Robert Towne has become synonymous with smart, ambitious, adult screenwriting. Like many of his peers, he started his career working for B-movie icon Roger Corman, for whom he wrote and starred in 1960's The Last Woman On Earth, acted in 1961's Creature From The Haunted Sea, and wrote 1965's Tomb Of Ligeia. Then, in 1967, Towne's uncredited rewrite of Bonnie And Clyde jump-started his career and cemented his fruitful partnership with Warren Beatty, who shared an Oscar nomination with Towne for the screenplay to 1975's Shampoo. Beatty's pal Jack Nicholson starred in two of Towne's signature '70s films: 1973's The Last Detail (directed by Hal Ashby) and Chinatown (directed by Roman Polanski), which won Towne an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
In 1982, Towne embarked on a directing career with Personal Best; since then, he's alternated between relatively impersonal scriptwriter-for-hire work on blockbusters like The Firm, Days Of Thunder, and Mission: Impossible, and directing intensely personal, relatively low-budget projects like 1998's Without Limits and the new Ask The Dust, a literate, accomplished adaptation of John Fante's autobiographical novel about the relationship a hungry young Italian-American writer and a Mexican waitress share in 1930s Los Angeles. The A.V Club recently sat down with Towne for a discussion of Los Angeles, the primal charisma of Colin Farrell, and working with Roger Corman and Vincent Price.
The A.V. Club: Do you have any amusing Corman anecdotes to share?
Robert Towne: Well, when we were doing The Tomb Of Ligeia—which is actually a favorite of Martin Scorsese, who was also a Roger Corman alumnus—I said "Roger, please, do me a favor. This is a bit different from the other Poe films. So we need a new leading man. I mean, I love Vincent [Price], but this is a dark, brooding, tormented soul who's tortured and diabolical, but also very attractive to women. I think I even mentioned Maximilian Schell for the role. Roger said okay. Then he came back and said, "Bob, listen: we got Vincent Price for the part, but it's okay, because we've got Marlene Dietrich's make-up man." I don't know what the fuck he meant by that!
AVC: You also appeared in some of Corman's movies. What do you remember about appearing in Creature From The Haunted Sea?
RT: I remember very little about it, only that it was a lot of time spent on a boat, and I was hot, sweaty, and completely embarrassed, and I'm embarrassed that you even brought it up.
AVC: Most writers say that even the most respected screenwriters have very little power in Hollywood. Have you found that to be true?
RT: Well, relative to the power that movie stars have, and producers and directors, I would say that's true.
AVC: Why do you think that is?
RT: Everybody recognizes "in the beginning is the word," and all that fucking lip service, but I don't think it's in the nature of the writer's profession to go after that power. Writers spend their time alone, hallucinating, writing, making these things up, while these other people are out schmoozing, making connections, meeting each other. They are trotting the corridors of power and making sure they've put their own imprints in it. And they're promoting themselves and their images, as they should. But writers, by temperament, by talent and by time, don't have the opportunity or the inclination. And even if they had the inclination, which some of them do, they don't have the opportunity, because they're too busy writing alone. They're not social creatures.
AVC: Have you always wanted to direct?
RT: No. I first started to feel that I had to direct when I wrote Greystoke, which is not the script that got shot, although my dog [P.H. Vazak] is credited with it. [Towne's dog scored a best adapted screenplay Oscar nomination. —ed.] I suddenly realized that I'd written a bunch of descriptions without much dialogue to go along with it. I'd reached the age where I realized that I couldn't necessarily just turn that over to a director and say "Don't fuck it up." It's just a bunch of descriptions, and then it became embarrassingly apparent to me that those were what I saw when I wrote them down. There was nobody else who could see them, so I needed to direct.
AVC: So it was kind of a compulsion to protect your work?
RT: You can say protect it, but also to just communicate it. Because the one thing you know when you're shooting a script—and I've been on a lot of sets—is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind.
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