SOURCE: "Darkness at the Edge of Towne," in American Film, Vol. XIV, No. 4, January-February, 1989, pp. 40-61.

[In the following excerpt, Sragow surveys Towne's career, focusing on Chinatown, Tequila Sunrise, and his reputation in Hollywood.]

"… Nobody wants me to quit. 'Don't quit, don't get caught, stay on top long enough for us to knock you off.' That's the motto around here. Nobody wants me to quit. The cops wanna bust me, the Colombians want my connections, my wife wants my money, her lawyer agrees and mine likes getting paid to argue with them. Nobody wants me to quit—hey, I haven't even mentioned my customers. You know they don't want me to quit."

That speech belongs to the drug-dealer protagonist of writer-director Robert Towne's new movie, Tequila Sunrise, but it may echo the sentiments of Towne himself, a prodigiously gifted filmmaker who's never been able to shake his reputation as simply the best screenwriter in Hollywood.

Tequila Sunrise producer Thom Mount is not alone in considering Towne's directorial debut, Personal Best, among "the best first movies ever made." But in the nearly seven years between that film's release and Sunrise, Towne's only other writing-directing project, The Two Jakes, tripped at the starting block. Pundits and industry gossips seemed to be pressuring Towne back into what they saw to be his proper place—as a great writer, period.

In some ways, who could blame them? A short list of the most memorable movie moments of the last 15 years would have to include a bunch of speeches, confrontations and revelations written by Robert Towne, such as the crisis in The Last Detail (1973) when the cantankerous Navy signalman harasses a redneck bartender until the latter threatens to call the shore patrol. The signalman slaps his service revolver on the bar and proclaims, "I AM THE MOTHER-FUCKING SHORE PATROL!" Or the time in Chinatown (1974) when an alternately slick and seedy '30s private eye, taking on a case that ripples through the power circles of Los Angeles, gets his nose slit by a verminy punk. "It looks like half the city is trying to cover it all up, which is fine with me. But Mrs. Mulwray—I goddamn near lost my nose! And I like it. I like breathing through it. And I still think you're hiding something."

Or maybe the magnetically shaggy oration of the charming Beverly Hills hairdresser in Shampoo (1975) when he explains why he's such an unregenerate womanizer:

"I go into that shop and they're so great-looking you know. And I, I'm doing their hair, and they feel great, and they smell great. Or I could be out on the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stoplight, or go into an elevator, or I … there's a beautiful girl. I, I, I don't know … I mean, that's it. I, it makes my day. Makes me feel like I'm gonna live forever. And, as far as I'm concerned, with what I'd like to have done at this point in my life, I know I should have accomplished more. But I've got no regrets…. Maybe that means I don't love 'em. Maybe it means I don't love you. I don't know. Nobody's going to tell me I don't like 'em very much."

These speeches, casual and simple in their language yet vivid and revelatory in their dramatic impact, are so intimately keyed to the performances that they bring to mind the actors and—amazingly for movies—their edgy, vernacular characters: Jack Nicholson as Billy "Badass" Buddusky in The Last Detail, Nicholson again as J. J. Gittes in Chinatown and Warren Beatty as George in Shampoo.

What's more, the outbursts arrive at just the right instant to clinch the stories and the characters. You immediately comprehend Buddusky's volatile dissatisfaction with life, Gittes' drawling slyness and romantic curiosity, and George's fundamentally innocent sensuality. Just listening to the lines brings back the movies in their entirety.

Creating scripts like these, which are full of existential showdowns, diversely expressive speeches, and characters that bring out the vitality in stars such as Nicholson and Beatty, helped make Robert Towne the first superstar screenwriter of the current Hollywood era.

Towne, now 54, was no Wunderkind when he hit it big. Raised in San Pedro, California, he worked as a tuna fisherman, studied literature and philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, and reportedly did a stint in military intelligence before landing in Jeff Corey's Hollywood acting class in 1958, where he met Nicholson and quickie movie king Roger Corman.

Madison Avenue-man-turned-producer Harry Gittes, the friend of Nicholson and Towne whose last name became immortalized in Chinatown, refers to Towne as

"the best example of an actor-turned-writer in the business. If you're an actor first, you know what's tough to play, how much exposition you need to get a point across. I ended up coproducing Drive, He Said [Nicholson's 1972 directorial debut]. Towne was in it as an actor. He was in a scene that was extremely tough to articulate—two characters just speaking totally between the lines. The Towne character knew that the other character was having an affair with his wife. The way that Towne helped rewrite that scene, the point came across light rather than heavy-handedly. It's a lesson I'll never forget."

By the mid-'70s, Towne had parlayed his string of hits, as well as the reputation as a script doctor that he acquired on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972), into the chance to become a writer-director. For years, Towne labored on the script he felt was the best thing he'd ever done—Greystoke, a version of Tarzan of the Apes that concentrated on the trials and tribulations of an ape raising a baby boy. Towne says that long before Gorillas in the Mist, The Adventures of Dian Fossey, he hoped to portray a hero "for whom the life of an ape was no less important than the life of a human being."

Still, the prospect of directing the scenes between boy and apes was daunting. So for his producing-directing debut, he chose a "smaller" script, Personal Best (1982), a story of female pentathletes, played by Mariel Hemingway and real-life track star Patrice Donnelly, who fall in love with each other while competing to qualify in the 1980 Olympics. Though not a commercial success, it was an audacious piece of work. A speech given by Scott Glenn, as Hemingway's coach, ranks with Towne's funniest and grittiest: "I could've coached football, I wouldn't have had to put up with this insulting shit from you. Do you actually think Chuck Noll has to worry that Franco Harris is going to cry if Terry Bradshaw won't talk to him?"

But Towne also demonstrated that he could extend his gifts for narrative structure and speech rhythms into the visual and tactile elements of movies. By concentrating his eye and ear on the athletes, he was able to recapture the unself-conscious grace that characterizes his memories of growing up in an unspoiled Southern California, and Personal Best became an ecstatic coming-of-age film, an indelible expression of the joy of movement.

The move into directing ultimately resulted in the stalling of his career, the loss of two dream projects and the disruption of old friendships. Where he once had been known as the consummate script doctor and Hollywood professional, he now found himself caught in a swirl of innuendo that raised questions about whether he was suited temperamentally to be a writer-director.

It all started when, as producer and writer-director of Personal Best, Towne clashed repeatedly with executive producer David Geffen during the completion and release of the movie. Geffen had rescued the project by taking over the financing from Warner Bros. when the 1980 Screen Actors Guild strike threatened to scuttle the movie. But a contract dispute between Towne and Geffen shut down production between December 1980 and June 1981.

In the course of what he later called a "coerced agreement" with Geffen and Warner Bros. in order to finish Personal Best, Towne signed away his rights to Greystoke. His Tarzan was made in vastly different form by Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, a considerably more pompous movie about Olympic athletics. The daunting new title told the story: Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.

Meanwhile, Towne endured years of gossip centering on Geffen's countercharges that the director had taken "a picture budgeted at $7 million and made it incompetently for $16 million." (Towne rebutted that the original budget was $11.7 million, renegotiated to $12.7 million and that it rose to $15 million partly because of the interest paid during the six-month contract dispute.)

In 1985, after some odd writing jobs, Towne was once again a writer-director, all set to launch The Two Jakes, the highly anticipated sequel to Chinatown. Jack Nicholson had gotten back into leading-man shape to repeat the role of Gittes, and, in the boldest, weirdest stroke, Robert Evans co-starred as the second Jake, a mysterious real estate operator named Jake Berman. According to the one full report ever published on the film (by David Thomson in Vanity Fair), that oddball move may have killed the production. Whatever the ultimate reason, when Evans couldn't cut it as Berman, things fell apart, and the production was halted almost before it began. Towne once again became the center of scrutiny, which this time questioned his leadership ability.

Over the years, Towne kept busy with writing chores—rewriting an unproduced fantasy named Mermaid for Beatty and Ray Stark (Splash beat this prestige team to the punch), and doing script surgery on Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die and Roman Polanski's Frantic. Still, since Personal Best, the only times his name appeared onscreen were as the executive producer for his friend Curtis Hanson's The Bedroom Window, and as an actor (and uncredited creative consultant) in writer-director James Toback's comedy The Pick-up Artist.

But, as Toback says, "Robert Towne is a Hollywood outsider with the compulsiveness, determination and slyness to crack into the center whenever the need arises." And with the help of independent producer Thom Mount, Towne has cracked back in with Tequila Sunrise, an "under $20 million" romantic comedy-drama starring Mel Gibson as a former cocaine dealer who now sells ecologically sound leaky-pipe irrigation systems, Kurt Russell as his best high-school buddy, who happens to be a star narcotics cop, and Michelle Pfeiffer as the chic Manhattan Beach restaurant owner who gets caught between them.

Towne asked Mount to produce Tequila Sunrise, a project he had been trying to make for a number of years, while they both were working on Frantic. Frantic star Harrison Ford, who was originally penciled in for the Mel Gibson role, had second thoughts about playing an ex-dealer. Mount downplays the difficulties he had selling the project to Warner Bros., where he worked out a negative pick-up deal for the film's distribution. (As part of the "coerced" 1981 agreement, Warners had the right to a first look at Tequila Sunrise.)

"Let's just say everyone looked very carefully at the balance between the drug dealer's current life and his past life," says Mount. "And, as a director, Robert has one of the most important weapons anyone could have to sell a project—a concrete vision of what he wants."

To Curtis Hanson, the clouds hanging over recent Towne productions have wrongfully obscured Towne's creative steadiness and industry clout. Shortly after The Two Jakes fell apart, Towne called Hanson and asked what he was doing. Hanson replied that he got The Bedroom Window back from Paramount in turnaround and was trying to set it up with himself directing. "And Robert just went crazy. Over the course of a holiday weekend, he got the go-ahead at Fox." Eventually, with Towne's help, Hanson ended up making the movie at the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group.

"Think about the gossip surrounding Robert," says Hanson.

"You know, when he was a writer, people used to say, 'Yeah, he's good, but he's too slow,' and now that he's a director, people say, 'Yeah, but does he have the temperament?' This is a very small town. A lot of guys who have bad experiences making movies don't work any more. Yet Robert commands great respect at Orion. He commands great respect at Paramount. And now, after the nightmare of the release of Personal Best and the further nightmare of Greystoke, he's back at Warner Bros. with Tequila Sunrise. They wouldn't be in bed with him if they didn't think he could perform!"

Mount says he wasn't disappointed on Tequila Sunrise: "Robert took 'the long view' on every scene and every shot; the flip side of that was intense work on issues of performance. There was a lot of night shooting (40 nights out of a total of 68 days), a lot of high-powered actors. And 10 days into production, he had to fire the cinematographer, Jost Vacano (Das Boot), a terrific guy who just wasn't in sync with his ideas. Robert handled it."

I found Towne at the Evergreen Studios, where he was overseeing the film's music scoring. He was paunchier than the last time I saw him, right after Personal Best when he was in the middle of a physical fitness obsession. But otherwise he seemed steadier now. The gaze of his eyes—his dominant feature—was more direct. There has always been something dolphinlike and slippery about his imposing physical presence. Instinctive in all his convictions, spontaneous in their expression, he sends out thought waves not only when he's speaking in his surprisingly soft voice, but also when he's punctuating his talk with silence.

"One of the reasons the first cinematographer and I had difficulties," Towne explained during a break,

"is that he wanted it to look grainy and gritty, because it was a drug world and everything else. And to me, it's like being in the olive oil business. I mean, what makes The Godfather real is all the glamour in it, which is what most of us would see in our daily lives. You'd see Sam Giancana sitting in a beautiful restaurant, very gentlemanly, and quiet, retired.

"So if you're trying to tell a movie about cops and robbers, you withhold the underbelly of it as long as you can. You show what most of us see, and it's not that different from our lives, when we're living well. And then, gradually, the audience starts getting scared, because they realize there's this underbelly, and they haven't seen it yet, and something is going to sneak up on them and bite them on the ass if they're not careful."

As the movie evolved, Towne turned parts of it into a celebration of West Coast light:

"There was a piece of graffiti I once saw that I tried to put in the movie and couldn't find a place for—'There's no life east of Sepulveda.' And this movie is about life west of Sepulveda, as I knew it. San Pedro, Redondo, Hermosa made up a magical place for me. It was unlike L.A., it was unlike anywhere I'd ever been. I was setting the movie in the place of my magical memories, even though the movie is contemporary.

"Conrad Hall [the cinematographer who replaced Vacano] has the same understanding of Southern California that I have, and that Richard Sylbert [the production designer] has. I always start out saying, 'I'm just going to show how this place has turned to shit.' And then I can't stop myself. My eye keeps going to the things that were beautiful, the things that I remembered as a kid—like people having trailers in the backyard, and bougainvillea in the backyard, and crab grass and those funny little redwood fences."

At the heart of Tequila Sunrise is the triangular tale of an honest master criminal who tries to be loyal to all his friends, including a Latin drug dealer; a good cop who's emotionally dishonest but redeemable; and the slick yet feeling woman who's caught between them. As a minor character comments, their interplay poses the question, "Who says friendship lasts forever? We'd all like it to, maybe, but maybe it wears out like everything else, like tires."

Over the years, many names had been dropped as possible players in Tequila Sunrise, including Warren Beatty and L.A. Lakers coach Pat Riley. After Harrison Ford dropped out, Towne saw Lethal Weapon and sent Gibson the script. "I just got stupidly lucky; no one could have been a better choice than Mel," he says. Towne was banking on Gibson bringing to the part the unhinged, reckless quality that it needed in its final act.

Towne thought of Michelle Pfeiffer after seeing Alan Alda's Sweet Liberty.

"She gave a very witty performance, one in which she displayed an ability to have a surface persona and then break into a whole other character. And somebody who owns and runs a restaurant has to have those two speeds, this surface persona as the hostess, dealing with people regardless of what's going on, gracious even in the face of crises, which has its own kind of comedy. And then there's also intrigue in, 'What's that woman like when she's not being so fucking gracious that she drives you nuts?' Her sangfroid and her beauty become a challenge and a kind of rebuke…."

Kurt Russell was the actor most firmly set in Towne's mind:

"Hanging out with him and Goldie [Hawn, Russell's live-in mate], I saw something in Kurt that was so right for the character—the irrepressibly mischievous nature of the man. It's an expression of the life force that allows you to take a character who has certain complexities that would normally be unacceptable or unappealing—enough to vitiate the drama—and with Kurt, he makes the movie a horse race."

Towne explained that each character is an amalgamation of several people.

"For example, in Kurt you will see a physical resemblance to Pat Riley that's unmistakable. Pat never comes unglued on the sidelines, never undoes his ties, and nobody can read into his behavior one way or the other. That's good for a glamorous cop who's trying to get a job done; it's useful with cops and criminals alike.

"What I wanted to create was a character who is politically very adroit, which is the reason for his success in his professional life and for his undoing in his personal life. He's charming and mischievous and basically decent, but he's also manipulative and damn near gets a lot of people seriously hurt."

From the beginning, Towne's Hollywood identity has been tied in with that of his friends Nicholson and Beatty. Towne has often given credit to Nicholson for teaching him the art of indirection—of playing the action of a scene against the ostensible subject, so that (as he once told John Brady) "a guy trying to seduce a girl … talks about everything but seduction, anything from a rubber duck he had as a child to the food on the table or whatever."

But after Towne toiled on cheap movies and television (including The Outer Limits and Breaking Point), it was Beatty who brought him into big time when, impressed by an unproduced western Towne had rewritten, Beatty asked the unknown writer to work on Bonnie and Clyde. Though Towne didn't get any screenwriting credit, the movie made him legendary as a script doctor, a reputation that was cinched when he provided Francis Coppola with a crucial scene in The Godfather—the one in which Don Vito tries to pass his wisdom along to his son Michael. And it was with Beatty that Towne wrote the critical and commercial hit, Shampoo.

"In my life," Towne says,

"I have known, at a little distance, what were putatively my closest friends for 20 years. I read about them in the paper, I see them in the movies, I get glimpses of them from the gossip columns, and yet they're my close friends. And I think we get lulled into a false sense of seeming that we know each other better than we do, because we read about each other in the newspapers and elsewhere."

"Movies are insulating experiences," says Towne, "and unless you have those experiences with your intimate friends, you inevitably lose contact with them but think you haven't." Tequila Sunrise took shape when Towne began to explore

"that feeling, and what it does to you, and the increasing willingness, in movies and in all kinds of business, to be able to use anything that's personal in the name of your business is OK. People use the name of art and the name of business the way they're given to saying, 'I swear on my child's life.' That feeling seemed transferable to a cop who could do anything in the name of his business because he's got justification—drug dealers being what they are and the world being what it is.

"When the characters get crazy over certain issues, none of them are venal…. They're always a matter of personal honor. The drug dealer has a very strict belief that there's a right and wrong way to behave. And, unlike most drug lords, the only thing that upsets the Latin so-called villain is that he feels an old friend may have behaved in a way contrary to the way friends are supposed to behave. They all operate out of an elemental code of honor. If your girl lies to you, that's it."

In its witty, sophisticated and surprisingly soft-spoken way, Tequila Sunrise protests the opportunistic morality that has held sway in this country's public life for 30 years. Although the movie focuses on the ethical corners present-day cops cut in order to nab drug dealers, Towne feels that the drama has its roots in the '50s.

"When Eisenhower admitted that we flew a spy plane over Russia, it was a big shock in this century. It was a bad thing to do. It wasn't fair. We were engaging in an underhanded activity.

"In the old westerns, before drawing your gun, the other guy had to draw his gun and fire. Take that and World War II, and you have a rather elevated way of viewing how you were supposed to deal with your adversary. The U-2 came along and just didn't square with that. It affected me, my thinking, strongly. We were doing that to them. From that moment on, the end justified the means.

"And that thinking is transferable in this country to any scourge, whether it's communism or drugs or whatever it is. You know, everything's fair. You've got to do whatever you can to get rid of the problem. It's another version of what you have to do to ferret out witches. And if you're like me, you never end up knowing how valid the problem is because you're so pissed off."

The most daring part of Tequila Sunrise is that the drug dealer is more of a traditional hero than the cop is. McKussick (the Mel Gibson character) still does drug-related favors for family and friends. But he's trying to go straight and devote himself solely to his legitimate business—his leaky pipes that irrigate fields without wasting water or endangering the ecology.

How upset were the folks at Warner Bros. at this sympathetic portrait of a drug dealer? "Oh, well, man, I tell you, I like and respect Bob Daly [Warner Bros.' chairman of the board and CEO], but at first he was terrified," says Towne.

"He couldn't believe it. Couldn't the guy be in the numbers racket? Couldn't he be anything else? Couldn't he just sell marijuana? But if a man is trying to escape his past and it's difficult, he's got to have a difficult past to escape from, and you've really got to identify with the problem. I mean, if the underlying dynamic of your story is that a gunfighter is desperate to hang up his guns, you've got to have some sense of what it was like to be a gunman, sort of unsavory. You can't have a gambler or a numbers runner ashamed and desperate to stop—the difficulties of trying to escape that kind of past are just not the same."

Towne can be indirect and disarmingly frank at the same time—like some of his best characters—even when he's discussing the current anti-drug crusade:

"I mean, if I were Rip van Winkle and went to sleep in 1968 and woke up in 1988, and they told me that drugs were bad and that sex could kill me, I'd say, 'I'm going back to sleep, man.'

"Of course I don't think drugs are good for people in general, they're just not. But I think the current preoccupation with drugs is more damaging than anything else. The real lie is, you CAN'T say no. You can't say no to the kid making thousands and thousands of dollars in the ghetto. You can't go around saying no—that's the lesson of William Blake, he knew that 250 years ago. He's the one who knew you can't have a 'Thou Shalt Not' writ over the door—people will just lose themselves in gin, because life is miserable. You can't just say no, you have to provide an alternative. You have to find something you want to do. Drugs is a way of saying that you haven't found anything you want to do."

Does he speak from personal experience?

"Hey, I'm just the wrong person to ask. In my life, until I was 28 years old, I smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, until one day I decided, 'That makes me sick.' Up to eight, nine years ago, I smoked Cuban cigars. I've still got a thousand Cuban cigars in London in a beautiful humidor that James Fox has for me. I don't smoke them anymore because they make me sick. Certain things just tend to give me up, whether I want to give them up or not. But I do know that Bob Daly's position on drugs isn't so far from mine, and he's on Nancy Reagan's 'Just Say No' committee."

The last six years have been a tumultuous time for a man who believes in simple codes. He's gone through divorce, remarriage and a custody fight for his young daughter, and the fracas over The Two Jakes strained his long-standing friendships with Nicholson and Evans. But Towne, who feels that the Jakes script is now "as solid and disciplined" as Chinatown, says he's happy that the film seems to be headed for production with Nicholson directing as well as starring, and will be glad to offer his help. (Although nothing has been officially announced, Nicholson's friends regard it as a done deal.)

Towne and his second wife, Luisa, are devoted to each other. Over her protests, he calls her "the keeper of the flame"—the person who keeps reminding him of his dreams whenever the pressures of production threaten to bury them.

Curtis Hanson, once described by Towne as "one of three close friends who one way or another have helped me through scripts and through my life over the years," has known Towne well for over two decades. Hanson admits that he and Towne have had their ups and downs—severe ones. And he agrees with Towne that things got more complicated for the writer when he became a director, "around the time of Personal Best, when he got into the center of the hurricane." Still, says Hanson, "Robert is an emotional guy and a complicated guy.

"My feeling," Hanson continues,

"is that Robert likes being in the middle and working with the actors and the cameraman and doing all the things that go with carrying your vision out. At the same time, I think Robert would also be happy to work with a director on a given project and see the picture go off and kind of godfather it—if he felt it was going to be made right. Of course, the question is, would he ever feel the projects would be made right?"

One project that Towne feels is sure to be made right is Hanson's next film, The Brotherhood of the Grape, in development at Orion. Based on John Fante's roisterous 1977 novel of California-Italian family life, Towne and Francis Ford Coppola were to team up on the movie, but instead will serve as co-executive producers.

Towne has fought hard when trying to preserve the form and meaning of his own scripts, never more notoriously than when he clashed with Chinatown director Roman Polanski over the bleak ending and cynical slant that Towne felt Polanski had imposed on the material. (Towne gets his revenge in his script to the sequel, The Two Jakes. By the end, the sleazy private eye J. J. Gittes turns into a romantic hero.)

"If he's really convinced of the rightness of something," says James Toback, "and he's given a couple of shots to explain why it's the way to go, he starts to get quite frustrated if you don't see it the same way." This willingness to take a stand over artistic issues, along with his stubborn attention to details, have helped to give Towne a reputation for integrity, and, in recent years, for "difficulty." But Toback admires Towne for his intellectual tenacity, which he calls "a very un-Hollywood trait. There, the attitude is, 'You don't like my script? I don't like it either, here's my other one.'"

Towne's sense of craftsmanship would seem to link him to Hollywood's glory days. "If we were back in the '30s and '40s, it might be that Robert would have become like Nunnally Johnson, more of a writer-producer," says Hanson. "But today, directors get all the praise and a lot of the power."

But Towne says that Hollywood tradition

"isn't important to me at all, personally. I think that I have always felt that people respond best to structure, especially if you're going to make an unorthodox point. I mean, to show how the farmers were blown out of the Owens Valley, I'm not going to do a Frank Norris novel like The Octopus or Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain. Nobody would go to see it—nobody would let me make it.

"So I figure I do a detective movie and do it about a real crime, which is fucking up land and water rather than stealing a jewel-encrusted falcon. The Maltese Falcon is one of my favorite stories. It's about greed and something else, and so's Chinatown. But Chinatown is about greed and its consequences, not just in the present, but to the future. The land is raped as surely as the daughter, and these things have far-reaching consequences.

"I mean, the important thing is, how much better can you write? How much better can you lead? Why are you doing it?"

Towne says, echoing the words he wrote years ago in Chinatown. "For the future."