SOURCE: An interview in The Craft of the Screenwriter: Interviews with Six Celebrated Screenwriters, Simon and Schuster, 1981, pp. 366-432.

[Brady is an American nonfiction writer, interviewer, and critic. In the following excerpt, Towne discusses his screenwriting career, focusing on his scripts for Chinatown and Shampoo, and describes his "script-doctoring" work on such films as The Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde.]

[Brady]: When did you start writing for movies?

[Towne]: About 1960. It was on and off. I started with Roger Corman doing horror and science fiction films—almost the same time that Jack Nicholson started acting. Nicholson and I were in the same acting class (run by Jeff Corey), but I always thought I was going to write. It was a class that included many directors, producers—Irv Kirschner was in the class, for instance. Roger Corman was in the class. That's how I got my first job. He was producing and directing. There were a lot of actors, too—Sally Kellerman was in there, Jimmy Coburn was in there … Dick Chamberlain. It was invaluable for me—for all kinds of reasons. I met a lot of people, who I thought were terrific at the time, and as it turns out most have done very well professionally. In some cases—Jack's, in particular—the acting influenced me as a writer. Watching Jack improvise really had an effect.

In what way?

His improvisations were inventive. When he was given a situation, he would not improvise on the nose. He'd talk around the problem, and good writing is the same way: It's not explicit. Take a very banal situation—a guy trying to seduce a girl. He talks about everything but seduction, anything from a rubber duck he had as a child to the food on the table or whatever. But you know it's all oriented toward trying to fuck this girl. It's inventive, and it teaches you something about writing.

You started writing for Corman. Can you tell me about the writing that goes into a horror movie?

It's the toughest kind. Really, it's a tough form. Roger and I were really a classic mismatch. It was very painstaking, the screenplay of The Tomb of Ligeia. In fact, I worked harder on the horror screenplay for him than on anything I think I have ever done. And I still like the screenplay. I think it's good.

Roger works so fast, and you seem to have a slower sense of craftsmanship. How did you adapt?

Actually, I didn't. It just meant I practically starved to death while I was writing.

Not even time for meals?

No, it just meant that Roger was not really lavish with the money he paid anybody. I think that Ligeia may have been made for about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the amount of money on the script was negligible. So if you take a long time writing something like that, it works against you.

How do you write a horror movie, particularly when you have a short story in front of you that must be expanded into some ninety minutes of screen time?

Well, "Ligeia" was a very short story. I remember reading all the body of Poe's work, and I felt the best thing to do would be to take Poe's themes and expand on them. There was a strong hint of mesmerism in the story. I decided to make it overt—with all that emphasis on Ligeia's eyes and how they held the beholder. Also in Poe there is a lot of necrophilia—implied if not expressed. So I took the combination of mesmerism, which was there, and necrophilia, which was sort of there (because the first wife was always in the background), and brought them together. It provided a natural explanation for this woman. She had hypnotized the protagonist, and he was making love to this body under posthypnotic suggestion, literally being controlled by someone who was dead—which is kind of a gruesome notion, but perfectly consistent with Poe. I was trying to use a theme consistent with him, even though it wasn't in the story.

American horror stories tend to provide natural explanations for events—like "Oh, well, she was hypnotized"—whereas the English tend to go for supernatural explanations. I tried to have my cake and eat it too in Ligeia. There was that natural explanation of posthypnotic suggestion, along with the supernatural explanation of a possession. That was also a theme in the story—this vaguely pantheistic notion of being able to come back from the dead in a blade of grass or an animal—and there was the cat and all that.

Some people liked the movie quite a bit. I think it was a little dull. I think it would have been better if it had been done with a man who didn't look like a necrophiliac to begin with.

You disapprove of Vincent Price?

I love Vincent. He's very sweet. But, going in, you suspect that Vincent could bang cats, chickens, girls, dogs, everything. You just feel that necrophilia might be one of his Basic Things. I'd felt the role called for an almost unnaturally handsome guy who the second wife could fall in love with. There should also be a sense of taboo about the really close tie he had with his first wife—as though it were something incestuous, two halves of the same person. The intensity of the relationship is a sacrilege in itself; just being together is almost an unnatural act.

At the outset, Corman told me he wouldn't cast Vincent Price in the film, but when it was done he called me in L.A. from London. He told me he had cast Vincent, and added: "It's OK, we've got Marlene Dietrich's makeup man." I've never been able to figure out what difference that made.

I did a couple of films for Roger Corman—Ligeia, and another horror film I'd rather not mention. Then I did some television work—The Outer Limits, some Man from U.N.C.L.E. work, a show called Breaking Point, The Richard Boone Show, an anthology. I also did The Lloyd Bridges Show, an anthology he did after his Sea Hunt shows.

Can you draw any comparisons between TV and movie work?

I think that dramatic writing for television is, if anything, almost harmful to the potential screenwriter. The only good thing about it is that it allows you to, theoretically anyway, make a living writing. Censorship is one problem. It was then, anyway. There is more permissiveness in television today, but a lot of it is still the same. I once did a script for Outer Limits which presented an interesting problem. These guys came to me and said, "We want to do a story on how adaptable man is, how chameleonlike human beings are. We want a story in which creatures come to earth from outer space, and, in order to study them, a man gets transformed into one of them to figure out what they are." Which is a wildly improbable story. I remember saying, "Fellas, did it ever occur to you what would happen if we went on a five-man space mission to Mars, and we're walking around and suddenly a sixth man shows up that none of us knew? Don't you think we'd be a little dubious about the new guy?" It's an impossible problem. But they said, "No, go ahead and do it."

Well, in those days I would try anything. I was just trying to work. So I came up with these creatures who were almost bear-like. I had them in these weird iron bars high up in the Rockies or the Sierras or someplace, and a forestman came across them. He was killed by them. People found his body, and they realized that his killers had taken him apart, literally, system by system. His vascular system, his muscular system … and so on. They had literally pulled him apart. Then they tried to put him back together, but they didn't do it quite right. People were appalled and frightened. They didn't know quite what to do with these creatures because they seemed so brilliant, yet erratic.

They got a piece of tissue from beneath the fingernails of the dead ranger and tried to program these creatures genetically to learn how they could transform a guy who goes there to find out how they can be so brilliant and so erratic. What he finds out is that they are children, and that they are literally in a playpen waiting for their mother, who has deposited them there temporarily. Which would explain why they could be precocious and bright but unpredictable.

Well, ABC Continuity read it and said, "No, we can't do this because we don't want to have anything to do with children." I said, they're not children children. They're these creatures from outer space. "No, can't have it." Well, that's insane. I don't know if it would happen today, but it was deeply demoralizing, and it was the only solution I could come up with for the particular problem that these guys wanted to do. The script had to be entirely rewritten. I did the rewrite in one day—eight hours—and it was terrible. I just didn't care what I wrote. It was shot (I don't know who did it—Bobby Duvall, maybe), but it was no good at all.

That sort of thing would happen time after time after time. Censorship like that is so demoralizing. Also, you had to write so explicitly. If a story had a theme, you had to state the theme. Scenes had to really be kind of on the nose. In every way. It got you into the habit of writing too much. Too much dialogue. Because they wanted it.

I think by and large it was not a terrific period for me, and I did not enjoy it in any way, shape or form. I should say one thing, though. I think that comedy writing on television is terrific—all those Mary Tyler Moore scripts, for instance, were very well written. But one of the things that is almost implicit in comedy is something that is repetitious, static—that is, you pretty much leave a character the way you find him. That's OK in all comedy. Repetitive or even compulsive behavior is what makes comedy. Archie Bunker is funny because he keeps repeating his prejudices in one form or another, and you expect these things. Jack Benny's repetitive behavior, his stinginess, was funny, and you came to appreciate him for it. Comedy in that sense lends itself better to television, where you have to have a running character the same every week, whereas in dramatic writing the very essence is character change. The character at the end is not the same as he was at the beginning. He's changed—psychologically, maybe even physically. He may be dead by the end of a show. Yet in a running dramatic series for television, you have to leave the characters the way that you find them—and that is basically antithetical to good writing.

Do you think you came too late to television? Do you believe in the so-called golden age of television in the 1950s?

No. I believe that there was some good stuff written in the fifties, and there were some terrific writers. But who knows? I've seen some of the stuff. Some of it was dogshit—pretentious, silly and precious. But some of it was great. There's nobody better than Paddy Chayefsky. An incredible writer. But the would have been incredible anywhere. A talent like that is as responsible for the golden age as is the so-called climate that went into creating him.

After working in TV, how did you get back into movies?

Corman again. He was doing a supposedly big-budget film at Columbia and needed a western script rewritten. He asked me to do it. I did, but there was a lot of subsequent difficulty between Roger and the studio over the movie. Roger left the picture, somebody else did it, and I took my name off it. But the script attracted attention from Warren Beatty. That's how I met Warren. At the time he and Arthur Penn were having trouble with the script for Bonnie and Clyde. They felt that they had reached a dead end with it, so I was asked to read it. I was brought together with Arthur, did the rewrites on the film, and that's how I got back into the movies.

Arthur Penn has called you Warren's best friend.

We're as close as two people are likely to be, I suppose.

The work on Bonnie and Clyde sounds like it must have been especially close.

It was. I was rewriting scenes time after time. The movie was impromptu in the sense that there was rewriting going on constantly, but once Arthur was satisfied with a scene, once the rewriting was done to everybody's satisfaction, there was no deviation whatsoever from those lines. That's the way it was shot. There was less improvising in Bonnie and Clyde than in any other movie I have worked on. Which speaks well for the acting and directing, I think, because the film was praised for its freewheeling sense, as though the cameras just happened to be there to record real life.

What were the rewrite problems on Bonnie and Clyde?

The original script, by David Newman and Robert Benton, was very talented, but it was written as a ménage à trois among Clyde, Bonnie and W.D. At that time the climate was not so permissive that it would be easy to do something like that, so, for several reasons (partly because of the studio), it had to be changed. Also, the script was kind of static. I mean, it was funny—Clyde and W.D., Bonnie and W.D., and so on—but ultimately it didn't go anywhere. If you're going to do a movie about shifting relationships, like Truffaut's Jules and Jim, it is tough to do a gangster movie at the same time.

Arthur Penn and Warren decided that they didn't want the ménage à trois, but instead a relationship between Bonnie and Clyde, and asked Benton and Newman to do it. But the script just didn't seem to work after that change was made. One of the problems was in making that relationship go somewhere. Arthur was very unhappy with it. That was when I was called in—things had reached an impasse. I remember the first suggestion I made. It was obvious that everybody knew the people in the picture were going to get killed, so that was never an element of mystery, but rather one of suspense. When was it going to happen? The other element was: Would Bonnie and Clyde resolve some element in their relationship before it happened? Which is one of the first things I think I said—that we would have to heighten the fact that the particular roads they were traveling on led to one place.

In the original script the mortician episode came after Bonnie went to see her family. She went and saw her mother, had a nice time, then picked these people up along the road, after stealing their car and chasing them, had hamburgers with them, then learned that Gene Wilder was a mortician—and kicked him and his girl out of the car. I suggested that they take that scene and place it before Bonnie sees her mother so that the impetus of having a good time, only to find out that the guy is a mortician, strikes Bonnie, who is the most sensitive and open of the group, and makes her say, "I wanna go see my Mama." It scared her. Pacing like that gives the character a little drive, makes her want to do something as a result of it. And then, at her mother's, instead of having a happy scene, I suggested that the scene end up with Clyde saying to Bonnie's mother, "We're gonna end up living by you," and with the mother replying, "If you're gonna live three miles from here, you're not gonna live long." In effect, Bonnie can't go home anymore. All of these avenues are being closed off, and she is being thrown back on Clyde for a ride that is going one way. Then came a scene in a hotel room where Bonnie says, "I thought we were really going someplace," with disillusionment setting in. And Clyde says, "Well, I'm your family," heightening the intensity, the meaning and the need of that relationship for her, and hopefully something will be resolved about it before they are killed. Of course, they eventually end up sleeping together.

Then one had to be careful (we all worried about it) about Clyde. Suddenly, just because he could have a normal heterosexual relationship, it could not mean that he would put down his gun and stop robbing banks, which is a script problem to deal with. Those were the initial changes. I started working with it then, always under Arthur's guidance—he would have me rewrite something ten or fifteen times, until I felt I just couldn't write at all. He used to scare me. I used to think, "Gee, I must really be terrible if he keeps having me rewrite like this. God, I'm really bad." Then they asked me to come down to Texas, where I stayed all during the picture, working even in postproduction, writing wild lines for background.

From a writing point of view, the thing that was interesting was the number of times I rewrote scenes. But when you're rewriting, very often you're doing the scenes that don't work. The toughest scenes in a piece of material may not only have been the toughest for the writer who worked ahead of you, but may also be the most difficult scenes to solve, period. So they are the ones you have to keep redoing, whether it's you or somebody else. Tough scenes create problems. All other things being equal, some scenes are easy for seven out of ten writers to do—the actions of characters are clear, and it's simple to get through. But other scenes are more difficult. There may be more ways in which a scene can go. Maybe a scene reaches a point where you have to carry both plot information and character information, which makes it difficult. There are all these problems, which I didn't realize at the time.

But afterward I realized that was one of the reasons why I was rewriting scenes so many times. There were other reasons, too. It was very valuable for me. I was learning an awful lot from Arthur just by doing and redoing. From Warren, too. There was constant collaborative effort. Story conferences. Arthur, Warren and myself down there in Texas.

When you come in to do rewrites on a script, do you ever work with the original writer?

I did work with Francis Ford Coppola when he called me in on The Godfather.

Mario Puzo shared the credit on that. Did you work with him?

No, I didn't meet Mario until afterward.

The reason I asked is that he wrote an article afterward which made it sound like that was a rather traumatic period for him.

It always is. Your first movie is terribly traumatic. But I'm sure he's gotten over it. He's survived, hands down. He's a terrific guy. But I didn't work with him.

I wondered how far the rewrite man works from the guy he's replaced. It sounds as if they want a fresh opinion, and don't want any …

Usually very far removed. Invariably. But sometimes the person who does the rewrite can write a whole new script. Literally, a whole new script. It wasn't the case in Bonnie and Clyde or in The Godfather, but in other films I've done, it's been entirely new scripts. I mean, the rewrite in that western I did was virtually a new script. Rewrites at times can be entire.

What were the rewrite problems on The Godfather?

Mainly, Francis was perplexed. In the book there wasn't any resolution between Vito Corleone and his son Michael—their relationship. He needed a scene between the two of them. Francis kept saying, "Well, I want the audience to know that they love each other." He put it that way. But you couldn't do a scene about two people loving each other. So I wrote a scene about the succession of power, and through that it was obvious that the two men had a great deal of affection for each other. Through Brando's anxiety about what would happen to his son, and his anxiety about giving up his power—his ambivalent feelings about, in effect, forcing his son to assume his role, and having to give up his role—that was the key to that scene.

If you want to use the "script doctor" analogy, it wasn't a major operation—just spot surgery in a highly specific area. That creates all sorts of problems by itself. I wasn't rewriting the script from beginning to end, which I've done most often. Instead, I was adding outside material and had to fit it in with what existed, make it consistent—and this meant knowing everything that had been shot, and everything that the director had in mind. An interesting problem. Usually you're rewriting right along with the director as you know where you're going. On The Godfather it was a case of someone saying, "This is where I think I'm going, but I don't know where to go anymore. You help me make up my mind where I want to go next." And yet I hadn't been in on any of the original process. They'd been shooting for five or six weeks before I even got there. So I had to look at the footage and say either, "This is terrific" or, "This is so bad, I can't possibly fix it." Which, of course, was the last thing in the world from the truth.

You were called in under extreme pressure, weren't you?

That was the scariest situation I've ever been in, because I knew they were going to lose Brando within twenty-four hours. It was a tense situation at that particular point because no one figured that the film was going to be the big hit that it was. I saw about an hour of assembled footage, and I thought it was brilliant. Francis was troubled. There was a lot of backstabbing on the set, and he was constantly being undermined. So I couldn't get over it: The footage was so extraordinary. I felt that I was going to make a contribution to a film that was virtually assured of being a major hit, although that was not the prevailing opinion on the set.

I worked on a few minor scenes. I remember restructuring Michael's speech for the scene where he tells how he is going to kill the cop. I just did a simple thing there. The way that Francis had originally written the speech, Michael says at the beginning he's going to kill the cop, and then he tells about the newspaper story and other things to justify it. But it was much more dramatic for him to withhold what he was going to do until the end of the speech. I just reversed it. There were a few other little things like that.

But mainly Francis was concerned about having a scene between Michael and his father. So we sat down with Marlon and Al Pacino, got their feelings, and began writing about eight o'clock that night and did a scene about the transfer of power: Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. I don't know if you remember the scene at all, but that's the gist of it. The don is saying, "We've got to see about this," and Michael is saying, "Dad, I told you I'd take care of it, and I'm taking care of it." What seems to be a kind of absentmindedness on the part of Vito Corleone as far as protective measures are concerned is really his unwillingness to accept the position he's placed his youngest son in.

But the two men in the course of the scene really accept the dictates of fate. It's sort of a perverse noblesse oblige: Vito is obliged to pass the cup, and Michael is obliged to take it. He does, and through that you see that the two men love each other very much, rather than my writing a scene about love, which wouldn't have worked in that movie. It's illustrative in a way of writing in general. Most scenes are rarely about what the subject matter is.

You mentioned this earlier in relation to Jack Nicholson improvising scenes at Jeff Corey's school—improvising off the point.

Corey had an exercise in which he would take a scene from, say, Three Men on a Horse, which is a farce, and he would say, "OK, you're a junkie, and you're trying to sell this guy some dope." In other words, the situation that he would give would be totally contrary to the text, and it was the task of the actors, through their interpretation of the various bits of business they could come up with, to suggest the real situation through lines that had no bearing on the situation. When you see that for three years running, when you are asked for improvisations in which you are given a situation and told that you must talk about everything but the situation to advance the action, you soon see the power of dealing obliquely or elliptically with situations, because most people rarely confront things headon. They're afraid to. I think that most people try to be accommodating in life, but in back of their accommodation is suppressed fear or anger or both. What happens in a dramatic situation is that it surfaces. And it shouldn't surface too easily, or it's not realistic.

How much do you take from your actors when you sit down and have to structure a scene with twenty-four-hour notice?

It depends on the actors. I took a lot from Marlon and Al. Particularly Marlon. He said, "Just once in this part I'd like not to be inarticulate." So I took the notion that he wanted to have this man try to express himself. I took the notion of Vito Corleone trying to talk, then, rather than having him give sage nods. Through most of the film it is the power of his silence that carries force. But in the situation I was asked to write, he actually talks. Most of the time the power of the character is conveyed through pregnant silence.

I took a lot of things from Jack Nicholson in life for the character of Gittes in Chinatown, too. Things that happened. I used his idiosyncrasies, but, more importantly, I tried to use his way of working. I've seen him work so much that I feel I know what he does well. In fact, I don't even think about it. I just do it. I saw Jack work and improvise two or three times a week for maybe five straight years. It's hard not to think about Jack even when I'm not writing for him. His work literally affected the way that I work, totally independent of doing a movie with Jack. He and other people in that class.

In the case of working with Warren on Shampoo, obviously there's an effect there. I definitely take him into account when I am writing scenes for him, because I feel that I know what he does well. I feel that Warren always has to be tougher than he thinks. He presents a peculiar problem as an actor because he is a man who is deeply embarrassed by acting. Unlike Jack. Warren is a very talented man, but he's so embarrassed by his acting that you have to constantly force him, one way or another, to use himself, whereas Jack doesn't have that reluctance. He doesn't mind using himself. Warren has the instincts of a character actor. He'd rather hobble around on one foot in Bonnie and Clyde, or wear a gold tooth in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He's a little bit like another great actor who is embarrassed about using his own instrument—and that's Albert Finney. In Murder on the Orient Express, for instance, he plays Hercule Poirot and manages to cover himself up completely as a character actor. Both men have the instincts of character actors, and that's not really good for movies, because after a time if an actor is playing a "leading man" he has to be willing to use aspects of his own personality for a role. It won't look real if he doesn't. Film is just too sensitive. When you are dealing with someone like that, if you know him well, you are obliged as a writer to try to push situations where an actor must use aspects of himself, and you remind him of it in the way in which you write scenes. Or when you write scenes together, as Warren and I did in Shampoo, you've got to say, "Look, you've got to be tough with yourself here, and not be afraid of yourself."

Now I am talking about two cases in which I enjoy close personal relationships with actors whom I respect professionally. In many ways I'm as close to Jack and Warren as I am to anybody. When you work with people you don't know so well, the problems are much more complex. Then you've got to go through a lot of diplomatic crises. When you say you don't approve of something (whether it's with an actor, a director or whatever), then they assume that what you are saying is you don't approve of their talent or of them—the way they part their hair, whatever. That's very time-consuming and exhausting, and there is not that kind of time on a movie when it's being shot—which is one reason why, whenever possible, you should do movies with people whom you are intimate with at one level or another. You can cut through that shit. The disadvantage, of course, is that over a period of years you can get sloppy, I suppose. John Ford finally just got tired, got very old. But for years he was working with people he knew. All really good directors do it. Fellini does it. Bergman.

He has a repertory company, I think.

Sure. And there's a reason for it; it's just too hard otherwise, too hard to keep working with strangers. It's like starting a marriage over and over and over again.

I'm very interested in how you write with somebody else. On Shampoo, you and Beatty shared writing credits. Does it come down to two men sitting in a room, or is it a back-and-forth type of arrangement?

In the case of Shampoo, it goes so far back I can't tell you. I had done an early draft—about two hundred and twenty pages—of the thing that I was interested in having Warren do around the time of Bonnie and Clyde. It was very amorphous, though. Warren looked at it and said, "You really seem lost, though the writing is interesting." I still have that draft, as a matter of fact. We sat and we talked for about a month about a new shape it might take. Warren went to Europe for a couple of months while I rewrote the script. When he came back we had a big argument over the script because there were two strong female parts. He had wanted one part for Julie Christie, and a very secondary part for another female. As it happens, there were two major parts in the final script—for Julie and Goldie Hawn—but at this time it was very dicey, and Warren was very unhappy, and we didn't speak for about six months. I thought that was the end of that particular arrangement. He had given me option money, but I felt the script would never be made, and there was some mutual confusion as to who had the rights to it. So it was left in limbo for three years. I went on to do other things—The Last Detail, Chinatown, and so forth. I did The Yakuza during this period, too.

Finally, Warren sat down and took the script and did a draft with some new material, including a couple of party sequences. He was trying to restructure it in a more interesting way, particularly after a lapse of three years. One particular sequence in the old script which involved dope was bad. He did a draft that really just didn't work. It wasn't much related to what I had done. Then he did another in which he rearranged a lot of the original material. We talked, and I took that draft and in a seven-day period in December 1973 we sat down in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with Hal Ashby, whom Warren had hired as director, and the real collaboration took place.

We thrashed out and rewrote entirely the rewrite of the draft I had done in 1970—if that makes any sense. It's a very convoluted history. Hal, Warren and I would sit in a room and thrash out the sequence of events in the picture. We had very little time to do this because they were going to try to shoot it in six weeks. In order to get Warren, Julie, Goldie, Lee Grant and Jack Warden together meant you had to be ready to go during these six weeks, or you'd end up costing yourself a lot of money. Warren had committed himself financially to people prior to finalizing the deal with the studio, which meant that he was personally on the hook for a lot of money. So there was enormous pressure to get it done immediately. We went through the draft then, and in many ways it ended up, at least in spirit, very close to the earliest version—that is, with two women, and with the guy more attached emotionally to the less naive of the two. The work on that final draft, though, was the most intensive I've been through in a long time. We'd start about nine in the morning and work until about eleven at night, then sleep and start again.

We would talk through the scenes, and I would go into another room and do the writing of the scenes themselves. Some writers can collaborate and write on the spot. I can't. Maybe comedy writers work that way: You say this line, and I'll say that line. But I prefer to talk through the scenes, reworking their structure, arguing back and forth about the party sequences, trying to make them an organic part of the whole script, and making relationships between characters come to a head during the parties, and not just having a party for a party's sake. It was completely rewritten in about seven days. Then I went to Japan to do the finishing touches on The Yakuza, then came back to do the rewriting on Shampoo as it was being shot.

In Shampoo the rewriting during shooting was less extensive than it has been in many other cases. It's a film that I like about as much as I like anything I've written in a while. Maybe other people don't, but I feel very positive about it. I was given an ongoing voice in the process of the making of the film. I was on the set every day, rewriting every day. At one point I even asked to have a scene reshot because I saw that there had been a crucial mistake. I rewrote the scene, and it was reshot.

Which scene?

It's between Warren and Goldie—the climactic scene in their relationship. She has caught him with her best girl friend. She faces him and says, "There were others, too, weren't there?" And he says, "What do you want to know for?" "Well, there were, and I want to know," she says. Finally, he blows up, and tells her to grow up, everybody fucks everybody else, and he goes into this whole speech about why he went to beauty school.

I took a couple of my dogs for a walk, and it occurred to me that as the scene was shot, he advanced on her; but as it was written, she advanced on him. In order for the scene to work at all, he had to be the passive agent and have it forced out of him. Anger or fear, as I've said, can't come out of a person too easily. It has to be forced out of him to be realistic, to make him more of a person. I realized, too, that the speech itself wasn't working. It was didactic when it should have been personal. He should have said it's me, not that's what people do. The speech was changed. He sits down (so she's towering over him), and he fumbles, but he gets it out—and it's a speech that we worked out with Warren. The part that's most important to me occurs when he says, "Well, look, I don't know what I'm apologizing for. I go into an elevator or walk down the street and see a pretty girl, and that's it: It makes my day. I can't help it. I feel like I'm gonna live forever. Maybe it means I don't love them, and maybe it means I don't love you, but nobody's gonna tell me I don't like them very much."

What I was getting at with the last half of that speech—the notion of seeing pretty girls and feeling like he was going to live forever—was someone as far away as possible from compulsive Don Juanism, or latent homosexuality, or someone who is trying to prove his masculinity. None of these things interested me, nor did I believe in them in the case of this guy. Instead, I perceived him as sort of a crude Pygmalion—he makes women pretty, then falls in love with them, moment to moment. They're pretty, they're nice to touch, they smell great, they look great, they feel great—which is what he says in the speech. They are a life force for him in the classic Don Juan sense. The man just has more life in him. He is a rebel in the sense that he doesn't want to deny himself. The man sort of goes through a breakdown. He really is getting old in the course of the two days in the film. It's never quoted in the film, but that line from William Butler Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium"—That is no country for old men—is never far from the back of my mind when I think of this film and of Southern California. And never far from the front of my mind.

Julie Christie has gone with George, the hairdresser, and at one point wanted to marry him. But he's always running around, having a hell of a good time, and she says, "You know why I always used to be so angry with you?" And he says, "Because I wouldn't settle down." And she says, "No, because you were always so happy about everything." And he says, "I was?" Because in the two days of the film he's kind of frenetic and occasionally very funny. But he's not happy. It's that element which it was necessary to deal with and carry through in the speech to Goldie, from a guy who really had a greater, more genuine appetite for certain kinds of enjoyment—particularly because the film is filled with people who settle for things. They settle for things because they feel they should, or because they are told they should, or because they're afraid not to. But the hairdresser is a guy who is dumber than the rest of them, in a way. He doesn't even know enough to settle for things, and he's lived his life in a certain sybaritic way. But there's nothing corrupt or crude about the guy at all. He's very sweet.

You've been called an Abe Burrows of Hollywood because of the years you spent doctoring the scripts of others. What's your attitude toward that kind of reputation? Is it an exalted role, like that of a star relief pitcher? Or is it a minor role, like someone who plays only when the star pulls up with an injury?

I don't know if a relief pitcher is an exalted role, but I think it's more like that than the other. It's misleading, though, to talk about script doctoring or polishing as though it were a specialized art. All scripts are rewritten, whether they be yours or somebody else's. The only question is whether it is rewritten well or badly. But everything is and should be rewritten. Movies are not done under laboratory conditions. They are done over a period of time, under the gun of a budget—maybe a film will cost a hundred thousand dollars a day—and there are all sorts of problems: weather problems, people problems, lots of surprises. People may not know each other, and there may not be enough time to rehearse. You can lose locations. You can lose light. You can lose your fucking mind. So there are tremendous numbers of variables.

Also, when you are looking at something, and then it is blown up thirty-two times, just that can surprise you. You don't know what you've got. You see it on the set, and then you see it on the screen, and you say, "Hey, that's good!" or, "That's bad!" For example, at an early point in Bonnie and Clyde, everybody was worried about establishing their relationship in a particular scene. I must have written seven or eight little scenes. Then, one day, we were looking at dailies when they came in, and there they were in the same frame on the screen, and Warren was saying, "I'm Clyde Barrow, and we rob banks." It was obvious.

Their relationship was established. It would be stupid to write any other scenes. You are always miscalculating in a movie, partially because of the disparity between what you see on the set and what you see on the screen. No matter how skilled you are in anticipating what the image is going to look like finally, you can still be fooled. So you have to rewrite, and be rewritten—not because the original is necessarily badly written, but because, ultimately, if it doesn't work for a film, it's bad.

Some people may think there's something pejorative about the term "script doctor." But on the whole it's better to have a reputation for fixing things up than for messing them up. I have enjoyed the role, and conceivably would and will do it again. If for no other reason than you force yourself into somebody else's world and you learn things at every level that you don't if you are doing original material. It's a way of revitalizing yourself. You learn things from other people. In rewriting someone or in adapting a work, you can come to feel it's your very own, too. Or you can feel that you are in the service of somebody else's material that you love very much, and you want to work. We all have rescue fantasies….

Is good writing enough? Or does a screenwriter also have to be good at story conference strategies for dealing with producers, directors, and the like?

Well, it helps. But the best answer to that problem is to work with your friends, because no matter how much moxie you've got, if you're with a guy who is fundamentally not congenial to your point of view, or if he's worried about what somebody else is going to think, it just doesn't matter. So if you can sidestep such things, it's best to work with people you know and trust—and who know you and trust you—and to work from that vantage point. There are going to be disagreements, for sure. But there is also mutual respect, and work that is bound to be satisfying insofar as everyone on a movie can be satisfied with the outcome.

I assume that you had some enemies on Chinatown. The early drafts of that script are completely different from the shooting script, especially at the end.

Yeah, there was some conflict there between Roman Polanski and me. We went over everything, and he said he didn't like the ending. In the original, I had Evelyn Mulwray going to jail and her daughter escaping to Mexico. Roman wanted Evelyn to die at the end. "You're kidding," I said. "Well, think of something else," he said. And I did. I came up with an alternative ending about four or five days before shooting. I brought it over to him, and he said, "Well, it's too late. We're going to shoot in a week and I can't change anything. I just can't do it." That was the last we spoke during the picture. It was very quiet, subdued, although we'd had several fights in which I'd blown up and yelled at him, and he at me. But I must also say that except for Arthur, Roman taught me more about screenwriting than anybody I've ever worked with, both in spite of and because of our conflicts. Roman is great at the elucidation of the narrative—to go from point A to B to C. In that sense, he is excellent.

The shooting script of Chinatown is such a reversal of everything the first, second and third drafts build toward. Can you recall the compromise version that you came up with?

I never wanted Evelyn killed. I can't recall the specifics of the original scene because I've lost it—but in it she did kill her father in Chinatown.

I remember that the second draft was very clumsy, and I was forced to embark on a third draft. One of the things about the first and second drafts is that Gittes is told by Evelyn, when she feels backed up to the wall, that she is seeing somebody else, that she's seeing a married man and that's her reason for not wanting to go to the police. It was a little lame in the third draft, a little vague in the shooting script, but in the earlier drafts it was very clear. Gittes says, "OK, I'm going to the police unless you tell me what is going on." And she gives the most plausible reason to her mind that he would accept, because it involved a certain amount of culpability on her part: She's a married woman, and she's making it with somebody else. Because he thinks that she's being honest with him, and because he's been kind of a sucker, he decides to go along with her. Then he becomes slowly jealous of this mythical character. So when he goes to see who she's seeing—when he follows her—he thinks he's going to find her lover. Which I felt would have been much more interesting.

The postcoital love scene, in which Evelyn adores Gittes (in the shooting script), was improvised on the set. In the original scene, Evelyn was so upset after having sex that she was ignoring him completely. And he was misconstruing it as her being concerned about her other lover, whereas, as she'd indicated earlier, her reaction to sex was very neurotic. But, frankly, I don't think Roman Polanski could be interested in a woman who is involved with somebody else, or, in this case, a hero who would worry that his lover was fucking somebody else. And it was Roman's identification with the hero that was making the film work. It has to be unqualified involvement with him. As with the love scene. The woman has to approve wholeheartedly of the man's performance in bed.

Roman needs that kind of approbation from both women, men and everybody on the set. He's the little king. That's a case where that kind of attitude warped the mystery, the tension at a point in the film. Also, it prevented the film from dealing with what I thought was the most important missing thing of all—namely, that Gittes was getting progressively, insanely crazy about this woman. He was jealous, and really falling in love with her. Although she came to like him very much, her other problems were so overwhelming that she couldn't … she came to admire and like him and really find him enormously attractive. But he was falling in love with her.

That kind of passion I felt was very important for the film, in order for his betrayal of her to have any significance. He had to really love her.

At any rate, the script had to be turned into a shooting script. I was struggling through the first and second drafts simply trying to figure out the story for myself. The second draft was so complex that a shooting script based upon it would have run close to three hours. I would have had to do a radical rewrite in order to simplify it.

There's incredible texture to it.

In the film I missed that kind of progressive jealousy by Gittes—his thinking that she was involved with someone else. And the ending, as shot, is very harsh.

Didn't you want to direct Chinatown yourself?

Initially I did. That's why I wrote a detective script. I figured that no matter how badly it was directed, if I wrote a story that people wanted to know the outcome of, it would carry. That was one of the reasons for the genre. There were others that I discovered as I went along with it.

I hope you do the novel. There's so much puzzlement in the film of Chinatown. I came away wondering, "What does this or that line mean? Why does Gittes repeat 'as little as possible' at the end?" The reference to Evelyn's flawed eye. There's so much going on in the film that is cerebral, that is just not visual enough—it's like a tease. I think the novel would answer many questions the film poses.

The novel would be very different, all right. What do you mean about the eye reference—are you referring to Evelyn's getting shot in the eye in the end?

Yes, but earlier Gittes notices some flaw in her eye. It's a point of discussion. Then, at the end, she is shot in the eye.

That shot in the eye at the end does make you think of that earlier line, which is unfortunate. The flaw in her iris was intended for another purpose. You may remember an early speech in the script, and Gittes says, "Who does she think she is? She's no better than anybody else in this town." She was sort of a perfect, upper-class lady. So Gittes comes up against this woman who is infuriatingly correct, and everything about her is an insult to this lower-class guy who monograms everything and is made to feel like a crude, dumb asshole. And finally: He sees a flaw in the iris. It's emblematic at that moment of her vulnerability. If you've ever seen such eyes, you know they are very pretty. To me it was also emblematic of the fact that she is psychologically flawed. The fact that she was shot in the eye later is a coincidental echo.

All the more reason for doing the novel.

Either I will do it, or it won't be done. It's a highly personal thing. In fact, most of the locations that Roman chose for the film were ones that I directed him to. I remembered them from my childhood.

What sort of childhood did you have?

I grew up in California, around San Pedro. I grew up amidst fishermen, Mexicans, chief petty officers in the merchant marine with three-day growths of beard who would come up and wheeeeze on you. Sailors and guys with raspy voices. It was kind of a fun neighborhood, actually. Rather polyglot: Slavs, Italians, a total melting pot. I was the only Jew on the block, I think. It was terrific. I've never regretted it. I even worked as a fisherman for a while on a boat, and when I was in college I wrote maybe half a dozen short stories that were largely descriptions of my life on that boat. Even today, I don't think they're bad. Every writer has to use the world he lives in as source material, I think, though it shouldn't impose restrictions or limitations on what you write. You have to be able to get into the worlds, the fantasies of people outside yourself as well.

Besides writing out of experience, how much research goes into a script like Chinatown?

I did a lot of research—mostly reading to get a feeling for the ambience of the time, the way people spoke, what their inhibitions were. For example, today it's perfectly proper to talk about all sorts of intimate sexual things, but people are rather chary of talking about how much money they make—whereas in the 1930s I think the reverse would have been true. People wouldn't have minded talking about how much money, but boy, would they not have talked about sex. To get attitudinal differences like that, you have to read, and I suppose that's research. You have to find out what people would say or would not say in a social situation. And the basic premise of the scandal was researched, too. I read about the Owens Valley, and became interested in it. But I didn't base a single character in Chinatown on any person I read about in the Owens Valley episode. My characters fulfilled roles that in some cases were analogous to roles in the original scandal but were wholly made up. Mulwray was perhaps somewhat like Mulholland of the Owens Valley deal, but in Chinatown Mulwray was depicted as a very decent guy, whereas I think that Mulholland was a corrupt man who allowed himself to be used by Chandler and everybody else. He was ambitious. The Mulwray of the film was intended to be a tough but decent man who was trying to avoid a scandal that would have ruined the public ownership of his department, which he had fought for, while at the same time trying to keep the thing from taking place which eventually took place.

And yet you have a William Mulholland statement as a prefatory quote to the first and second drafts of your script.

Which I would use in the novel. Sure: "There it is, take it." That's what the attitude had always been out here about everything. L.A. has never been viewed as a city, but as a place where hustlers come. It's like a mine, and everyone's trying to hit the main vein and get it out, then leave the fucking place. It's never viewed as a city. Never has been. It's a place where you just Get Yours, then get out. It doesn't matter what happens to the land, the air or any of its natural beauty. That's the attitude. So I felt that the Mulholland quote was apropos not only of Mulholland, but of everyone who was here to make a fast buck, to make it big and fast.

I liked the Seabiscuit material in the early drafts. That shows research, too, I suppose.

Right. That was an interesting thing. Big argument over it. Remember the early draft of the barbershop scene?

Yes.

Remember when he gets mad? Somebody says "Boy, did Seabiscuit fold in the stretch the other day," and Gittes gets furious. He threatens to get in a fight over it. And later, when he goes to see Noah Cross, Cross offers him, by way of payment, a horse. The point (and I would have smoothed it out in the final draft if I'd continued to use it) was that I wanted to show a venal, corrupt man in Gittes—well, pettily venal and crude, rather than corrupt, really—crass, crude, self-serving, social-climbing—who admired the character of this tiny horse named Seabiscuit. At one point in an early draft he is asked why he thinks so much of the animal. I don't know how much you know about Seabiscuit, but it was a horse that came back from a complete breakdown, and won the following year. The animal didn't look like it could win anything, but really was one of the classiest horses that ever lived. A small horse with tremendous character. And Gittes' admiration of that character was meant to be an early tip-off that the guy was susceptible to class in one form or another. Of course, he would be susceptible to class in a woman, too. Seabiscuit was meant to be the transfer. But Roman said, "That's folklore," although he ended up using the Seabiscuit thing in the paper. What he insisted on using in the barbershop scene as a means of getting Gittes mad was a story in the newspaper and some guy calling him a headline seeker. Gittes is then called upon to justify his work—which he had to do with Evelyn anyway, when he went to her house after being threatened with a suit. I disliked the self-serving moment there in the barbershop. I wanted to suggest at that point that the guy had the capacity to admire something, just for the sake of its beauty or its character. In one way or another, it was thoroughbred. Which is a tip-off that he could be in real trouble with a woman he admired. I missed that. I felt it was a mistake to get rid of it. It made that moment kind of petty and dumb, whereas if the Seabiscuit idea had been developed, I think it would have been more insightful to the guy.

It's an angle on Gittes that is simply not fleshed out in the film at all.

That would have done it, really. Everything I was doing was driving toward Gittes falling in love with Evelyn. Everything that Roman was doing was blunting that.

An influence that I see in the early writing is Dashiell Hammett. In the first draft, Gittes at one point says, "In my case, being respectable would be bad for business." Hammett's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon says, "Don't be too sure I'm as crooked as I'm supposed to be. That kind of reputation makes it easier to deal with the enemy."

I remember the line very well from The Maltese Falcon. It may be an unconscious echo there.

Are there any parallels between Sam Spade and Brigid in Falcon and Jake Gittes and Evelyn in Chinatown?

The relationship in Chinatown is meant to be the opposite. In Falcon, Brigid is the villain. The woman is usually a femme fatale, and I was trying to suggest that that was the way I was going, but go against that convention and make her the only decent person in the story, which is what Evelyn is meant to be. She is acting from a pure, basic motive—mother love. That's generally conceded to be the most unselfish motive there is, and that was the basis for all her actions in the film. I was trying to make Evelyn the opposite of what someone like Brigid was.

Hammett's toughness of character was the main value in his work, I would say, at least for me. If you reread all of Hammett and Raymond Chandler, though, I don't think you can touch Chandler. Hammett ages badly in some of his short stories. Chandler doesn't. Both Hammett and Chandler, though, were so much better than anybody else. Chandler's prose about the city of Los Angeles at that time is really inspiring. I'm old enough to remember what the city was like then, and reading Chandler filled me with such a sense of loss that it was probably the main reason why I did the script. Just reading Chandler kept me going.

Your background readings, then, were used more often to acquire a mood for your own writing than to acquire outside material, it would seem.

No question. That's what it was really all about.

Who else did you read?

John Fante, who wrote one of the best books about L.A. ever—called Ask the Dusk. A terrible title, but a terrific book. I had read Nathanael West before. A very telling writer, but I'm not one of the unqualified admirers of The Day of the Locust. I don't think it's that good a book. West was brilliant, but Locust was not a great book in the manner that Miss Lonelyhearts was.

How did you decide on the names in the film?

I picked my names on the basis of sounds. I thought Mulwray had a romantic sound, redolent of some heroines of the past. It had a ring to it. Hollis Mulwray sounded good for the husband. Julian was the original name for Noah Cross, but there was a Julian Cross living, so it had to be changed. For which I'm sorry, because Julian Cross is now actually dead. If I do the novel, I'll return his name to Julian. Gittes' name was chosen because I wanted an antiromantic name for him—a name that sounded like a hustler. Jack Nicholson and I have a friend called Harry Gittes, and I've always loved his name. Just pronouncing the name is vaguely insulting: Gittes. Jake is a good name from the time period, and it is also the name I have always called Nicholson. Jack's full name is actually John J.—so I took that, too, and it became J. J. Gittes, which seemed like a reasonable name, a real name. I tend to name characters that way, on the basis of their sound.

How did you decide on the dirty joke that Gittes is telling when Evelyn comes into the room?

I was talking to a fellow who lived out here in L.A. in the thirties, when there was much antipathy toward the Chinese and when that joke had its origins out here. I asked him to tell me everything he could remember—what people called people, what they did when they went out, how they fucked, did they use rubbers, and so on. I went crazy with details like that. I talked to guys in their fifties and their sixties who were resilient, sharp. There was one writer in particular, and he told me this joke.

I thought, that's the perfect kind of joke for that time, because it was a time when people's prejudices were much more out front, and I wanted to make use of that throughout the movie. "Do you accept anyone of the Jewish persuasion?" Gittes asks at the old folks' home. "Sorry, we don't," he is told. Jake: "Well, that's good; neither does Dad."

I wanted to be consistent with that. I had some Mexican stuff that I wanted to use, too. People then were more ashamed of their origins. Prejudices were more open. They all wanted to be Americans, and were vaguely ashamed of being anything else. Society was more stratified at every level. People had principles. There were certain things they would do, and certain things they would not do. Fucking. Not fucking. Marriage. Adultery, Abortion. All these things were really major issues. Behavior was much more codified, and people were much more certain of the limits on their behavior—which is what Gittes learned. Gittes thinks he understands people's limitations, and then he comes up against a monster, Noah Cross, who will do everything. There is nothing he won't do. Man has no limits. That was the point of that confrontation scene, which Gittes didn't understand: Cross tells him that some people have no limitations. At a given place and a given time, people are capable of anything. Gittes' cynicism, by comparison, is petty, naive, and almost sweet.

When and why did you decide to call it Chinatown?

The origin of that was the vice cop who sold me one of my dogs and who used to work in Chinatown. "Down there," he said, "we never do anything, because the tongs are still working. We don't know all the dialects, and they say don't do anything, because you could make a mistake. You don't know who's a crook and who isn't a crook. You don't know who you're helping and who you're hurting. So in Chinatown they say just don't do a goddamn thing." Which I found an intriguing notion, and when I started working on the script I tried to elaborate on that idea—turning it into a metaphor. Chinatown is the place where Gittes fucked up, and Evelyn is a person where he fucked up. That was the idea. But ultimately, I think Chinatown—where if you're smart you do nothing—suggests the futility of good intentions.

Did you have trouble getting the name through?

Oh, yeah. That was why the last scene was set in Chinatown. These guys sat around like Harry Cohn saying, "How can you call a movie Chinatown when there's no Chinatown in it?" Roman led the way. One highly sensitive man whom I love went so far in this discussion—and things had gotten so out of hand—that he actually said, "Well, maybe if Gittes liked Chinese food." At which point I blew up. It was one of those story conferences with the best of men, I'm afraid, saying these crazy things.

How did the idea for slitting Gittes' nose come about?

I didn't want to use a lot of overt violence in the film, because I felt that the only real way you could be scared for your hero is emotionally—that is, if he got hung up on somebody you were afraid he shouldn't have gotten hung up on. Or if he committed some act that destroyed him as a character, because your identification with him as a detective is probably the greatest instant identification an audience can have with any hero. You follow the guy, the mystery, and try to unravel it the way you follow yourself around in a dream. You know you're not going to die—in the dream, anyway. So the only fear you can threaten the viewer with is something suggestive of a deeper horror. So I just sat back and asked, "What is the most horrible thing I can think of that would really scare you?" And I just came up with that. I thought of slitting his ears and everything else, but he's a nosy guy, and a knife up his nose just seemed to work.

I would think it takes a special actor to agree to a role requiring that he go around in half the film with a piece of gauze over his face.

That's Jack. A grand guy.

Which is easier, adapting the material of others or creating your own?

I think that almost always it's easier to adapt. Your writing inhibitions are lower. In a sense, you might even be writing a little bit better when you're adapting somebody else's material because vanity, fear and all the things that inhibit you as a writer don't come into play. You tend to be a little looser, taking shots from different parts of the court that you wouldn't normally attempt—and making them—just because you are looser. Sometimes with your own material you get constipated, vain and stupid. For that reason it's somewhat easier to adapt. But not always.