Robert Towne: The Hollywood Interview

Writer/director Robert Towne.


ROBERT TOWNE DUSTS OFF A CLASSIC
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Venice Magazine.

When Robert Towne won the 1974 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Chinatown, he could have easily hung up his Underwood and spent his days in comfort, resting on the sizable laurels of having crafted what many feel is the greatest movie script of all-time. Towne, possessing the intellectual restlessness that drives most creative spirits, kept writing, penning classics such as Shampoo (co-written with Warren Beatty, 1975), and becoming Hollywood’s top “script doctor,” doing uncredited re-writes on some of filmdom’s greatest titles (Bonnie & Clyde, The Godfather, The Parallax View, Heaven Can Wait, to name a few).
Born November 23, 1934, Towne grew up in the port city of San Pedro, where his father owned and operated a women’s clothing shop. After attending Pomona College, Towne cut his screenwriting teeth working for legendary producer/director Roger Corman, penning the script for 1965’s The Tomb of Ligeia, viewed by many film scholars as the best of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Towne made his directing debut in 1982 with the powerful, controversial Personal Best, about the lives and loves of female Olympic hopefuls. He went on to helm the nifty noir love triangle Tequila Sunrise (1988) starring Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the story of legendary runner Steve Prefontaine in Without Limits (1998). During this period, Towne penned a diverse slate of films, including Days of Thunder (1990), The Two Jakes (1990), The Firm (1993), Love Affair (1994), Mission Impossible (1995) and MI:2 (2000).
Towne’s latest puts him behind the camera and the pen once again, with his long-awaited adaptation of John Fante’s classic novel Ask the Dust. Set in 1930s Los Angeles, the story follows aspiring writer Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell, in his best performance to date) as he searches for inspiration in the form of an unlikely muse: a tempestuous, beautiful waitress from a Bunker Hill greasy spoon (Salma Hayek, also her best turn to date). Like the novel on which it is based, Ask the Dust is an elegiac, poetic masterpiece: a triumph of mood, performance and especially production design (Capetown, South Africa has been meticulously transformed into 1930s L.A. Production designer Dennis Gassner should be remembered at next year’s Oscars). The Paramount Classics release, which also stars Donald Sutherland, hits screens March 10. Don’t miss it!
Ask the Dust had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on February 2, at the city’s historic Arlington Theater. Robert Towne sat down with Venice the following day to discuss his latest labor of love, and his remarkable career. Here’s what was said:

It was amazing to see Ask the Dust premiere at a theater like The Arlington, which was built in 1931.
Robert Towne: The irony of it is that as that theater was being built, John Fante was in L.A., struggling and beginning to think of this novel.

The novel is autobiographical, right?
Very much so. The psychodynamic of that character, his manic-depressive nature, I think was congruent with John. Probably much more so when he was younger than the time when I first met him. But an awful lot of the story is autobiographical. In a way, I took more from his life in the second half of the movie than the book did. The book, basically, is very much like the movie, dealing with Bandini’s obsession with Camilla—and it was one-sided. In the book, Camilla is not obsessed with Bandini. Because the internal life of the character was so strong in the book, I didn’t think that an audience would put up with such a masochistic hero, because just being a writer is masochistic enough. So I decided to make their love more mutual. Also, to make the racial theme of it work, you needed to have it cut both ways: both wanted the same things from society, but the person that each of them loved stood in the way of that, and each needed to overcome their respective prejudices. I felt that was an inherently much more dramatic dynamic for the story, and a better way to dramatize the racism.

The book is so rich in terms of its themes. It’s one of those books I re-read every five years or so, and it’s always about something new to me each time I pick it up, much in the way The Great Gatsby is.
When did you first read it?

In college.
I was a little older when I first read it, probably about 30.

What’s interesting is that when I was younger, I identified strongly with Bandini, just as I related to Gatsby. We all knew we were Jay Gatsby as young men. But as we get older, we realize that we’ve been Nick Carraway all along, just as during my last reading of Dust, I realized I related much more to Camilla now.
That’s interesting. Yeah, I can see how that would happen. Funny story about the ’74 film version of Gatsby: I turned it down to write Chinatown. I remember well being on Robert Evans’ tennis court, as Evans was trying to talk Jack Nicholson into playing Nick Carraway. And Jack said “Sure, I’d be happy to—as long as you re-title the movie Nick & Jay. (laughs)

Tell us some more about when you first read the novel, what it was about it that spoke to you so deeply.
I was doing research for Chinatown, and was scrambling around searching for something that would put me in the past. This was in the 70s, and I wanted to read about the 1930s, and also see if I could find one book that was set in Los Angeles in the 30s, and had dialogue that felt like it had authenticity to it. You couldn’t get that from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nathaniel West, or even Steinbeck, who was from northern California. So I heard about this book and checked it out from the local library and immediately found myself drawn back into the past. It was like these people were alive in some alternative universe, right then and there. I said to myself ‘This is the way it was.’ It also jogged my own memories of Los Angeles in the 40s. That’s close enough to remember. When you hear the title Ask the Dust, you might think that sounds rather affected and pretentious, but the truth is, L.A. doesn’t look today like it did then. Then, it was much starker. All the foliage that had been imported all over the world hadn’t grown yet. There was still a sense of it being a desert, and all the little bungalows and houses that had been built Spanish-style after the 1915 World’s Fair, the sun just burned off that white stucco. The sky was bleach blue. The roofs were red tile, and there was dust in the air, because it wasn’t held down. So all those memories of my childhood came flooding back, and as we know from great writers like Proust, you jog somebody’s memory, it’s a very powerful thing to want to recapture. So in a sense, it’s a longing to recapture your own past. And then there’s the characters, all of whom are so vivid. Look, I grew up in San Pedro, and my earliest memories of girls were Mexican girls. I’ll tell you, if a girl didn’t have a cross around her neck, it wasn’t a girl! (laughs) They were so sexy, and just drove me crazy: their vitality, their humor, I’ve always been drawn to them, and always sensed and felt the injustice of their lot in California. We were so cruel and stupid to them. California was Mexican, and we stole it during the Mexican war. I agree with Profirio Diaz, who said “Pity poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.” There was a sense of that in Fante’s writing, and I pushed it, maybe even more so.

You got to know Fante towards the end of his life.
Yes. (laughs) I’ll never forget our first meeting: “Who the hell are you, and what makes you think you know anything about writing, anyway? What have you written?” ‘Well…uh, nothing Mr. Fante, but…’ “Well then, what are you doing here?!” Then Joyce, his wife, a blue-eyed blonde from a Brahmin family in northern California, Stanford graduate and a poet in her own right, whose parents were appalled that she was marrying this Italian, calmed him down and said “Give the boy a chance.” So the next time I came to dinner, John was on his best behavior, and (laughs) we were making small talk, and I asked him a question about his neighbor. And you could just see John struggling, and he said “I don’t like her much, Bob.” (laughs) Then I asked him about Camilla. He said “She was a dyke, Bob” I said ‘Oh God, please don’t destroy it for me, John!’ But he actually did live with her and the two of them had quite an affair. And he had her name, Maria, tattooed on his shoulder. So when Colin and Salma finally met Joyce in my kitchen, Joyce looked at Colin and said “You are so perfect for John.” John, as a young man, was very handsome. Then she took one look at Salma, and said “I don’t like you!” And she meant it, too. She was jealous of Maria up to that day, because he had that tattoo on his shoulder.

Did you ever mention to John that you wanted to make Ask the Dust into a movie?
Yeah, we talked about it. He gave me the rights, and a first edition, which he signed “To Bob Towne, in the hope he will take it to far places,” and I ended up taking it to Capetown, South Africa. He died in 1983, ten years before I finished the screenplay, but Joyce read it, and she had been his editor and was a part of his writing process, she said “Not only do I love it, but I think John would have been proud of it.” I don’t know about that, because John was such a curmudgeon, that even if he had liked it, he would have had to have something negative to say.

So this has taken more than ten years to go from page to screen.
Elaine May once wrote a line in her script for Heaven Can Wait: “The virulence with which people oppose an idea is a sure indication that there’s some merit to it.” Like every other profession, ours is one that is filled with stories of the ugly duckling variety: he’s different, and nobody wants anything to do with him, but that’s the swan.

Look at the Best Picture nominees this year: nearly all of them had to fight for years to get made.
Yes, absolutely. “You talk too fast. Can you slow down, Mr. Cagney?” And “Mr. Stewart, can’t you speed it up a little bit?” “Mr. Brando, could you stop mumbling?” All of these things that make artists distinctive, are the very things that get the hackles up of the executives who want everything homogenous. They’re in the position of forever being like chateau generals: who are always fighting the last war, and not the next one. It’s just amazing. It’s something that simply that never changes, and I don’t know why. Dust was no different. Years and years ago, when I was doing work on The Godfather, I approached Pacino with it, and we had lunch about it. I think he would’ve been wonderful. Peter Sellers, who was then a friend, was going to play Hellfrick (played by Donald Sutherland in the film), and then that got lost when I got busy doing Chinatown and Shampoo and so on. Eventually John allowed the book to be optioned by Mel Brooks. Then Mel and I met, and he said “Look, if you’ll write it on spec, I’ll make sure you can direct it,” which was a good deal for me. So I wrote it, he loved it, but something happened where he let the option lapse, and the problem there became that the script had been circulating enough that people had been talking about it, and Irving Azoff grabbed the option out from under Mel. Then Irving couldn’t get the movie made, and I talked to the Fantes and went around everywhere trying to get it made—and got turned down everywhere, including Warner Bros., which was my home at the time. Over the years, I went to many actors, and many different studios, and it got to the point where if my mother could have turned me down, I think she would have. It wasn’t just that the powers-that-be didn’t like the characters. They didn’t. Plus the story was viewed as racist, depressing, a period piece, and it just went on and on. Finally, about four or five years ago, Josh Lieberman called and said “I got a kid whose right for the script. He read it and he likes it!” Nobody had ever heard of this kid, and up to my door popped this young kid, wearing a t-shirt and cowboy. He came in, and there was a family gathering going on. He says in a lovely Irish brogue “Ya got a fuckin’ beer?” And twelve hours, and many beers later, he was still there. I was crazy about him and we were crazy about each other. That’s how I met Colin Farrell. He had the right amount of arrogance and humor, and he looked enough like a young John Fante to make it perfect casting. You could just see how magnetic he was. And then we still couldn’t get it made! So things sort of lay fallow for a while. Years before I’d approached Salma, and she read the script and said “Robert, I love this script, but I just can’t play this character—a Mexican waitress.” She was struggling against the very prejudices that are addressed in the story. Subsequently I cast someone else, who I realized was not going to work. Then, not knowing who to cast, because I wanted to cast a Mexican actress, my friend Warren Beatty said “What’s wrong with Salma?” ‘She turned me down, man.’ So Warren offered to talk with her, and talked her into reading it again. She said “I don’t know why I turned this down. I absolutely love it.” Meanwhile, time was passing, and Colin became a movie star, and that was enough to get it made, although our financing was cobbled together very haphazardly.

So the whole thing was a huge act of faith on everyone’s part, it sounds like.
Yes, it was just remarkable. Colin even came down to the location in South Africa before everything was finalized. Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise put their own money into it, as did I. Our entire budget was only $15.5 million and we shot it in 50 days, which is not a lot on either end. It was tough, but we had to make this film. That’s all there is to it.

This is your second picture with Donald Sutherland.
I don’t know what to say about Donald, other than I so love him. We had one hell of a time on Without Limits, for a while. I didn’t want to cast him originally, so there was some animosity there. We were going to shoot the scene one night where he was going to tell them that the Israeli athletes had been killed during the ’72 Olympics. And I said “Donald, you look like Dracula going into suck their blood!” He blew up and said “You didn’t want me in the first place!” I said “Donald, why do you say that like it’s a surprise? You know I twisted in the wind to avoid having you in this movie, and hardly because you’re a bad actor. You’re a brilliant actor, but you have made a living for so many years playing tortured souls in the most spectacularly interesting manner. But (University of Oregon track coach) Bill Bowerman is not a tortured soul. He tortures other people!” (laughs) So we aired our differences then, and the next day we did this scene where he was talking about what the Olympics meant, and he got it. Then he just unfolded and transformed himself, and nobody could have been better. Against my own worst instincts I had cast the very best person for the part. So we’re now very good friends. With this, I said ‘Donald, unfortunately given our budget constraints, it’s not as big a role as I’d like for you, but I’d love you to do it.’ So he flew down, showed up, and did it. I didn’t really say anything, it was all Donald: “This is who the character is. This is what he’s wearing. This is his make-up.” I just watched and said “Wow. Thank you.”

Shampoo was on cable recently and I watched it from start to finish. It’s one of the great political pictures of the 70s, juxtaposing the national politics of 1968 with the sexual politics and changing mores of the denizens of Beverly Hills. One of the things that struck me were the socio-political parallels between ’68 and our last Presidential election, in 2004.
Yes, it’s true. All things considered, I’d rather have Nixon in office than Bush! (laughs) I mean, Christ, is it possible that I now long for the days of Richard Nixon? I certainly don’t feel he got a bum rap, but he was bright, but the fact that he was hopelessly filled with self-loathing and desperately needed to maintain a political constituency, all his instincts were good: whether it was about China, his initial take on the drug war, which was that there’s no way that enforcement is going to take care of this problem. It has to be re-education, treating people. It has to be all of these things. He wanted to do this, but politically it seemed unwise at the time, so he didn’t pursue it. But he was a bright man.

The irony between that administration and the present one is that a lot of the players are the same: many of the young Turks in Nixon’s White House are the elder statesmen of Bush II. The difference is, Bush II is a puppet, and the guys pulling the strings are people like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Nixon was always too paranoid to ever yield that much power to anyone.
That’s true. And there wasn’t this religious component that was part of his political constituency, which is perhaps the most dangerous single aspect of it. Having managed to divide our country this way, which is the first time this has happened in my memory, which is what he’s done, is unconscionable.

Look at where we were the day after 9/11: the entire world was behind us, including countries that had always hated us. In a matter of weeks, that position took a 180.
We had an opportunity then and there to change the world. And we didn’t. To change everything. Talk about being able to put an end to terror, we certainly could have put a big dent in it, had we approached in differently. Not to mention Bush’s environmental stance: what global warming? It’s an administration that will go down in history as probably our worst, and we’ll be feeling the ramifications for decades. So yes, Shampoo has become prescient again, but I wish to God it wasn’t.

Many people probably aren’t aware that Chinatown was originally planned as the first part of a trilogy.
Right. After The Two Jakes there was going to be a final chapter, Gittes vs. Gittes, which dealt with the new concept of no-fault divorce in the 1950s.

And we’ll never see this, correct?
Correct.

Can you tell us why?
Well, in the interest of maintaining my friendships with Jack Nicholson and Robert Evans, I’d rather not go into it, but let’s just say The Two Jakes wasn’t a pleasant experience for any of us. But, we’re all still friends, and that’s what matters most.

Ask the Dust is a story that would be best described as bittersweet. A common thread I’ve noticed in all your films, both as writer and director, is that you have a tragedian’s view of love. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I think that love stories, if they’re love stories, are almost by definition tragic. Love stories are stories that are more religious, and if they have one purpose for people it’s to convince us of the importance of, and the actual existence of love. And the only way we can be truly affected by it, is if the lovers will give everything they have to be with one another. It’s that cliché “Honey, I feel like I’d die without you.” So when it ends with the loss of the lovers from each other, the love they’ve generated that held them in its grip, still feels like it’s a real thing, like it’s still there. It makes us feel hopeful that perhaps such a thing could exist for us, as well.

The longing that one feels in love is one of the most incredible feelings you can have.
There’s a reason for the analogy of Cupid’s arrow: the first thing you feel is a twinge of pain, because you feel “Uh oh, I’ve got something that could really hurt me if I don’t have it fulfilled.” There’s a wonderful old song that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote: “What is love? Love is a gentle, pleasing pain. Love is a sunshine mixed with rain. Love is a no, that would full thane.” That’s love.