AWARDS/
ROBERT TOWNE
KANBAR AWARD
The Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting acknowledges the crucial role that strong screenwriting plays in the creation of great films.
An Afternoon with
Robert Towne
Saturday, May 3
4:00 pm
Sundance Kabuki Cinemas
1881 Post Street (at Fillmore), San Francisco
The Film Society is honored to present iconoclastic scribe Robert Towne with this year’s Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting. Esteemed by generations of filmmakers and moviegoers, Towne will discuss and show clips from his films during an onstage interview. A screening of Towne’s wicked Me Decade satire Shampoo will round out this very special evening with screenwriting royalty.
Robert Towne: The Detail and the Big Picture
By Pam Grady
In the early 1970s, Robert Towne was researching Los Angeles history, preparing to write what would become his Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown, when he became entranced by Arturo Bandini, the hero of a series of novels and stories by John Fante. Thirty-five years later, the screenwriter recalled the author’s reaction when Towne approached him about adapting his work for the screen: “Who the hell are you?” He and the rest of the world would know soon enough. Towne promptly racked up three Oscar nominations in three years—for The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975)—along the way becoming one of the exemplary figures of the 1970s Hollywood renaissance.
The Last Detail, with which this amazing streak and a brilliant decades-long career began, is an adaptation of Daryl Ponicsan’s novel about Navy lifers accompanying a naïve young sailor to prison. “I think [it was] the first movie that I wrote that I felt I had some idea of what I was doing and might be pretty good at,” Towne has said. That confidence seemed to have stuck. Chinatown’s twisted noir went on to elegantly expose the corruption and moral rot driving the growth of a city, while the bitingly satirical Shampoo—written with Warren Beatty—finds supple parallels between Richard Nixon’s ascension to the presidency and a playboy hairdresser’s self-implosion. On the surface the three films may seem to have nothing in common, but they share a deep strain of dark humor, piquant dialogue and Towne’s rich sense of detail, an ability to evoke how people in wildly disparate circumstances actually live.
Born in 1934 in the heart of the Great Depression, Towne grew up in San Pedro, California, worked as a tuna fisherman and studied philosophy and literature at Pomona College in Claremont. By 1960 he was in Hollywood, honing his craft under the aegis of B-movie master Roger Corman, for whom he wrote the 1960 apocalyptic sci-fi drama Last Woman on Earth (a movie in which Towne also starred) and the 1964 Poe adaptation The Tomb of Ligeia.
Towne also dabbled in writing for television, and joined forces with Sam Peckinpah to cowrite 1968’s Mexican Revolution saga Villa Rides! But, beginning with his uncredited work on Bonnie and Clyde (1967), he found greater success as a script doctor, his reputation growing as he added his touch to films that would become classics, including the first chapter of Francis Ford Coppola’s mob trilogy, The Godfather (1972), Alan J. Pakula’s paranoid thriller, The Parallax View (1974), and Warren Beatty’s comic fantasy, Heaven Can Wait (1978).
Throughout the 1980s, Towne continued to alternate between working on his own scripts and doctoring others. In a testament to his Midas touch, he once tossed off a screen credit for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan (1984) to his dog—a gesture of displeasure at what the director had done with his script—only to see the canine walk away with an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In 1982, Towne added the title of director to his list of accomplishments, making his writing/directing debut with the erotic sports drama Personal Best. In that film he managed handily to maintain a delicate balance between the romance that develops between competing female Olympic runners and the competition that drives them on the track.
Although his dream of directing the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes, came to naught (star Jack Nicholson would eventually direct Towne’s script in 1990), Towne was able to indulge his love of serpentine neo-noir with 1988’s Tequila Sunrise, a romantic thriller limning the explosive relationship of a drug dealer, a narcotics cop and the woman they both love. In 1998’s Without Limits, he returned to the world of elite track-and-field athletes, crafting an affecting biography of the late Olympic runner Steve Prefontaine. 1990’s Days of Thunder was another lap around the track for the screenwriter, this time with racecars and a new muse in Tom Cruise, a combination whose success proved Towne could write blockbusters for a new generation. He followed it working with Cruise again, helping to adapt the John Grisham novel The Firm (1993). Then, with David Koepp, he helped transform Cruise into super spy Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible (1996), going on to take solo screenplay credit on the follow-up blockbuster Mission: Impossible 2 (2000).
Two years ago, Towne fulfilled the ambition that first brought him to John Fante’s doorstep 35 years ago, bringing the author’s 1939 novel Ask the Dust to the big screen. “It was the only book I’ve read that was redolent of my own childhood,” Towne explains, “of memories, visual memories, countless visual memories that I have.”
The Depression-era Los Angeles of Ask the Dust is long gone, but screenwriter/director Towne evoked the period startlingly in the film’s precise, evocative dialogue and shimmering images, including a 1930s vintage Bunker Hill neighborhood meticulously recreated thousands of miles away on two football fields in Capetown, South Africa. In a career spanning nearly 50 years, the artist’s devotion remains there on the page and on the screen, down to the last detail.
Pam Grady is a San Francisco freelance writer and member of the San Francisco Film Critics Circle whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, FilmStew, Reel.com and other publications.
FESTIVAL SCREENING
Shampoo
Selected Filmography:
2006 Ask the Dust
2000 Mission: Impossible II
1998 Without Limits
1996 Mission: Impossible
1994 Love Affair
1993 The Firm
1990 The Two Jakes
Days of Thunder
1988 Tequila Sunrise
1982 Personal Best
1975 Shampoo
1974 The Yakuza
Chinatown
1973 The Last Detail
1968 Villa Rides
1964 The Tomb of Ligeia
1962 My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy
1960 Last Woman on Earth
Kanbar Award previous recipients
2007 Peter Morgan
2006 Jean-Claude Carrière
2005 Paul Haggis
