Robert Towne

Robert Towne died a week ago, Tuesday.  He was 89, which surprised me, because I’ve always thought of him as being more or less my age.  Probably because he managed to capture so effectively a kind of consciousness that seems particularly ours, this generation, a neo-noir sensibility, the shadow of Viet Nam and the Cold War.

Chinatown is of course his most famous script, and it led the death notices.  Bill Goldman, another celebrated screenwriter we lost not so long ago, remarked that his obituary would lead with Butch Cassidy, although he was credited on two dozen pictures, and acknowledged to have worked on thirty others.  Bob Towne is credited on nineteen features, and uncredited on at least as many, at last count.  He took money under the table as a script doctor on any number of projects.

The best-known movies he worked on, without a formal writing credit, are Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather.  Francis Ford Coppola, accepting his screenplay Oscar for Godfather, went out of his way to share Towne’s contribution.  Towne did unspecified work on The Missouri Breaks, Marathon Man, Heaven Can Wait, Reds, and 8 Million Ways to Die.  He wrote Greystoke, wanting to direct it himself, but had to surrender the script because of money problems.  He was grievously unhappy with the finished picture, and took his name off the screenplay.  When it was nominated for the Oscar, he used his dog’s name. 

He directed four of his own scripts.  The first, Personal Best, released in 1982, is a jock picture, about track and field, and I myself have a real soft spot for it.  Siskel and Ebert put it on their Top Ten list, but it tanked at the box office.  Was it the lesbian angle?  Seems hard to credit; it’s all very innocent and sort of summer camp –there’s a fair amount of locker-room nudity, but Porky’s it ain’t.

Towne’s second movie as a writer-director is Tequila Sunrise.  Terrific title, for openers, the Eagles song.  Next, there was star power, Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kurt Russell.  Third and last, though, it’s easily the most generic of Robert Towne scripts: Cagney and Pat O’Brien as kids together, who grow up on opposite sides of the law.  And the studio imposed a happy ending; as originally written, Mel’s character was a moth to the flame, he didn’t live to see the credits.

It’s hard, with all due respect, to see Without Limits and Ask the Dust, the two later pictures Towne wrote and directed, as other than vanity projects.  Now, these days there’s really no such thing.  You pitch a movie, and convince the suits you can give them a return on their investment.  And apparently a story about the runner Steve Prefontaine was convincing enough (Without Limits).  It’s sort of curious that it bookends Personal Best.  I don’t know that you can say the same of Ask the Dust, an honest effort, but it simply doesn’t take wing.  Salma Hayek glows in the dark; Colin Farrell is in the wrong movie.    

You can only wonder if it’s just the breaks, somehow.  I look at Walter Hill, and John Milius, for example, both a little younger than Towne, but both guys who toiled in the trenches.  (Towne’s first two feature credits are for Roger Corman grindhouse pictures; Milius started out at American International, a longtime poverty row independent.)  Hill got lucky, and was picked up by the majors, his second produced screenplay was The Getaway.  He moved into the director’s chair with his sixth script.  

He’s kept writing and directing and producing.  Milius a slightly different kettle of fish.  A lot of scripts and stories, not anywhere near as many features as a director – seven only, so far.  But like Towne, he’s also worked uncredited.  Get this.  Dirty Harry, Jaws, the second Indiana Jones, Red October, Saving Private Ryan.  I’m thinking they kept pursuing commercially successful stuff, and maybe Bob Towne did too, but somehow less energetically.  That can’t be right.

Robert Towne’s last screen credit is Mission: Impossible 2, in 2000.  There are half a dozen projects since, for Mel Gibson, for David Fincher, but they didn’t get off the ground, for whatever reason.  It seems weird to me.  Did people stop knocking, or did he simply decide not to answer the door?  Dunno. 

Guy wrote some God damn good movies, though.  Which isn’t a bad epitaph, at all.

“I want to write a movie for Jack.”
“What kind of movie?”
“A detective movie.”
“What’s it about?”
“Los Angeles. In the ‘30’s. Before the war.”
“What happens?”
“I don’t know.  That’s all I know.”

(Quoted by Ty Burr, The Washington POST, 07-03-2024)

I am Arturo Bandini

By Nail Babayev (Own work)
[CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Towne, screenwriter of Chinatown and writer-director of Ask the Dust, has called Ask the Dust by John Fante the greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles.

“Fante was my God,” Charles Bukowski wrote in the introduction to a later edition of Ask the Dust.

***

This post is the tale of a young punk and John Fante, author of Ask the Dust, Dreams from Bunker Hill, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, and more. They never met, they never talked, they never corresponded (though sort of), but one was greatly influenced by the other.

Some time before Fante died, the young punk discovered his work, especially his seminal work, Ask the Dust, about Arturo Bandini (Fante’s alter ego), a young writer struggling in Los Angeles in the 1930s. The young punk devoured everything of Fante’s he could get his hands on, and at that time not everything was in print as Fante hadn’t been rediscovered yet. The punk thought that Fante was speaking to him, writing about him. The punk related to Bandini’s struggles and aspirations.

Ask the Dust is Bandini’s story. Bandini was born to be a writer and he is more than excited when he sells his first short story. Fante, uh, Bandini, was a struggling writer living in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles in the 1930s (see my piece on Sleuth Sayers from 12/2016 –  http://www.sleuthsayers.org/2016/12/remembering-los-angeles-bunker-hill-in.html  for more on Bunker Hill). Even then the once-impressive neighborhood, filled with grand Victorian mansions, was rundown. Many of the mansions had been turned into cheap rooming houses. Both Fante and Bandini lived in cheap hotels there, Fante in the Alta Vista, renamed the Alta Loma for Bandini:

The hotel was called the Alta Loma. It was built on a hillside in reverse, there on the crest of Bunker Hill, built against the decline of the hill, so that the main floor was on the level with the street but the tenth floor was downstairs ten levels. If you had room 862, you got in the elevator and went down eight floors, and if you wanted to go down in the truck room, you didn't go down but up to the attic, one floor above the main floor. – John Fante, Ask the Dust

Bandini (Fante) traveled the streets of downtown LA, from Pershing Square to the Grand Central Market, where he liked to look for girls. Bandini was elated when he finally sold his first short story, as was the punk when he sold his first paid piece – an article on John Lennon.

Screenwriter Towne decided he wanted to make a movie of the book. His dream finally came true in 2006, with mixed results. But one thing that the movie got right was the sets, at least in tone. Built on two “football” fields in South Africa, they recreated the look and feel of the hot and dusty Bunker Hill of the 1930s. Maybe every little thing isn’t in the exact place it should be, maybe every little detail isn’t exactly right, but the overall ambience and milieu is there and you feel like you’re there among the hoi polloi and the people just hustling to get by. And you feel that you could run into Bandini – or Fante – in a diner or the Columbia Buffet on Spring Street.

***

Fante and Bandini moved to Los Angeles from Colorado. The punk was born in LA. Fante lived in Bunker Hill, once the city’s most affluent neighborhood, but by the time Fante lived there it was what Raymond Chandler called “shabby town”. The punk never lived in Bunker Hill, but would see it often as a child on trips to downtown LA. And later as a young adult when the old Victorians were being torn down or put on dollies to move away, he and a friend explored several of the Victorians that hadn’t yet been moved. He still has the finial from a newel stairway post that he liberated from one of those old houses...and that he recently pulled out of storage.

And those images of the Bunker Hill that used to be linger still in the movie playing before the not-so-young-anymore punk’s eyes. A romantic vision of shabby gentility. Or maybe not so much gentility as seen in several noir movies that were filmed there in the 1940s and 50s, including Criss Cross, Kiss Me, Deadly and Cry Danger.

***

The young punk identified with Bandini and Fante. And even young punks who think they’re cool have idols and one of this young punk’s idols was John Fante. To that end, he decided to reach out to Fante.

As a young man, Fante had begun a correspondence with H.L. Mencken, journalist, scholar and co-founder of a magazine most of the readers here will know, Black Mask. The punk hoped to have a similar relationship with Fante. He sent Fante a long, 3 page single spaced typed letter. It was a fan letter, but also more than simply a fan letter, and the young punk hoped to begin a correspondence with Fante like Fante had had with Mencken.

The young punk had done a lot of things like that, writing to a lot of well-known people. Got letters back from some, phone calls from others (Cary Grant), and was even invited to Gene Kelly’s house. And from others nothing. As time went on, the punk started to lose hope that he would ever hear from Fante.

Even though Fante eventually had success in Hollywood, writing movies like Full of Life, Walk on the Wild Side and others, he never seemed like a happy man. He thought of himself as a well-paid Hollywood whore. And the punk knew that Fante was bitter and angry and in failing health. He never did hear back. He figured Fante was too sick or too angry or both.

On April 8, 2010, John Fante’s 101st birthday, Fante Square was dedicated in downtown L.A., near Bunker Hill. The area may have changed a lot, but the spirit of Fante and the old Bunker Hill is still there.

By eigene Aufnahme (Own work (Original text: eigene Aufnahme)) [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en), CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Fante died on May 8, 1983 and the not-so-young punk liked to think that maybe Fante read his letter or a family member read it to him before he died. And the punk kept writing, hoping to someday be able to say “I am Arturo Bandini.”

Books by Fante:

The Road to Los Angeles (1936, publ.1985)
Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938)
Ask the Dust (1939)
Dago Red (1940), short story collection
Full of Life (1952)
Brave Burro (book, with Rudolph Borchert) (1970)
The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977)
Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982)
The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories (posthumously, 1985), Dago Red and short story collection
1933 Was a Bad Year (post., 1985; incomplete)
West of Rome (post., 1986), two novellas

Fante/Mencken: John Fante & H. L. Mencken: A Personal Correspondence, 1932–1950 (post., 1989), letters
John Fante: Selected Letters, 1932–1981 (post., 1991), letters
The Big Hunger: Stories, 1932–1959 (post., 2000), short story collection

###

And now for the usual BSP:

Coming on January 30th from Down & Out Books:

Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea 
A collection of 15 Private Eye stories from some of the best mystery and noir writers from across the country. Available for pre-order now on Amazon:

And I have a couple of appearances in January.

Santa Clarita: The Old Town Newhall Library
Saturday, January 14, 2017, from 10:00 AM-3:00 PM.
24500 Main St, Santa Clarita, CA  91321

Cerritos Library, where I’ll be moderating a panel:
Saturday, January 28 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
18025 Bloomfield Avenue, Cerritos, CA  90703

www.PaulDMarks.com

Click here to: Subscribe to my Newsletter