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When director/screenwriter Robert Towne talks about the old days of the New Hollywood, each anecdote carries the weight of revelation. That's because New Hollywood — the period coinciding with the counterculture, Vietnam War protest and the Watergate scandal, in which studios were hungry for work from young risk-taking filmmakers — has increasingly come to be regarded as the last golden era of American cinema.
As the writer of Chinatown, The Last Detail and Shampoo, Towne was in the thick of it. Chinatown, in particular, a dark thriller involving Los Angeles' historic quest to find water, is often mentioned as New Hollywood's finest film.
And Towne's still active. Ask the Dust, a film he's been trying to direct since the heyday of New Hollywood, is finally coming to fruition. He also adapted its screenplay from John Fante's 1939 novel about Los Angeles that has come to be considered a classic.
In conversation, Towne offers fascinating tidbits about the casting of producer Warren Beatty's 1967 groundbreaker, Bonnie and Clyde, which Towne was involved with as a script doctor. (He helped decide to make Clyde sexually impotent and thus eliminate the original screenplay's ménage-a-trois between Bonnie, Clyde and their sidekick C.W. Moss.)
Towne reveals that before casting Faye Dunaway in her star-making role as Bonnie, Beatty first considered Tuesday Weld, Natalie Wood and Jane Fonda.
"And as far as that goes, when he first started with it he was considering Bob Dylan for Clyde before he did it himself," Towne says.
Now 71, Towne has become New Hollywood's Yoda. Sitting in a Los Angeles hotel room, his voice soft from a morning of interviews, he offers this writer a soft drink before sharing his experiences. He has a moderately scraggly white beard and long, gray-and-white hair falling down around his neck. The cuffs of his blue jeans are frayed; the sleeves of his black shirt are rolled up, like a writer ready for work.
Sitting down, he recalls his experience with Marlon Brando on The Godfather. As a script doctor, Towne wrote the famous "I never wanted this for you" speech between Brando's Don Vito Corleone and his son, Al Pacino's Michael. (It was filled with the father's regret about Michael becoming part of the family's criminal ways.)
"There was no scene between father and son, and there was a deep-seated need for the two protagonists in the story to face each other with the consequences of what had happened," Towne explains about his contribution. "Now he was able to express to his son that his whole life had been a struggle to prevent this very thing from happening."
Brando was so impressed with it that he asked Towne to be on the set during the shooting.
"To the extent of wanting me there and wanting to know everything about the scene, I think he realized it was important," Towne explains.
Another important moment in Towne's life came in 1971, when he was considering ideas for what eventually would become his screenplay for 1974's Chinatown. He was visiting a television-writer friend, Richard Collins, with whom he had once worked on the series Breaking Point.
"I was talking over what was going to become Chinatown and said, 'I'd love to read something of the period,' " Towne recalled earlier, when this writer asked him about discovering Ask the Dust during a small-group discussion. "And I looked up on his shelf and there was a book with a beige cover and he said, 'That was written in the period.' I asked, 'Is it any good?' and he said, 'It's OK.' And I plucked it off the shelf and read it. It was just that serendipitous."
That book was Ask the Dust, an out-of-print autobiographical novel about a young writer in Depression-era Los Angeles. Fante, an Italian-American immigrant from Colorado, created as an alter ego Arturo Bandini, a desperately proud and argumentative young man struggling to survive and having a doomed affair with a Mexican-American waitress. (Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek play the two in the film.)
In the hotel room alone with this writer, Towne explains that what moved him most about the book was its portrait of Los Angeles as a freakish urban anomaly. He looks out his window and points below to the ground cover of green trees.
"Imagine 60 years ago, that wasn't really there," he says. "All our flora, like our fauna, has been imported and it's grown. But at that time, there was much sparser foliage so you were reminded constantly that you were on the edge of desert. There was dust, whether blown in or coming up from ground."
Fante's point, Towne believes, was a variation of the passage from Genesis: "In the sweat of your face/you shall eat bread/till you return to the ground/for out of it you were taken/you are dust/and to dust you shall return."
And as a Los Angeles native with a sense of doom, Towne strongly agrees with that assessment of the city's history. "There's a speech in Chinatown reflective of that," he says. "Los Angeles is on the edge of the desert, (and) without water the desert will rise up and claim us as if we never existed. That was a view I really shared."
Towne met Fante at the time, and they developed an ongoing friendship until the writer died in 1983. He encouraged Fante to keep writing and told him he planned one day to bring Ask the Dust to the screen. He has kept in touch with Fante's widow on this project.
Now, after years of struggle to arrange financing, Towne — and, posthumously, Fante — has made the film he has long desired. ©
