Robert Towne
Biography
Robert Towne (born Robert Bertram Schwartz; November 23, 1934 - July 1, 2024) was an American screenwriter, producer, director and actor. He was part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmaking. He is best known for his Academy Award-winning original screenplay for Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), which is widely considered one of the greatest screenplays ever written. He later said it was inspired by a chapter in Carey McWilliams's Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article on Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. Towne also wrote the sequel, The Two Jakes (1990); the Hal Ashby comedy-dramas The Last Detail (1973) and Shampoo (1975); and the first two Mission: Impossible films. Towne directed the sports dramas Personal Best (1982) and Without Limits (1998), the crime thriller Tequila Sunrise (1988), and the romantic crime drama Ask the Dust (2006). Description above from the Wikipedia article Robert Towne, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Also Known As
Movie Appearances
Creature from the Haunted Sea
as Sparks Moran / Agent XK150 / Narrator
1961
Last Woman on Earth
as Martin Joyce
1960
Drive, He Said
as Richard
1971
Revolution! The Making of 'Bonnie and Clyde'
as Self
2008
Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That
as Self
2005
Shampoo
as Party Guest (uncredited)
1975
Suspect Zero
as Professor Dates (uncredited)
2004
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
as Self
2019
The Pick-up Artist
as Stan
1987
Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature
as Self - Screenwriter, 'Chinatown'
1997
The Zodiac Killer
as Man in Bar #3
1971
Billy Wilder: The Human Comedy
as Self
1998
A Sad Flower in the Sand
as Self
2001
Salinger
as Self - Screenwriter
2013
Rescued from the Closet
as Self
2001
You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story
as Self
2008
A Decade Under the Influence
as Self
2003
Reel Radicals: The Sixties Revolution in Film
as Self (uncredited)
2002
Robert Towne
TBA
Halloween Monster Bash
as Sparks Moran (archive footage)
1991
