half his clients) with a timely skewering of the presidential election. Here was a talent who could size up other people’s screenplays and offer suggestions that immeasurably improved the end result, as he did as an uncredited script doctor on both “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather.” But when it came to his own work, he piled on the ideas, reaching toward a kind of impossible perfectionism.
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