Robert Towne, CHINATOWN and the Bewitchments of 'Tone'

Robert Towne, CHINATOWN and the Bewitchments of 'Tone' Evan Wm. Cameron Professor Emeritus Senior Scholar in Screenwriting Graduate Programmes, Film & Video and Philosophy York University [Presented in class on 02 March 2004; augmented in 2006 to encompass the opening remarks on the 2005 poll of the Writer's Guild of America on the '100 Best Screenplays'. Revision presented on 27 May 2009 to the 2009 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Aesthetics, 2009 Annual Meeting of the Congress of the Social Sciences & Humanities, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario.] Robert Towne, CHINATOWN and the Bewitchments of 'Tone' In summer of 2005 the Writers' Guild of America invited its members to name the ten movies they deemed to have been made from the best screenplays ever written. The Guild then published in rank order the one-hundred-and-one titles most often cited, pretending to have distinguished thereby the '101 Greatest Screenplays' of all time.1 As a record of merit, the listing was a joke. Few of the contributors had read the screenplays they were supposedly distinguishing from one another, save for their own, or had screened even a representative sampling of the movies made from them, much less recently. None had been prohibited from citing movies, or movies of comparable kind, in which they or their agents, producers, friends, colleagues, spouses, ancestors, descendants or 'significant others' had a past, present or wishful financial interest. No attempt had been made by the Guild to ensure that any of those contributing had bothered to ponder any of the thousands of screenplays written and realised elsewhere than in America that would have had to have been gauged were any listing of 'greatest screenplays' to be representative (though five managed nevertheless to find a place far down the list). As a snapshot of transient repute, however, the survey had the historical virtues of a half-staged family portrait of striking consequence. The three movies commended most highly by the participating members of the Writers' Guild of America at the conclusion of the first century of movie-making were in order CASABLANCA, THE GODFATHER and CHINATOWN. Thus, Robert Towne, writer-on-set during the making of THE GODFATHER and sole screenwriter of credit for CHINATOWN, had been in large part responsible for the reputation among his peers of two of the three top-ranked screenplays 'of all time'.2 1 See the website of the Writers Guild of America [west, but east will do as well], http://www.wga.org/writers-room/101-best-lists/101-greatest-screenplays 2 Though Towne received no screen credit for his contributions to the design of THE GODFATHER, he had, for example, written the memorable last conversation between the once- and-future 'godfathers’, enacted by Brando and Pacino, a scene nowhere to be found in the novel or the original screenplay; and, as screenwriter of credit for CHINATOWN, he had won both the American and British academy awards for 'best original screenplay' (the only 'Oscar' given the movie in America despite eleven nominations) to accompany the comparable Writers Guild of America, Edgar Allen Poe and Golden Globe awards he had earned for the same movie. Robert Towne, CHINATOWN and the Bewitchments of 'Tone' Page 2 of 17 The conclusion confirmed a chorus that the screenwriting choir of Hollywood had long before learned to sing, namely that Robert Towne, arguably the most accomplished screenwriter of the last third of the twentieth-century, had earned a place among the best screenwriters that Hollywood had ever known. Remarkably, however, one of its members refused resolutely to sing along with the others – Robert Towne himself. In 1995, for example, twenty years after the release of CHINATOWN, Towne was requested by the author of a volume of interviews with contemporary screenwriters to contribute a foreword to the book. He did so, beginning the piece with the sentence, 'Borden Chase was a Hollywood screenwriter', compelling readers to attend to a writer, mentor and friend who had died three years before the making of CHINATOWN, whose name would remain unmentioned by any of the other writers interviewed in the book and whose best works would find no place a decade later within the Guild's listing of '101 Best Screenplays'. With evident admiration, Towne gave an example of Chase's "… wonderful way with scenes involving confrontations between men" (Montgomery Cliff and John Wayne in Red River; Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper in Vera Cruz; Jimmy Stewart and Dan Duryea in Winchester 73). There's an especially memorable Mexican standoff between John Ireland as Cherry Valance and Montgomery Cliff as Matthew Garth, two young bucks who it appears will inevitably shoot it out, in Red River. The scene is not one of tough-guy, in-your-face posturing. On the contrary, it is playful and polite. They engage in target practice on the open plains, taking a break from the business of driving John Wayne's cattle herd to market. Ireland shoots and knocks the shit out of some bottles and rocks. Cliff admires the display. Then Cliff shoots the shit out of some bottles and rocks on the ground and in the air. Ireland is hugely admiring of the display. "Now I know who you'd be," he says with a wide grin, fairly licking his lips at the prospect of facing a gunfighter of Cliff's skills and reputation, "you'd be Matthew Garth! You're as good as they say you are." Cliff returns compliment for compliment. They exchange weapons to see what the other fellow's got for equipment in a shamelessly Freudian I'll-show-you-my- gun-if-you'll-show-me-your-gun display. They admire the hell out of each other's long barrels, stroking them, purring over them, before they return them, Ireland wistfully adding, "There's nothing like a good gun or a Swiss watch – or a woman from anywhere. Ever had a ... good Swiss watch?" …3 3 From Towne's 'Foreword' to Joel Engel's Screenwriters on Screenwriting (New York, New York: MJF Books, 1995), pages ix-xii, page xi. Robert Towne, CHINATOWN and the Bewitchments of 'Tone' Page 3 of 17 The paragraph was calculated to entice readers to ponder in historical context the lesson with which the foreword would conclude, for after recalling with characteristic grace an aspect of the Christmas dinners that he used to share with Chase and his family, Towne ends with a sobering judgment of the modest heights of his own achievements from which he never wavered. There was one particular part of the Chases' Christmas dinner that sometimes involved a bit of writing. Everyone at the table was obliged to come up with a toast. They were sometimes inventive, amusing, elaborate, but there was always one that brought the table to a respectful silence – "To absent friends." I'm old enough to have glimpsed those writers and their times but too young to have lived and worked with them. I have no regrets about having missed that semifabled epoch when men were men, women women, and writers rogues, but I increasingly feel – I suspect we all do – that the history of life on earth is not one of evolution so much as devolution. With each succeeding generation we get weaker and smaller; the Titans are always in the past. They're the original, we're the Xeroxed copies, each generation growing progressively more blurred and degenerate. This is a romantic fancy of course, but having succumbed to it I should add that the writers interviewed here have talents that would serve them well in any age. Still, I can't help but look back from the vantage of relative respectability and say, "To absent friends."4 In Towne's estimation, the core of the work that he had done had failed to measure-up to the standard of excellence set by the best of the screenwriters who had worked before him. 4 Ibid., pages xi and xii. Robert Towne, CHINATOWN and the Bewitchments of 'Tone' Page 4 of 17 Towne's contemporaries within Hollywood, conditioned to regard humility as a mortal disease, have tended to dismiss his assessment as slyly self-serving – a curmudgeonly act of inverse meaning. I, on the contrary, believe that he meant what he said, and that what he said accords with the evidence. Towne sensed, I think, that the movies whose screenplays he has written himself (CHINATOWN, for example, or THE TWO JAKES or TEQUILA SUNRISE), unlike those that he helped to rewrite in the course of the making of films from derivations of literary sources or screenplays structured by others (BONNIE AND CLYDE, for example, or THE LAST DETAIL, THE GODFATHER or MARATHON MAN), have failed to conclude with the power of the movies made from screenplays by screenwriters, often of far lesser renown, working long before and alongside others within the confines of the fabled 'film factories' of Hollywood's studio era. As a tribute to Towne's uncommon sense of the nature of the weakness of his own work, and the courage that he has exhibited in reminding others of it, I wish to show how CHINATOWN exemplifies the problem of 'endings' that Towne never learned how to solve and to draw from it consequences that will clarify the scope and nature of the curious art of screenwriting. How often I have had to remind even the best of my students that, if the ending of a movie is weak, one will never by tinkering with it remove the flaw, for the causes lie embedded within misconceived scenes preceding it having roots often difficult to detect, much less correct.

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