Robert Towne, the Academy-Award winning creator of Chinatown and the Jake Gittes mythos, passed away last month at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.
Like so many others of his era, Towne had humble beginnings working on B-movies for Roger Corman and on episodic television, then would become one of the most celebrated and iconic figures of that great period often referred to as 'New Hollywood', a second Golden Age of American cinema.
While he was most revered as the screenwriter of a trio of seminal films - The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975) - for each of which he would be nominated for an Academy Award, winning for Chinatown, he was also considered to be the greatest 'script-doctor' of the time, breathing life into and adding nuances to such classics as Bonnie & Clyde, The Godfather and countless others which could not have made it to the screen without his input. Francis Ford Coppola even thanked Towne on-stage for his uncredited work on The Godfather during his acceptance speech at the 1973 Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Also an accomplished director, Robert Towne helmed such films as Personal Best (1982), Tequila Sunrise (1988) and Ask The Dust (2006). Since then, he worked as a consulting producer and writer on the hit TV series Mad Men and wrote two episodes of Welcome to the Basement.
From 2019, Towne was working with David Fincher on a TV series for Netflix based upon the early career of Jake Gittes. Mere days before his passing, Towne confirmed in an interview with Variety that all the episodes for this series had been written.
This site's full biography for Robert Towne can be found here.
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