Oscar-Winning 'Chinatown' Screenwriter Robert Towne Dies at 89

LOS ANGELES, CA — Funeral services were pending Tuesday for Robert Towne, whose Oscar-winning script for the 1974 classic "Chinatown" is considered among the greatest movie screenplays in Hollywood history.

Towne died Monday at his home in Los Angeles at age 89, publicist Carri McClure said. A cause of death was not revealed.

Towne also received Academy Award nominations for "The Last Detail" (1973), "Shampoo" (1975) and "Greystoke" (1984). He was also highly regarded for his work as a script doctor on key scenes in "The Godfather" (1972) and "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967).

Oscar-winning actress-director Lee Grant posted on X -- formerly Twitter -- that she was "shaken" to hear of Towne's death.

"His life, like the characters he created, was incisive, iconoclastic, and entirely original," she posted. "He gave me the gift of `Shampoo.' He gave all of us the gift of his words and his films. There isn't another like him. There won't be again."

Towne launched his career in the 1960s, working as an actor and writer for B-movie director Roger Corman's science-fiction film "The Last Woman on Earth."

While much of his script doctoring work in the 1970s went uncredited, Towne received a rare honor in 1973 when director Francis Ford Coppola thanked him in his Oscar acceptance speech for scripting the pivotal Al Pacino-Marlon Brando garden scene in "The Godfather," a scene not found in Mario Puzo's novel.

Towne wrote for many of the top stars of the day, including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. He did uncredited work for "Chinatown" director Roman Polanski's "Frantic" (1988). For Cruise, he wrote "Days of Thunder" (1990), "The Firm" (1993), "Mission: Impossible" (1996) and "Mission: Impossible II" (2000).

Born Robert Burton Schwartz in Los Angeles on Nov. 23, 1934, Towne was 2 when his family moved to San Pedro, where his father, Lou, bought a women's clothing shop called the Towne Smart Shop. Eventually, Lou Schwartz began using the last name Towne.

In addition to his movie work, Towne wrote for television in the 1960s, including "The Man from U.N.C.L.E," "The Outer Limits" and "The Lloyd Bridges Show." Many years later, he was a consulting producer on the television drama "Mad Men."

Towne was described by Peter Biskind in his bestselling book on Hollywood in the 1970s, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," as being "unusually literate" in "a town full of dropouts, where few read books."

Biskind wrote that Towne "had a real feel for the fine points of plot, the nuances of dialogue, had the ability to explain and contextualize film in the body of Western drama and literature."

City News Service