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On Refining Story: A Conversation with Robert Towne
From: American Film Institute
| By:
Robert Towne |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Through a career spanning five decades, Robert Towne has come to be known as one of the most successful screenwriters and script doctors working in Hollywood. He has doctored such films as Marathon Man (1976) and Heaven Can Wait (1978) and has adapted high profile works to the big screen, including The Firm (1993), Love Affair (1994) and Mission Impossible (1996).
In 1974, Towne (right) won an Oscar for Chinatown, a work combining historical material, the detective genre and modern storytelling techniques. In an address at the American Film Institute (AFI) shortly after the release of Chinatown, Towne spoke about developing and refining story through drafts and collaboration. |
 he ending that I had originally conceived never ended in Chinatown. I had always felt it was really pushing the metaphor to end up in the physical location. There was one horrible day when everybody got crazy just about two weeks before shooting and somebody said, "My God, there's no scene in Chinatown, and it's called Chinatown!" |
Of course, I felt that was fine--and in a way the point--that it was not a location but either a state of mind or a person. It was one of those insane sessions where somebody said, "Well, maybe if the girl liked Chinese food..." |
Finally, out of this meeting where some normally very bright people sort of lost their heads, at least in those kinds of excesses, it was collectively agreed upon--not by me, but by everyone else--that there should be a scene in Chinatown. |
On the conclusion of <I>Chinatown</I>
Originally, I had Evelyn [Mulwray] kill her father and I had the detective try and stop her. In the first and second drafts he got the daughter out of the country. It also ended in a funny way: you knew that Evelyn was going to have to stand trial and you knew that she wasn't going to be able to tell why she did it. But it was bittersweet in the sense that one person, at least, wasn't tainted--the child. |
But the larger crime against the whole community went unpunished. In a sense, that was my point, that there are some crimes for which you get punished, and killing her father was a crime for which she could be punished, and so she would be. Then, there are some crimes that our society isn't equipped to punish, so we reward it. You displace a whole community and take their land and there's really nothing that's done except putting their names on a plaque at City Hall. |
It was my feeling that in order to get that balance, I had to end it that way. In fact, the very last shot of the first draft was J.J. Gittes [played by Jack Nicholson] on top of what had been called Alta Vista Road in the script. The road had been changed from Alta Vista Road to Mulwray Drive, just as Mulholland was changed in the actual history of Los Angeles. And the last shot was that--looking out on this pastoral valley, which changed as you watched it into the valley of today. |
I was arguing for this, but in the end a very tricky thing happens when you're doing a film. A director comes along and beyond a certain point you recognize that a transference has to take place and he has to conceive of it as his film. You just hope that your visions will complement each other, and in that case they did. |
Films are exceptionally collaborative. You can't pretend they're not. Even with the strongest and the most authoritative directors, you have to realize that it isn't just you. You just hope that your quarrels are not about the central vision, but the ways of getting there. You can argue about execution, about the way something should be done, but not what you're going for overall. |
On arriving at the material for a story
With Chinatown, I originally thought I'd do a detective movie. That was all, initially. But then, I didn't want to do just any detective movie. |
Once you say you want to do a detective movie, you start thinking about what crime is to you, what it really means, what you think is really a horrible crime and what angers you. So I thought, I don't want to do a crime movie about the kind of things that don't anger me. I wanted to do something that really infuriated me. |
The destruction of the land and that community was something that I thought was really hideous. It was doubly significant because it was the way Los Angeles was formed, really. |
On developing characters
The genesis of Gittes is this: in most detective movies that I have ever seen, all the detectives, particularly older ones you read in [Raymond] Chandler or even [Dashiell] Hammett, they're always very down on divorce work. And yet, I knew that's all they ever did, practically. That's how they made their money. So, I thought that was a wonderfully seamy character opportunity. |
There were some notorious divorce detectives here in LA--Freddie Otash, years ago, and people like that who were colorful, very successful, vulgar and enjoyed publicity. Then I drew on a lot of things that I knew about Jack Nicholson. Jack is kind of a clotheshorse. Ultimately, I wanted the character to have decent instincts, even though he's not entirely capable. And this is how I modernized those earlier detectives. |
On plotting a story with a tragic ending
Along the way you want to show a certain amount of warmth, affection, friendship, good times and people being decent because it accentuates the fact that, in the end, all those things go by the boards. |
If there's going to be a tunnel at the end of the light, you want to have some lightness before you get there. It's elemental. If you're plotting something like that, it should be a consistent pursuit. |
If you read a great tragedy like King Lear, what makes it so effective are all the little kindnesses along the way: the Fool, Cordelia, the virtuous daughter. Ultimately, much of it gets destroyed. They die. But it lends a kind of reality to the presence of the evil, whereas, if it just seems to take place in a vacuum it becomes too relentlessly cruel. |
On subjecting your protagonist to danger
I chose the nose-cutting sequence [in Chinatown] because I felt it would be very hard to take seriously any violence that was visited on the hero, because you know he's going to last until the end of the movie. So the only thing that you can really fear is for his psychological safety, either emotionally or morally. |
But I needed to put him in some sort of danger, so I thought of something really horrible. The worst thing that I could think of that would appeal to the imagination was the nose-cutting. I didn't want the conventional beating. |
On crafting a film outline
You can't wing it. In the case of Chinatown, I wrote at least 20 different step outlines--long, long step outlines, that got me about 70 percent of the way through it. Finally, after the twentieth I said, "Well, this is far enough. I know where it's going to end. Now, I'll just devote myself to the problem of writing it." Usually, I have a pretty clear idea of where it's going to end up, even if I don't know every step of the way. |
It's commonly held that screenplays fall into three acts and run about 120 pages. The first 40 pages are the first act, and at about page 80 you go into the end action of the piece. I don't hold to that excessively. I just try to see that the story goes somewhere incrementally. |
But even that's somewhat up in the air. I don't consciously try to break it down that way, but you keep it in mind. I believe in soft openings for movies, which departs from convention to some degree. |
I think it's almost impossible to lose an audience in the first 10 minutes, but almost inevitably you lose the audience in the last part if you haven't got the groundwork laid in the film at the beginning. |
In a movie with a very fast opening, you inevitably end up paying for it somewhere along the way--by having to explain what happened in this fast and furious action. I like the build of having a soft opening and leading the audience into it. I almost like it when movies are a little boring in the beginning because it establishes credibility to build on. |
On getting the knack of scriptwriting
One of the frustrating things about working on movies--and one of the exciting things--is that you never have the same problem twice. You wouldn't really encounter the same problems working on The Sound of Music as you would on Lawrence of Arabia. They're entirely different. |
Which is not to say that there aren't certain principles. Generally speaking, scripts are too talky. When there's a problem, it's usually because it lacks clarity. It lacks some kind of lucidity at some level or another. The writer does not have a very clear idea about where the story is going or where the characters are going. Strive for clarity. I think that's the mark of anybody who's really terrific. |
On script doctoring
"Doctoring" is kind of misleading because all scripts are rewritten. Every script has to be rewritten;, it's just a question of whether or not it's going to be rewritten well. |
When you get to that moment when the film is about to be shot, you realize a lot of things that you don't realize when it's on paper. Things are suddenly very scary. And you think, Jesus, this is really awkward. Or it might be just a simple logistical problem: making sure that a guy who has got to get to a door has enough business to cover an action that's absolutely necessary. It can be at that level or on a more serious level. Those problems have to be dealt with all the time, drastically or just very carefully. |
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