The Writer Speaks: Robert Towne Part 1

by the time I was 2 the depression had hit a pretty severely and my father's business went bust here in Los Angeles and we moved to San Pedro which is where I grew up and and which in an odd way I still consider home it's just I think you're so influenced by the first 10 to 15 years of your life that I mean even today when I Drive down there I think I'm going home parts of it have changed very little but I grew up in in the city in which it was unusual for the Friends of my parents to have English as their first language and I were it was a very polyglot community I mean that's something of an exaggeration but there were the Slavs as they were referred to then I think they were mostly Serbs the big Donna Vicious and the true tanika's and the Missa touches and a very hearty and and kind of outgoing people many of whom were fishermen and that's how I ended up working on a tuna boat i i knew the big donna who were just starting a little company then called Starkist tuna my folks my folks did and my father was I think he came here from Minnesota because he as he told me he woke up one morning at the age of 15 and went to wash his hands in the and the not the sink but a pan or a bowl or whatever he had in his bedroom and it was frozen and he said that's it I'm getting out of Minnesota and he came to California became a Weatherby Keyser shoe salesman for well not and did when he didn't met my mother who had been born in Santana his name I gather had originally been armored but they got German passports coming from Romania and they and the name was Schwartz and then when he went broke and moved to San Pedro and 6th Street across from the Warner Brothers Theatre there which dictated my future profession the name of the dress shop that he took over was called the town smart shop as in Yee Tony smart shop so he began being called mr. town and I think he liked that and by the time my brother was born his legally changed his name and I have never regretted that my wife has said to me he never would have married me if my name is Ben Schwartz it was an interesting time did you have more than the one sibling just my brother was also a writer I think his most known for writing the natural but it was a fascinating time growing up in San Pedro during the war one of my happiest and one of the most eccentric memories I have is of Italian prisoners of war who in San Pedro had it better than anybody else because they were supposedly imprisoned at fort MacArthur there but in fact were always given the run of the city they were in impeccable uniform so the little powa and they had cameras and they were dating all the girls in Pedro and having a wonderful time so the Japanese had it rough when they went to internment camps but the Italian POWs had a great time since you and your brother both became writers do you think that there was that there was something special about your early days and either in your home life or the stories that you remember like what you're saying now that kind of propelled that in some way how do two boys from San Pedro from the family that you're describing decide to be writers or become writers do you think I don't know how we both did I know that I was interested in writing from a very early age you know my mother read to me a lot when I was young and I think she used to write poetry and it seemed to be some suggestion of writing in the family apparently I had a great-grandfather who was a journalist I never met him regrettably but beyond that you know I guess I have a Warner Brothers theatre I don't care loving movies growing up there I remember the first thing that had any impact on anybody was I was in a creative writing class at Pomona College and I wrote a sort of a short story about my experiences as a tuna fisherman and that got everybody's attention just the experience of it actually what I thought I was going to be was a journalist I was interested in you know at that time and I've always thought that you know a critical component of screenwriting is I mean screenwriting is you know something that is very well served by a knowledge of the world and its textures and journalists do nothing so much as as as in reporting stories they report on all aspects of life and society and and and work and and and and you think about the numbers of screenwriters from Hecht and MacArthur Nick Pileggi journalists have you know historically done very well as write isn't and I think that I've always thought that the two of the best people to have who were never screen writers who should have been were mark mark twain and rudyard kipling both of whom were journalists and whose ear for telling dialogue and refrain and his eye for telling detail is it's just perfect for for screenwriters we wanted to ask you a couple more questions about the fishing boat experience how old were you when you did that was it like post high school or I would I we had a lot we had moved out of San Pedro but my ties were very close and Starkist it was beginning to be pretty well known it wasn't what it became but it was prior to the Charlie the tuna days it was the days of live bait fishing which you were pulling in the fish by hand which is very dramatic I don't know if you've ever seen pictures of it just pictures I mean have you ever seen film of it happening well as it was interesting because um it was difficult and it was dangerous work because the boats were at a maximum 150 to 200 feet under I think our boat was one of the biggest in the fleet it was 150 feet it was 250 tons now they're two three four thousand ton boats you know and with nets but what would happen is that there was about a dozen fishermen and they would off the stern of the boat they would lower steel racks into the sea and he would get out and he would stand on the in those racks with your knee braced up against a railing and he would slap the water with a pole with a line that wasn't much more than three or four feet long because the fish would strike at the lure and he would pull the fish back it would hit the both head and spit out the hook and then so it was a continuous motion and the fish would range in size anywhere from 24 no but from 40 to three four hundred pounds and the larger the fish then you would have to change poles from what they would be called one pole fish or two cold fish with which would be anywhere from forty to eighty pounds two men on one line you could have three men on one line sometimes as many as four to pull in a three or four hundred pound fish it was that it was dangerous work and and because you know the boats had always attracted a lot of sharks you were about we were about three or four hundred miles out to sea but the trips that I was that I was on uh how long would you be out sixty seventy days it was and got pretty well fried but it was I wasn't it was a fascinating experience I mean the the fishermen were there was a sweet there was a Portuguese live all kinds of guys people generally have to get along pretty well on a boat like that although there are always times when people there was one guy I didn't get along with in particular but one of the interesting things that happened was we got caught in a Tabasco which is a hurricane and I've used the incident in a script that hasn't been done but that's something that you can't really appreciate until you've been through it the waves are 30 or 40 feet high and when the when the boat drops it's like you're in an elevator and somebody's cut the cables you drop 30 feet and you hit the trough and the wave and the thing that's frightening about it that you can't explain that somebody is every bolt and nut in that ship creaks in screech and squeals it sounds like people are in the hold of the ship being tortured and screaming every time that ship hits and you can't you can't believe that the ship can possibly stay together I mean it's just you you don't think it's going to happen it's just going to break apart so that was an interesting experience and we survived it several ships I gathered went down in that storm but um it was you know it was and and like I love the crew and it's it's it's like anything else I remember there's a passage in in war and peace or Paris somewhere he's in it he's with other people at her captured her me somewhere but it's there long enough that he figures yes I could live this life I could live this way you know and I remember being out there and thinking yeah I could be a fisherman I could live this life I mean there's a great pleasure and not just the work but knowing that when it's over with you're off for because then we're high they pay you know I mean for that time you make three trips a year and and the rest of the time is like holiday you know so you're out to sea maybe four months out of the year three months sometimes and you're home and you live a great life I've identified fishing with writing in my mind to the extent that each script is like a trip that you're taking and you are fishing you know and sometimes they're both involve an act of faith I mean you're looking at the water and assuming that there's something underneath it you're going to catch you know and it's the same thing with your brain you just got a something under that you're going to get you thinking sometimes it's sheer faith alone that's sustained think goddammit nothing not a bite today you know nothing is happening and I and and and that that feeling of having to work and work and work because when the fish are running and then just to stop you know their rhythms that I've been very comfortable within four years that's how I worked in a frenzy you know when it was going well and and then when it wasn't going I just stopped but as you get older that's a tougher way to work you know you know two three four morning and you have kids and things like that and the world in the incursians of the everyday world suddenly become more important I had a girlfriend who graduated a year ahead of me and who wanted to be an actress and she went to Jeff Cory's acting class and Jeff Cory as you probably know was a blacklisted actor who became a real influence and on a whole generation of filmmakers I mean in my class at Jeff saw there were people who then were of course actors it was Nicholson there was Dick Chamberlain there was sally kellerman there was a very chase the dancer and it was Diane varsity had become a very well-known reserve Kershner the director there was Roger Corman but it was a you know all of us came together not always wanting to do to do the same thing but my training as a writer really came from seven years of improvising in that class and coming they have a feeling for what was effective dramatically what was effective in terms of dialogue in terms of just what people could and couldn't say that would be an effective that's an amazing array of talent in one in one group in one class that's only the people I can remember and there was also Jimmy Coburn and their class there were so many people in there James Dean had been in there and told a year or two before that there were other actors who were brilliant who you know who were either killed or who died but do you think that Jeff quarry also influenced your politics as well as your writing I I don't know that Jeff quarry influenced our politics we knew that he couldn't work and we knew that that was horrible it was just obvious if you knew Jeff you know that this is a threat to the country it wasn't you know it was it was outrageous and he was so good-natured about it such a wonderful teacher and had given himself over to to that that you know our sympathies for him were great and I think I mean to this day those people who who kept people from working I think many of us still resent terribly because of unhappiness in foster when I understand that Roger Corman was responsible woman for giving you your first time yes he was in brace Roger Corman was in Jeff's class and he he said kid I hear you want to write yeah and he said okay write a script for me and that's how it started with so many of us with Roger Corman there was Francis Coppola Scorsese Nicholson no it was meh no tough to make a living writing for Roger but at least he gave us a start right I would guess that most of you in those days would rather have the start than the money so oh sure yeah and any he you know he did some movies that like Little Shop of Horrors that were kind of memorable and I did among other things one of his poem Ovie's tomb of Nigeria the first movie that you did for him was that something that you really wanted to write or was it something that he said this is the idea or how did it work with Roger it was number something that you wanted to write at least in those days it was ah attack of the 50-foot woman that's the story give me a script in a week or the last woman on earth which is something I regrettably did and and the end your Alan Pope any idea he chose the subject matter and I realized that from my point and I had a hard time with that from my point of view that was bad for me I really needed to I really needed to feel that something for the material or I had a hard time always have so that's continued over the years you would rather do an original than do a book or somebody else idea it's not necessarily true that I would rather do an original it is true that whatever it is that I would be doing I would need to feel a connection with it one of the oddest ways I ever backed into a project was I live across I lived across the street or Sydney lived across the street from me and I was in my front yard and he was in his front yard and the garbage trucks had just gone by and Sydney said can you give me a hand and I thought for just a minute Rob I said sure and I thought he wanted me to help them take this garbage cans into the backyard you know and in fact what he wanted to do was talk to me about the firm and so you know would have been a lot easier to take his garbage but so mister he said you know you don't have to read it you know just talking about it and he started to try to explain the plot to me and again like we were saying earlier it started very quickly to devolve into the vessel with the pestle is that I I can't follow in Sydney and I'm sorry so then I had then I read the book and then we got and then I backed into it and managed to find in the course of doing it a way that it could be meaningful to me and that can happen too but you know we didn't try to make it not grisham but there was a lot about the book I was uncomfortable with and I don't know if you ever read the book primer did you know I was highly uncomfortable with him taking the money and running and things like that I was uncomfortable with him cheating on his wife and never talking to her about it and so we looked for ways to keep it like Grisham but change it I was most uncomfortable with him violating his oath as a lawyer and getting the firm and all of his clients at the same time I called my wife's brother who was a lawyer and still is a very good one and I said John what how could it be that if you had members of your own law firm that were dishonest and you wanted to take them down but you didn't want to violate the confidentiality with your clients what can you possibly get them on and he thought about it for a minute and he said mail fraud you know when when if they over build him and put a postage stamp on it that's mail fraud and that can add up and of course that became the key thing that in the script both John and my cousin who's another lawyer John Edmonds helped with and then I and then then we went from there and just looked for ways to make to make it meaningful but I guess this is a roundabout way of saying sometimes with an adaptation you can find something that you can identify would then mean something to you and go away do you enjoy doing research for projects because you talked about originally wanting to be a journalist and I know and there's always it always seems to me that there's a certain amount of research that goes into arenas or you know like with the firm you called a couple of lawyers you had a conversation but some of the some projects take a lot more research do you like learning about whole new areas that you don't I think that's one of them benefits of screenwriting is being able to delve into worlds like a journalist and and often to be able to travel the places I'm you know journal you know writing screenplays has taken me all over the world when they were shooting it's how I first really got to Australia and came to fall in love with it doing a couple of movies down there meeting with Mel Gibson on tequila sunrise for the first time and then coming back and doing Mission Impossible there so you know I mean writing can take you around the world and into worlds that you would never ever be able to approach so I love it I think it's important and I think that you know to be try to immerse yourself as much as you can in those worlds and as I think critical to the to the process I have always had in my life strong relationships with actors with whom I worked I suppose you know when you start off via your professional life and in a way my professional I started in Jeff Corey's acting class who did I spend the most time with it particularly at that time but actors you got to realize there were no writing classes there were no there was very few very very very little cinnamon schools I mean my education didn't come anywhere near it I didn't answer a question and I'll get back to this and I mean I didn't answer a question earlier about what drew me to how did I get into movies I think loving them but not really taking screenwriting seriously as a the possibility for a profession I stumbled across two books by James Agee one was his his movie criticism in the time and the nation and the other were a book of his screenplays African Queen Noah Noah and I remember reading in one of a Jesus passing remarks that he said you know I've often been bored by a bad play but I've rarely been bored by a bad movie and at the time and certainly changed since but at the time because I have been bored by violence but at the time I thought you know that's true I'm but B movies then were nothing if not energetic so really bad you know I mean there they were bad they were fun and I thought well hell it's good enough for James EJ and I thought he was wonderful I'm going to be a disreputable screenwriter and which didn't go down well in my family but in any event that was sort of the triggering stimulus but when I the first time I saw Jack act he was 18 and he was working as a messenger in the cartoon department at hanna-barbera and I saw him improvise and I immediately thought he was wonderful and I went up to him and I said Jocko you're going to be a movie star and got a right for you and he said yeah I said yeah and of course twelve years later we were broke and unemployed and it didn't look as if that was very prophetic but then in a year or two that all changed with Easy Rider and but these things often take them longer than you than you think they will and it's just as well in a way in any event I mention it because you know when you see somebody improvising twice a week four five six seven years and then even more because we went from Jeff's class to a classic Marty Landau taught for a while you know you you understand them so well both personally and and and and understand and appreciate their various skills as artists the cadence is how they phrase things what effect it has on the scene in on a story you know the profound effect that casting has on your material I mean and so I wrote for Jack I wrote last detail for Jack I wrote Chinatown for Jack I mean and and it was often on the basis of not often always on the basis of what I had come to understand about him both personally and watching him work realizing that with that wonderful monotone he could go on talk talk talk talk welcome and he could carry a sentence indefinitely and it had a kind of wonderful cumulative power so I always considered that the jack was always my collaborator then whether I ever talked to him about the scene or not because all I had to do was imagine him doing it and it you know and and to do what I think writers have always done imagined somebody that they know you know I mean playing the part and and and listening and your inner ear to Kevin I mean it was know before what scant history we have of Shakespeare tells us about Burbidge and the effect that he I think everybody everybody knows that the same was true would warrant you can't help but and then you see work with somebody and then you work with him again and I had worked with Gene Hackman in Bonnie and Clyde and had seen him and come to Norman so when I was asked to rewrite the firm the character of that he was playing was changed substantively because I knew that gene would have the weight and the sympathy to make a very unsympathetic character in the book become a very sympathetic character in the film so I you know I think it has a tremendous effect I mean you know these collaborations from the Eggman Birdman with Max von Sydow to Scorsese with De Niro and Francis with Al I mean Ford with John Wayne I mean it it's it's what makes movies work so well it was interesting that Warren Beatty Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson seemed from the outside from to be such completely different styles types the kind of movies they do everything about them seems so completely different and you seem to have been able to hone in on such disparate personalities and had great success with all three of them they are different but the adjustment if you want to call it an adjustment is so automatic that that I don't see anything unusual about it I mean like I said Jack is very comfortable with you can give him a speech that can rattle on forever I mean you saw that from the very beginning when he did Easy Rider and that long deranged speech about alien whatever it was you know one um is it's quite different I think some part of Warren is very comfortable being a bumbler you can see it in Bonnie and Clyde you can see it in shampoo you can see it in Kate McCabe and mrs. Miller you can see it even in Reds you can see it in heaven can wait I mean a guy displaced and doesn't know who he is some part of that is the anxiety of a man who's so beautiful that he would like to mess it up with a go to for the limp and a giggle and whatever it is some shit-kicking ineptitude and part of it is I think a feeling of in spite of all the worldly sophistication that has come to be worn he started out as a as an innocent Virginia boy and that's some real component in his personality that kind of innocence that can be taken advantage of or that he felt to be taken advantage of but in the event not for long so you know you come to understand these things Tom has always been to me at least particularly night I started working with him he always seemed to me to be what Zelda Fitzgerald had said about Scott and always seemed to be you know walking slightly off the ground I mean it's just so buoyant so full of the belief that anything is possible that he can do just about anything and and in fact I you know I think he can i tom is imbued with more physical courage than anybody just about I've ever seen I mean when we were doing Days of Thunder a race one of the one of the drivers took me around the track at about 200 miles I'm well 175 miles an hour and Tom then and of course Angela you know Louisa she wanted to do it too so Tom was offered to take her around the track and she said well how how fast did Robert go 175 miles an hour she said well that's what I want to do so crews got her out on the track and they zip tit around at 175 miles an hour and she said a number of times she said what if I wanted to go fast and he said I would have tried to oblige and he the head of the Charlotte Motor Speedway was a very engaging man called humpy wheeler who told me he was sitting high up in this sort of booth above the Charlotte Motor Speedway and he saw crews go around the track and he timed him and he was a fraction of a second off the track record and he went down below and he thought well there must have been soft tires on the car something that allowed him to maintain that track and they weren't there were normal tires I mean his ability to his ability to gamble like that he went they once parachuted onto the track as he wanted to try parachuting the day that we were shooting and people were getting killed and downdrafts I said Tom even down drops here and this is asphalt but what he said note wouldn't happen to me and I that belief that he has some secret that somehow will allow him to get through things you know is something that you just naturally take into account when you're working on something involving you know I think that's been a real competitive his persona right naturally it has an effect on everything I've done with him it seems as though Mission Impossible was maybe slightly unusual for you in that it was such a huge action picture about all both of them and I guess a lot of us always think of you as writing very witty complicated smart drama and some slightly different way from a huge action picture did you enjoy doing those and and how did you happen to wind up sharing screenplay credit on and mission impossible well in in both mission war Impossibles the the took the two that I did they were actually I guess three now I didn't think I was going to do them I didn't want to do them there had been I think in both cases either seven or eight writers before me so if you know about anything about the way the guild works you'd know that I'd be sharing screenplay credit with them but that it was not sitting down and working with people it just it was a case of they were very interesting experiences because you know never having done anything like that I was given access to a few people who had worked and and intelligence either were the FBI or the CIA in the case of the first movie which confused people at the time I think probably more than it would now because of the of the term knock a non-official cover which was the agent which is now much more widely recognized in the you know in the entertainment world and in the world in general it's a but some of the action pieces were set pieces and so what I was doing was to try to make those action sequences appear as if they sprang from the character and I mean it reached a really interesting point in the second Mission Impossible when after a number of writers all that John Woo was left with were storyboards of a half-a-dozen action sequences and he gave them to me and since then when millions of dollars spent on setting up these action sequences please now write a story for these action sequences and that wasn't interesting that was interesting it was a little bit like I guess being given the music and say can you write the lyrics you know and that was a that was kind of it a it was a challenge it was a little scary but it was also fun I remember let me see if I can give you an example of a tiny change that suggests character in the originals I can't say original script because it was seven guys had worked on on on it up to that point but there was that mountain climbing sequence which was played for suspense and drama and was serious and I thought that's no good that that the way to deal with that is this is what Cruz does on his day off you know in it's a busman's holiday it's something that he does for enjoyment risking his neck climbing up the you know fall during fall Dora haha you know so it was something that was fun for him to do and and this pleasurable experience was interrupted with with an assignment and speaking of his courage that man climbed that mountain and and he was hanging by the thinnest of cables over 1500 feet and getting those toe holds himself and poor John will almost passed out I want you it was so frightening because he he was making those jumps assuming the cable can hold but he was moving as if he wasn't it was covered so that was a way of working on that and and and that was something that I had never done before so that was an interest and it was I'm glad it wasn't something that happened early in my career but you know that wasn't the only I mean there were there are lots of problems associated with action films like that for me and in some ways are the most difficult things of all to do that was a difficult thing to do I mean get about it but trying to make the action sequences seem you know however however tangental to be something that comes from the characters for a long time you had an incredible reputation for being what they call a script doctor being and I wonder if those years of doing some of that helped it all when John Woo handed you those those storyboards coming in at a different time than you would have if you had sat down from the beginning to write well yes I think that that's what script doctoring is about I mean is as trying to well it's no different from adaptation or what we were talking about earlier with the firm it's it's as if that there it's as if there's an ideal story there and you try to explore how you reach it we put it to you and in platonic terms you know Plato always felt that I mean wrote about I guess you know when you look at something like His Dark Materials are you know the golden compass Philip Pullman where he he writes about alternate worlds no existing side by side well in Plato there was the real world which was unchanged and unchanging and then the world that we live in and uh which is the world of he called a becoming and in the written in the real world there was an ideal chair that never changes and if you can by the idea that if all the chairs in the world were destroyed there would still exist the idea of a chair some people don't think that's true but I do and you know I can see that that idea would still exist I think that that that a screenplay any given screenplay is something that exists in that world to be discovered and that the act of writing is not so much an act of invention as it is an act of discovery at least for me and and time after time when a story works you're struggling with it and it just seems as if it was a that's what it should have been so it was there to be discovered rather than to be invented and I think that working is a script doctor to call it is just lending yourself to that process of discovery it's true original things too I mean there's a point at which at which there's no difference really I wanted you to talk a little bit about directing and how you feel about directing your own material versus having the eye of someone else coming in and directing your material and whether you talked about journalism and and how things in life contributes so much to your work both as a writer and I assume as a director do you do what actors do and use things from from childhood or your early earlier life in those in those situations well look when it comes to either writing or directing I think you use whatever you can use including the crew the life that you get from the crew around you I mean I think everything is I mean the making a movie is a living thing when you're making it and it can go any which way I mean it is itself an act of discovery I think that and and I think this is not precisely answering your question but I think you keep making the same movie I mean each time you make it when you imagine it you make it when you shoot it you look at the mess that you've created after you shoot it and you make it all over again in post-production you're constantly you're constantly using whatever you can find wherever you can find it I mean that's in terms of personal experience look I I mean I had a girlfriend who was married to a hairdresser I didn't know that when she first that's how I got interested in hairdressers because to my this I was in my early 20s you know and to my you know I was shocked that she was married to a hairdresser that a hairdresser would be married to anybody and then I was definitely shocked to find out that she still went to him every week even after they were divorced and I said you know you know how Canada and she said well you want to hear what he says about you and you know what the are you talking about so I said I want to meet this guy so I went into a beauty shop to pick her up and there I saw this guy who was that was ginger Cove being you know tacking his blow dryer into his jeans whipping it out you know and you know being the only rooster in the henhouse I thought man what a job you know and there's where life and research and everything came together I even lived with gene for a couple of weeks you know I used to sit in that beauty shop and listen to those women talk till as George says tell it's coming up my ear you know and and at one point when he's saying you never listen to women talk man he's talking and while I do and and and he goes on with it so you know there was research there was my personal life there was you know everything coming together

Channel: Writers Guild Foundation

Views: 35,724

Rating: 4.9492064 out of 5

Keywords: writers guild foundation, writing, writers guild, screenwriting, screenplay, writers, screenwriters, television writers, chinatown, robert towne

Id: P6r7exIYOo8

Length: 54min 39sec (3279 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2013