[In the following, Kasindorf discusses Towne's approach to screenwriting and his experiences working on Chinatown.]

The Hollywood star system is back stronger than ever. Once again it's an age of the hot performer, the hot director—and now the hot screenwriter. Where for years studios were reluctant to take chances on original screen-plays, preferring adaptations of "sure-fire" hit plays and books, now the bidding for original scripts is fierce. The success of originals like David S. Ward's Oscar-winning The Sting, William Goldman's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Carole Eastman's Five Easy Pieces has put a big premium on originals. Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, the husband-wife team who created American Graffiti, were paid $400,000 for their new story of rum-running in the '20s, Lucky Lady, which will star Liza Minnelli. All this has given the screenwriter a status he hasn't had since the '30s and '40s, when people like Ben Hecht, Herman Mankiewicz and Charles Brackett were pounding typewriters and bending elbows in palm-shaded bungalows.

Right now there's no hotter screenwriter than Robert Towne, whose salty adaptation of Darryl Ponicsan's novel The Last Detail earned him an Oscar nomination last year, and whose brilliant Chinatown will be hard to beat for the best original screenplay of 1974. At 38, after unsung years of "doctoring" others' efforts as an Abe Burrows of Hollywood, Towne now gets $150,000 for adaptations and up to $300,000 for his original stories, with juicy percentages of the box office. Long handicapped by a chronic sickliness that he shrugged off as "writer's hypochondriasis" until it was diagnosed two years ago as a complex of allergies, the bearded, rumpled Towne had been considered, he wryly recalls, "a relief pitcher who could come in for an inning, not pitch the whole game."

Towne got his start by writing horror movies for producer Roger Corman whom he met in 1958 at acting classes along with Jack Nicholson, James Coburn and Sally Kellerman. After some television scripting, Towne moved into rewriting scripts. He put a final polish on Bonnie and Clyde and added the brilliant, crucial last scene between Marlon Brando and Al Pacino to The Godfather at the request of director Francis Ford Coppola, a superb screen-writer himself. But not until he was cured of his allergies did Towne begin the sustained productivity that has brought him to the top.

The first choice of Paramount production chief Robert Evans to do the screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby, Towne luckily turned down that job, convincing Evans in the process to commission Chinatown. Then, among other projects, Towne teamed with Warren Beatty to write Shampoo, a forthcoming comedy about a fashionable Beverly Hills hairdresser, starring Beatty, Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn. Nowadays the busy Towne hangs out with big-name buddies like Beatty and Nicholson (the star of both The Last Detail and Chinatown), and lives in an idyllic hillside cottage with his girlfriend of six years, actor John Payne's daughter, Julie.

Doing most of his writing in a tiny Los Angeles apartment, Towne likes to follow his solitary drafting with daily visits to the set to solve problems once filming starts. A classic craftsman who uses no gimmicks, Towne believes that "People want to escape into stories with strong narrative lines. A well-made screenplay has to go somewhere, not just ramble around. A good script should have air in it, to allow everybody latitude. If you don't want to totally alienate directors and actors and drive them crazy, don't tell them what they're feeling." Not surprisingly, Towne finds it easier to adapt material than create his own. "Fear and vanity don't come into the process in the same way as in original material," he notes.

Nevertheless, Chinatown succeeds largely because Towne, like the best novelists, chose to work close to his own roots. Raised in the San Pedro harbor district of Los Angeles, he worked on a tuna clipper and noted the paranoid fear of the fishermen that their wives were cheating on them. He began Chinatown with a scene playing on this theme involving his private eye, J.J. Gittes. A longtime devotee of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Towne fused their hard-boiled atmospherics with his own concern for the violation of the land. His archvillain, Noah Cross, played by John Huston, is an amalgam of several portentous figures from California's history of land and water scandals. "I wanted to tell a story about a man who raped the land and his own daughter in the name of the future," says Towne. "Men like Cross believe that as long as they can keep building, keep reproducing, they'll live forever."

For all their new star status, writers are still the low men in the director-dominated movie hierarchy. On Chinatown Towne found himself at loggerheads with director Roman Polanski, a strong creative force with ideas of his own. After wrenching debates, Polanski changed Towne's original ending, in which virtue at least partially triumphs, to a denouement of unrelieved despair. "The ending is so relentlessly cynical that it works against itself," says the still bitter Towne. During one dispute, Polanski asked Towne, in his Polish accent, "Bob, do you think I'm a schmock?" No, Towne shot back: "You're a terrific 400 hitter, which means that I think you're right less than half the time." Even before the cameras rolled, the two had stopped speaking to each other. "I would never work with Roman again, nor he with me," Towne says.

Nevertheless, Towne accepts the screenwriter's lot. "Film is totally a director's medium," he says. "And I would rather work with a strong director, because the chances are it will be a better movie. Ideally, your relationship with the director should be one of loving contentiousness."

J.J. Gittes may live on in a sequel, sans Polanski. Meanwhile Towne is working on his most bizarre project, Lord Greystoke, based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's original Tarzan story. Towne is converting the ape-man from a mighty, monosyllabic mumbler to a marooned idealist. "The original myth showed that an English lord could conquer nature on the Dark Continent," says Towne. "This lord will have a communion with nature."