Your Guide to the Stars

Every ink-stained wretch who humps it for a nickel in L.A. County is haunted by the shaggy mane and dour glower of Robert Towne. His shamanic countenance, once likened by Pauline Kael to that of Albrecht Durer, stares down from every screenwriter magazine on the racks. Film-school fogeys who wouldn't have given the man a gentleman's C now teach Shampoo and Chinatown as if they emerged from a burning bush. There are screenwriting auteurs held in high regard--Paul Schrader, Charlie Kaufman--and then there is the Man.

When Towne came to mumble a few words at the Los Angeles Film Festival last summer, crowd control at the Directors' Guild Theatre suggested the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Clearly, in the view of executives, filmmakers, and purchasers of "Write a Spec Hit in 20 Days!," Towne has the Stuff--the magic juju of storytelling, the ineffable Homeric goods. But what is the secret formula? And why does Towne have sole custody of it?

Towne, appearing at Walker Art Center on February 22, will screen and discuss his new adaptation of John Fante's novel Ask the Dust (along with a half-hour clips reel of greatest hits). He has the powerful producing muscle of Tom Cruise behind him, and has managed the jump from writer-for-hire to writer-director with relative ease--and ongoing support, too, despite the lack of substantial hits. The basis for this septuagenarian's juice in a trend-based community is his trilogy of masterly screenplays: The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Shampoo (1975). Whether the true authorship of these works belongs to Towne or to collaborations between Towne and Roman Polanski, Hal Ashby, and others, is best left to writers of '70s kiss-and-tell gossip books. But what's unassailable is that Towne better understands his masters in the industry--the superstars who make him bankable--than any other contemporary screenwriter.

A friend of Jack Nicholson from their Roger Corman days (when Towne penned the still-sharp Poe cheapie Tomb of Ligeia), Towne had a brilliant insight on the set of Nicholson's 1971 directorial debut Drive, He Said. (In it, Towne perfectly essays the role of an ineffectual small-town academic--the most self-lacerating performance from a moviemaker in recent times.) Towne imagined Nicholson as Bad-Ass Buddusky, the Navy lifer who is the hero of what would become The Last Detail. Only Towne would have the insight and chutzpah to write a role for Nicholson where the character is literally named Bad-Ass. (This guaranteed that Jack would sign off on it after reading Page 10.)

In this three-handed chamber piece, Bad-Ass is given the sorry detail of accompanying a black sailor (Otis Young) on a journey to the brig, where teenage Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) is to be locked up for eight years. The kid's offense: stealing 40 bucks from the base's polio charity box--a no-no in the eyes of the chief's philanthropic wife. As Meadows moves closer to lock-up, Nicholson gets to perform the function that would make him the icon of his generation: teaching the squares around him how to loosen up and have a reckless good time. Just as he often does when not playing an introvert, Nicholson gets through much of the movie on bullshit "charisma": busyness, hyperbole, and funny faces. Towne tweaked Nicholson's alienated Five Easy Pieces persona into a mustachioed, bare-chested rowdy who had audiences cheering when he rebutted a redneck bartender's threat with the brandishing of a handgun and a catchphrase: "I am the motherfuckin' Shore Patrol!" At last, Nicholson's Easy Pieces chicken-salad meltdown turned into a touchdown.

Towne himself became the star when he conceived Chinatown as a neo-noir with Nicholson as a scuzzier Philip Marlowe. The screenwriter's calculation of where his superstar friend's desires might lie was impeccable: Having been the middle-finger rakehell in various low-budget pictures, Jack now deserved the Cadillac treatment. Chinatown burnishes Vietnam- and Watergate-era resentment in an ironic gloss on Otto Preminger's poisonous noirs, with a smoky sax score and high varnish from Roman Polanski. Here, Towne perfected the template that would become a career-long thematic: He turns the American existentialism of Ernest Hemingway into the drama of a largely corrupted figure rebelling against, then sighing and giving in to, a system of total corruption. You don't have to squint too hard to see the source of this metaphor.