SOURCE: "Fault Lines," in Film Comment, Vol. 26, No. 6, November-December, 1990, pp. 52-5, 57-8.

[In the following essay, Horowitz analyzes Towne's career through The Two Jakes and reassesses the significance of Chinatown as "the lens through which all of his other films are judged."]

Sixteen years have gone by since we first met Chinatown's Jake Gittes, the Los Angeles private eye who specialized in divorce cases, though he preferred the more delicate term "matrimonial work." By whatever name, Gittes' métier was still the sleazy but lucrative snooping on adulterers that his closest professional rival, Philip Marlowe, fastidiously eschewed. It has also been sixteen years since we met the doomed and beautiful Evelyn Mulwray, she of the anxious hunted look and the nervous habit of lighting up a cigarette when she already had one going. Mrs. Mulwray and her family had terrible secrets, and Gittes, regrettably, learned them all. The year was 1937.

Robert Towne's screen writing career divides easily into two parts: 1) Chinatown and 2) Not-Chinatown. The second category includes an impressive list of credits, among them The Last Detail (1973), from the novel by Darryl Ponicsan; Shampoo (1975), co-written with Warren Beatty; Greystoke (the original version by Towne, not the final film version written, according to the credits, by Michael Austin and P.H. Vazak, Towne's sheep dog, now deceased); Personal Best (1982) and Tequila Sunrise (1988), both of which Towne also directed; Days of Thunder, this summer's Tom Cruise retread; and The Two Jakes, this year's long-awaited continuation of the Jake Gittes saga.

But of all that Towne has written, Chinatown remains the keystone. Critics still treat it as his definitive statement. It is the lens through which all his other films are judged, and, if they are found wanting, it provides a convenient rhetorical club to beat them with. In view of how often this has happened over the years, it's possible to conclude that writing Chinatown was the worst mistake Robert Towne ever made.

Chinatown's artistic ambitions were as grand as they were apocalyptic. It promised to lay bare the sinister roots of modern capitalist society by proposing a countermyth to the traditional American story of benevolent founding fathers. Evelyn Mulwray's father, the all-powerful Noah Cross, begat modern Los Angeles by bending man as well as nature to his will.

Named for the founding father in another popular origin myth, Cross was the paragon of unrestrained capitalism, monstrous and heroic, destructive and creative. No meat was unfit for his insatiable appetite. He was the secret id of modernity, the Oedipal nightmare turned on its head: Dad kills son and rapes daughter. He was unstoppable.

When the movie hit theaters in July 1974, unbridled pessimism was the currency of the day. Political disillusion was epidemic. OPEC had the West by the short hairs. Watergate was at high tide. Less than a month into the film's successful run, President Nixon resigned from office. The formal burial of the sincere Sixties came nine months later when Saigon, without American support, fell to the North Vietnamese Army and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The country was in foul spirits. Chinatown, set in the deepest, darkest Great Depression, captured the mood of 1974 to perfection.

But as grim a portrait of American society as Chinatown was, the film still wasn't dark enough to match the true depths of the contemporary mood. Chinatown was a modest hit and won Towne an Academy Award for best screenplay, but the Oscar for best picture that year went to its rival in radical despair, Godfather II, an even darker and more tragic vision of corruption in high places. Chinatown still had a hero, albeit an impotent one; Godfather II had none.

Towne never intended to create a classic of despair. Granted, he took Raymond Chandler's detective genre and enriched it with a more fully articulated social critique, giving the pessimism inherent in all detective fiction a stronger foundation. But Towne also preserved intact Chandler's romantic notion that, despite the odds, there were occasional candles against the darkness. Marlowe and Gittes were both cynical private eyes, but they were also closet knights-in-shining-armor who occasionally made a difference.

Towne wrote Chinatown but it was directed by Roman Polanski, a man whose philosophical views had been uniquely shaped by his tragic encounters with both Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. He lost family members to both. Towne's and Polanski's artistic agendas diverged at times, and Polanski, as director, had his way at the crucial moments.

At the end of the film Evelyn Mulwray confronts her father over custody of their daughter, the product of their incestuous union. "She's mine, too," he moans pitifully. Apparently, in Towne's original draft Evelyn shoots her father and goes to jail, but, with Gittes' help, the daughter escapes to Mexico. There was a partial victory; hope was kept alive, even if only a glimmer.

Polanski took Towne's romantic pessimism and twisted the knife until it metamorphosed into his own brand of East European nihilism. In the final Polanski version, Evelyn dies and Noah Cross gets his hands on the girl. The forces of darkness are unbeatable. No one makes a difference and Gittes' meddling probably made matters worse. At the end of the tunnel Polanski saw only … more tunnel.

Since 1974, the libraries of few aspiring screenwriters have been complete without a tenth-generation Xerox of the script for Chinatown. The true connoisseur possesses several different drafts. Towne's script is held up in film schools and how-to-write-a-screenplay books as a master-piece of construction, noted for its layered plot in which one revelation after another unwinds with absolute precision, no scene ever lasting longer than it has to.

Thanks to Polanski, Towne not only acquired a reputation for unqualified pessimism despite the fact that he intended something far more equivocal—he was also given too much credit for Chinatown's tight, clockwork plot structure.

Towne was tagged as an avatar of crystalline screenplay structure when nothing could have been further from the truth. Admirers confuse his craftsmanlike respect for the formal demands of a particular genre—the detective film—with an overall commitment to rigid story structure in every case.

Such discriminating attention to craft has always stood Towne in good stead with producers who happily pay him unimaginable sums to take a look at their ailing properties. (His uncredited interventions as script doctor are known to include Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, Reds, Swing Shift, Eight Million Ways to Die, Frantic, and Fatal Attraction. Some of these were major page-one rewrites and some were brief hit-and-run consultations. A complete list of credits will probably never be known.) But in his original screenplays Towne prefers a loose approach to storytelling. Chinatown was the only exception, and Towne readily gave Polanski credit for a large part of the film's narrative precision.

Chinatown's canonization wreaked havoc with critical perceptions of Towne's career. To borrow a perverse line from The Producers, Chinatown was just "too good." It created a vivid but false impression. Towne is most famous for a film whose content is darkly pessimistic and whose form is crystalline and succinct. These qualities are uncharacteristic of everything else he's written, and this anomaly has been interpreted as clear evidence of a decline in artistic quality since 1974.

Chinatown, so the argument goes, is perfect, while the rest of Towne's scripts are all over the place, like big sloppy shaggy dogs (like P.H. Vazak, in fact!): Personal Best feels improvised and unstructured, the plot of Tequila Sunrise is incomprehensible and its climax is sentimental, Shampoo is too light and ambivalent, and The Last Detail pulls its final punch, compromising the novel's dark conclusion by having Badass Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) deliver his prisoner to the brig, then go back about his business, whereas in the novel he feels so guilty he goes AWOL and destroys himself. The novel ends with the doleful finality of Chinatown, while Towne's adaptation substitutes a wishy-washy conclusion.

Oh what a falling-off there's been. In every instance, Chinatown's moral certitude (life is shit) has given way to moral vagueness (life is kind of complicated). Or so it appears.

What if you turn the painting around and try looking at it another way? What if the sins of an artist unable to find his way back to his one single moment of perfection are actually the hallmarks of his true style? What if Chinatown, far from being quintessential Towne in theme, style, and structure, is really his most atypical and misleading work?

"The greatest filmmaker that I know of, the one who moves me the most, is Jean Renoir. If I ever were to do a course on screen writing, I would deal a lot with Renoir … [who] got more of life into his art than anybody I've seen before or since." [Robert Towne, in a interview with John Brady]

Many of Towne's alleged weaknesses are also those of his avowed master, Jean Renoir, whose artistic universe is as far from Polanski's Chinatown as Frank Capra is from the Coen brothers. Renoir's is a world where villainy and heroism are never clear cut, where each character has his reasons, where scenes end only after every last ambiguous bit of meaning, buried intent, and misunderstood motive has been teased out, where the moral terrain is constantly shifting and where actors and camera alike appear to be freely improvising rather than fatalistically following their well-worn path to oblivion.

Towne's affinity for Renoir may not be the master key that unlocks all his films, but it's a useful corrective to the tunnel vision engendered by Chinatown. For starters, Towne finds justification in Renoir for ignoring many of the innovations of modernist cinema. Towne is a classicist—at least in form—not an innovator. He does not subvert or "appropriate" old forms in the postmodern fashion; he embraces the conventions of whatever genre he happens to be working in—whether detective story, romantic melodrama, even Restoration comedy (Shampoo was inspired by Wycherly's The Country Wife).

He shares this deference to existing forms with Renoir, who also moved freely from costume drama to war film to Hollywood melodrama to Technicolor musical, always leaving the conventions of the form as he found them. His interests, like Towne's, lay elsewhere: in the moral relationships of the characters.

It is a conundrum of 20th century modernism, familiar to literary critics, that stylistic radicalism is no guide to anyone's politics. (Eliot and Pound come to mind.) For all their dynamic innovativeness, Scorsese, Schrader, DePalma, Cronenberg, and Lynch are, to a man, rigid moralists. They subscribe to the profoundly conservative line that man is born bad and only society restrains him, though just barely. The cosmological specifics may vary according to their religious backgrounds, but corruption always lies just beneath the surface, sin is everywhere, and redemption is possible only through violence, death, or, less frequently, love. It is one of the many ironies of postmodernity that our hottest cinematic rebels are the true heirs to the moral intransigence of old Hollywood's Production Code. Flesh betrays spirit, and transgression must bring punishment.

In stark contrast to so many of his peers, Towne is moral without being moralistic. He is a moral filmmaker in the French sense of the word: he's preoccupied with choices and ideas. In an earlier day, we might simply have called him a liberal humanist. The same goes for Renoir (despite a brief flirtation with Communism in the Thirties). Their style of psychological realism is rooted in the brilliant bourgeois culture of the 19th century European novel.

Like Renoir before him, Towne's lack of moral rigidity has often been misperceived as moral laxity. Moral absolutists of the right have attacked Towne for glorifying drug use in Tequila Sunrise because the drug dealer (Mel Gibson) is not a villain and, what's worse, in the end he gets the girl. Moral commissars on the left denounced the same film for its allegedly shameless revival of old-fashioned, hero-worshiping Hollywood decadence, not to mention its cop-out of a happy ending.

But Towne prefers ambiguous, morally compromised characters because they're real. His attitude is that no individual can walk through life along a perfectly straight line. He must live and work in the real world.

Money is usually a problem; so is job stability. Towne has the common man's contempt for those who enjoy enough material luxury to never have to compromise their high-priced values. Shampoo's George the hairdresser (Warren Beatty) caters to the rich, but he himself is not; he desperately needs others' capital if he is to open his own shop. Mac, the drug dealer in Tequila Sunrise, used to be rich, but his decision to go straight has caused financial problems that are driving him to the wall.

Another dose of reality is that Towne's characters aren't all geniuses, either. George, Mac, Buddusky, and Jake Gittes are all explicitly portrayed as intellectual under-achievers. They cannot easily discern the truth of their situations, or see clearly what's right and wrong. They have the desire to be faithful and good, but they make mistakes, they misread events, and they always, always are forced into unpleasant compromises.

Those characters who have the greatest luxury of all, the luxury of moral certainty, like the track coach in Personal Best, are never the heroes of a Towne story. The coach (Scott Glenn) knows he's right, and his certainty is very seductive, at first, to his two young protégés (Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly). He "knows" that any athlete who wants to make it to the Olympics has to be selfish, singleminded, and completely alone. But the two young women develop an intimate friendship, at first erotic, then platonic. Their innocence turns to experience and challenges the ideological authority of the coach. Personal Best is about testing the limits of the self, on and off the track. It's a sexy, physically intimate film about the life of the mind.

In The Last Detail, Buddusky escorts a young sailor to prison. The poor dumb kid (Randy Quaid) is being put away for years—for stealing just a few dollars. Buddusky gives the kid a happy last few days, but he still follows his orders and takes him to the brig in the end. In Towne's version of Darryl Ponicsan's novel, Buddusky hates himself for doing it but he accepts it as part of his job and lives with it. Towne's ending is compromised, unresolved, unheroic, but true to life. In a corrupt and compromising world where everyone eventually gets their hands dirty, the important question is: how dirty.

"Most people just do their job," Towne said à propos The Last Detail, "whether it's shove Jews in ovens or take a kid who's stolen forty bucks and rob him of eight years of his life. You're nice about it. You're polite … I'm just doing my job…. The ending of that screenplay is more consonant with my sensibility than the ending of Chinatown." Not surprisingly, Ponicsan is said to have hated it.

Towne not only wrote Personal Best and Tequila Sunrise, he directed them as well. And directing style is another area where Chinatown can be misleading when it comes to analyzing Towne's other work.

In his first two directorial efforts, Towne has shown more affinity for the sympathetic and accommodating directing style of Hal Ashby (with whom Towne made three films) than for Polanski, whose sharply controlled technique gave Chinatown its edge. Towne, Ashby, and, at a much higher level of development, Renoir share a flexible method that allows greater room for the contributions of the actors. Their styles are slightly rough around the edges, with a looser, more spontaneous feel. Towne has even gone so far as to use nonprofessional actors in Personal Best, not for their malleability (as Bresson does), but for their unpredictability, perhaps taking his cue from Renoir's Toni. (Jack Nicholson, who years ago directed his acting-class colleague Towne in Drive, He Said, also leans toward a more improvisatory style. All the more reason we should have expected that The Two Jakes, directed by Nicholson, would be a disappointment to hardcore purists awaiting a literal reprise of the Polanski Chinatown.)

Towne's penchant for informality has been harmful in one respect. His plots have grown increasingly complex, even to the point of incomprehensibility, and he is reluctant to pare them back. This is especially true of the last two, Tequila Sunrise and The Two Jakes. Towne might agree with Raymond Chandler—another writer whose plots have gotten out of control at times—who once wrote: "With me a plot … is an organic thing. It grows and often it overgrows. So that my problem invariably ends up as a desperate attempt to justify a lot of material that, for me at least, has come alive and insists on staying alive."

I am reluctant to defend either of them on this point, though Oscar Wilde might take their case: "Incomprehensibility is a gift," Wilde said. "Not everyone has it."

If plot construction is not among Towne's evident strengths, character certainly is—even though film is a difficult medium for a psychological realist. Unlike the novel, film permits no direct view into a character's mind. The filmmaker's tools are acting, dialogue, visual style, and whatever tricks of the trade can be found amidst the artifice of 19th century drama, the unsung source of many a classic Hollywood dramatic mode.

Towne revels in the kinds of conventions previously at home in the well-made plays of Feydeau or Sardou, not the least of which is his nearly fetishistic use of symbolic objects as foci for the shifting meanings that surround his characters. Cigarette lighters, watches, missing eyeglasses, even scars recur within and between films, each time imparted with a new and different symbolic meaning by the character who touches them. We often come to truly know Towne's people through their bric-a-brac.

Take the common envelope. In Chinatown Evelyn Mulwray mails a check to Jake. She's trying to buy him off. He tries to return the envelope—and the check—but not before noticing her engraved initials, which reveal her relationship to Noah Cross. Not much; but the same envelope reappears in Tequila Sunrise with a vengeance. (At least, I prefer to believe it's the same one.)

Tequila Sunrise is about two high-school buddies—one who grew up to be a cop, the other a dealer—and the woman they both love. Mac (Mel Gibson) is suspected of still dealing drugs. Envelopes of cash are a drug dealer's stock-in-trade. So when Mac gives an envelope to his cousin to deliver to Jo Ann (Michelle Pfeiffer), everyone eyes it suspiciously. Is it evidence that Jo Ann is involved with Mac in some sort of drug-dealing scheme? Is it a love letter? In fact, he's just asking her restaurant to cater a party for him.

The envelope reappears, in duplicate now, when Mac hands one to Jo Ann as payment for the party and then hands another to his ex-wife as his monthly alimony installment. This time they really are filled with cash, but he has accidentally mixed the two up and given too much money to Jo Ann and too little to his ex-wife. The envelopes move from hand to hand in an elaborately choreographed dance of meaning and misunderstanding. Jo Ann assumes he's trying to buy her affection. Mac "explains" everything, but the symbolic envelopes are closer to the awkward truth.

Or how about cigarettes and lighters? In Chinatown Evelyn Mulwray lights a cigarette everytime she tells a lie—it's as reliable as Pinocchio's nose. In Tequila Sunrise, Mac the dealer and Nick the cop both nervously flick matching Zippo lighters bearing the initials, in raised brass letters, of the high school they attended together. The lighters are constant visual reminders of the bond of experience and affection that ties the two unlikely friends together.

And if not lighters, then ordinary matches. In the film's finest scene—one of Towne's all-time best—Nick the cop (Kurt Russell) gives a long, confessional speech in front of Jo Ann. He's saying he loves her and will no longer be the suspicious cop with her. It is a moment of absolute sincerity and it wins her heart.

Then the phone rings. Jo Ann goes to the other end of the bar to answer it. Nick's police instincts get the better of him. He has to know who she's talking to. He thinks it may be Mac. He decides to eavesdrop. Let the screenplay finish it:

He reaches for a cigarette, doesn't seem to be able to find a match. He moves down the bar ostensibly to pick up a pack by the cash register which is close to Jo Ann and her conversation. She turns questioningly when she senses he's at her back. He holds up the pack of matches by way of reply. She nods, "oh"—then stops. She looks down the bar—two packs of matches are crammed under the ashtray in front of Nick's bar stool….

Betrayed by a book of matches. With that eloquent gesture, more truthful than his long confession, Nick drives the woman he loves into the arms of his rival. Nick will always be a cop. That's his strength and his fatal flaw.

Like Personal Best before it, Tequila Sunrise is a portrait of a tense and competitive friendship. Towne has shown an increasing interest in how friendships and love affairs survive in the real world. Where the public and the private overlap, professional demands impinge on personal and romantic ones. (He may have drawn inspiration from his own highly publicized friendships with Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, with each of whom he has collaborated on numerous film projects.)

The public and private realms do not peacefully coexist; the choices between the two are often impossible, but choices have to be made. "Given the choice between betraying my country or my friends," E.M. Forster provocatively wrote, "I hope I will have the courage to betray my country." Towne can be infuriating in the same way.

Lately Towne has taken to doubling the number of protagonists as a way of upping the moral ante. The moral dilemmas of individuals has given way to the moral distractions of pairs and couples. The trend continues with his most recent film. Where there was only one Jake sixteen years ago, today there are two.

In The Two Jakes we meet Gittes eleven years after the events of Chinatown. He's added a few pounds and lost some hair, but is prosperous and content. The Great Depression is over, World War II (in which he served with distinction) has come and gone, and the postwar boom is in full swing. His company, Gittes Investigations, has its own building now, and the proprietor has his own parking space. All that remains of the unpleasant past are a few scars: one on his nose, others hidden deeper.

The script for The Two Jakes (which circulated in samizdat form for several years) again concerns a character trying to do good but making a mess of it. This time there are two knights-errant, both named Jake—and two fetishistic cigarette lighters as well.

It is also the next chapter in Towne's history of the social and economic development of Southern California. The harsh social realism precariously coexists with the romantic recollection of the Southern California of his youth.

In Chinatown the historic focus of desire was water; in The Two Jakes the smart money is on real estate and oil. The original tenants of the San Fernando Valley land appropriated by Noah Cross in the first film are long gone; postwar tract houses are going up where walnut groves once stood. The second Jake of the title is a Jewish real estate developer who at first seems like the bad guy but (shades of Marcel Dalio in Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game) turns out to be, well, more complicated. Is he another cynical megalomaniac who'll stop at nothing to further his own interests and mint more money? Or is he a different kind of dreamer, and Gittes' doppelgänger in more than name only?

The Two Jakes is a continuation of the Chinatown story, but on a deeper level it is also a rebuttal. Part of the new script's subtext seems to be how Towne himself, in the form of Jake Gittes, must atone for his mistake in the previous film—namely, letting Polanski give a dark, nihilistic twist to the original ending by killing Evelyn Mulwray. Towne and Jake failed to save Evelyn in Chinatown. The failure still haunts them both. In The Two Jakes they want to protect the memory of her daughter, Katherine, as a way of atoning for Evelyn's death.

Katherine was always a perfectly balanced Towne symbol: the tainted product of a horrible incestuous rape—but also a symbol of innocence and hope for the future. Would Robert Towne, the third Jake, manage to protect her this time? (Part of him must have been confident. After all, four years after the release of Chinatown, his wife gave birth to a daughter. They named her Katherine.)

As he did with Polanski, Towne had some differences of opinion with director Nicholson, and he apparently absented himself from L.A. during the latter part of the shooting. Nicholson reportedly reworked the ending to suit his own artistic instincts—and, no doubt, to simplify the very long and convoluted script.

But finally … so what? The compromises of filmmaking are a perfect mirror to the compromises in life, and they do not always lead to inevitable failure. Towne once called Chinatown the first part of a projected trilogy, so there's always hope for another shot—though prospects are dim: after all, the second film took sixteen years to reach the screen, and was soon playing to empty houses. Still, anything is possible. Like the old revolutionary, Robert Towne is a pessimist of the intellect, but an optimist of the will.