Robert Towne
Realistic film writer comes to town
By Emerson Batdorff Robert Towne, who may have the best ear in the moviewriting business for his characters all sound like real people, not like people in a movie, came to Cleveland yesterday to promote "Sham poo," which he wrote with Warren Beatty, who stars in it.
Towne is a slim man, casually dressed in blue jeans, a blue shirt and a' blue-green sleeveless sweater. His approach to life is not as intense in person as it is in his films.
On the other hand, he is by no means as casual as his appearance.
movies often appears worse than it is. "I set a certain amount of goodness alongside it to show it up,” he said.
His favorite drama is "King Lear." "I'm fascinated by all the goodness in the play. You believe in the evil in Lear because you see it against all the goodness."
"Chinatown," for which Towne has been nominatfor an Academy ed Award, ends all grubby, with evil winning and the heroine (a woman of goodness as well as badness) dead.
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"The Last Detail" for which Towne got Academy Award nomination but not the award, pursued false joy for a while but ended on a note
He usually finds what, he calls "the tunnel at the end of the light." The badness in his of gritty reality.
"Shampoo,” which opens tomorrow, is similarly realistic.
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This brought up a question for Towne: After writing those three pictures, does he believe in the future of the race?
He seemed a little surprised.
"You think they're a little bleak?” he asked. "There are two ways to approach a story. One is the way you hope the situation will turn out, the other is to face things the way they are.
"Facing things the way they are is the best way to change things."
On the other hand, "Chinatown" was changed by the director, Roman Polanski, to be grimmer.
"I had it end with the Faye Dunaway character killing her father (for the sake of her daughter) and she survived to live with her guilt.
"But Roman is much more relentless than I am. He wanted her to be killed and her father to live so that's the way it was.”
In "Shampoo" he worked closely with Warren Beatty while the picture was being made, tuning up the roles to fit the people who were playing them..
"It's always of value to tinker a bit,” he said. “I noted that Jack Warden was always singing on the set so I figured it would be appropriate for him to sing a bit as he walks up to find the hairdresser's motorcycle in his driveway.
"First we wanted him. to sing 'Strangers in the Night,' but the rights to that cost too much. So we had him sing 'Born Free,' to which Columbia already had the rights.”
The context here is that
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the hairdresser is in the house seducing the wife.
The husband has been guilty of stereotyped thinking and is inclined to consider the hairdresser homosexual, adding an air of pungency to "Strangers in the Night." Or even to "Born Free.”
After a series of downbeat movies, Towne now is embarking on what may or may not be a change: Tarzan. He plans to show that scar over Tarzan's eye, which was inclined to blaze out when the ape man got angry. It never has been observed in any Tarzan movie before.
"In it there will be some social consciousness," he said.
Not that he's against entertainment movies that have no social comment. He just doesn't write any like that.