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Robert Towne, Academy Award-Winning ‘Chinatown’ Screenwriter, Dead at 89

Robert Towne, the screenwriter and director whose Oscar-winning work in the 1974 film 'Chinatown' enshrined him in Hollywood history, died at age 89.

During his celebrated career, Towne wrote the Hal Ashby films The Last Detail in 1973 and 1975’s Shampoo, receiving Academy Award nominations for both. He also wrote and directed 1988 crime drama Tequila Sunrise — starring Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, Michelle Pfeiffer — which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography. You work and think and rework and rethink, toss out and put back in, and over the months and quite possibly years, something will start to take shape that someone else, at some later juncture, may just call good.”

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