In Conversation with Robert Towne

Academy Award-winning writer Robert Towne, who was born in Los Angeles and raised in San Pedro, has lived in Pacific Palisades for over 20 years. He resides in an English Tudor-style house in the Riviera with his Italian wife, Luisa, and their 14-year-old daughter, Chiara. Asked what he likes about our town, the former philosophy major says “the way the weather comes in over the ocean, having friends like Sydney Pollack in the neighborhood” and “‘ la tarte,” where he often eats with his brother Roger, who is also a writer. Asked if living here has influenced his work, Towne says: “No, it doesn’t inspire me in that way.” However, it may some day, given the scope of his career. Towne, who got his start acting and writing for director Roger Corman, came into his own writing what he knows best’Southern California. His Oscar-winning screenplay for “Chinatown” (1974) was critically acclaimed and “Shampoo” (1975), which he wrote with his friend Warren Beatty, was a commercial hit. “Tequila Sunrise” (1988) reflected his roots, as does his latest release, “Ask the Dust.” Known as one of the best script doctors in Hollywood, Towne worked on other Academy-Award-winning films, including “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972). What do all these films have in common? They’re all “period” pieces in that they reflect the reality of the times in which they are set’be it the sexual mores of the 1970’s or the racial prejudice of the 1930’s. Still considered one of the finest writers in Hollywood, Towne at 72 is the quintessential Californian: laid back, opinionated, hip. He swaggers around his room in the Four Seasons Hotel in faded jeans and a black long-sleeved shirt looking for a match to light his cigar. He was meeting with the media here for two days to promote “Ask the Dust,” which opened in early March. The film, which Towne both wrote and directed, is based on the novel by John Fante. Set in Depression-era Los Angeles, it stars Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, the son of Italian immigrants who comes to L.A. determined to write the great American novel and marry a beautiful blonde. Instead, he falls for Camilla Lopez (Salma Hayek), a passionate Mexican waitress who can’t read and longs to marry a WASP. Their explosive relationship (the curdled milk Camilla accidentally puts in Arturo’s coffee says it all) is meant to be a metaphor of the larger issues facing Angelenos at the time: the underlying racial tension, given the steady influx of Mexicans into California seeking a better life. “This whole book and movie is really about Los Angeles,” Towne says. “It’s a love story about the city and the relationship between two angry people, who are essentially angry for the same reason. Both feel like outsiders.” Asked if the film is somewhat autobiographical, Towne says that when he first read Fante’s novel “I almost thought I was reading about my own past. While there is a point where the movie and the book diverge, it was hard for me to tell where one ends and the other begins.” For Towne, “Ask the Dust” became a 30-year labor of love. After discovering the book while researching “Chinatown,” he began a friendship with Fante that would last until the author’s death in 1983. In the mid-1990s, 20 years after he first read the novel, Towne wrote a screenplay on spec and then spent the next decade years trying to secure financing. He says the reason the novel became a passion for him is that it taps into strong feelings he has for this city and his work as a writer. “It’s about a writer who feels neglected, unappreciated,” Towne says. “What writer doesn’t feel that way? How could I not identify with that?” Fante was born in 1909 in Colorado, the son of an Italian immigrant bricklayer. After a childhood spent in poverty and battling anti-Italian prejudice, he moved to California in 1929 and began writing stories for H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury magazine. By 1936, he had created Arturo Bandini, the character who would become his alter ego in four novels. The first novel, “Wait Until Spring, Bandini,” was published in 1938 (and made into a film in 1989), followed by “Ask the Dust,” “Dreams from Bunker Hill,” and “The Road to Los Angeles” (published posthumously). The saga chronicles the writer’s acceptance of his working-class background, his Italian-American heritage and his longing for assimilation. “If there’s a better piece of fiction written about L.A., I don’t know about it,” Towne says of “Ask the Dust.” “I saw the story as a sort of ‘Wuthering Heights’ in Bunker Hill. In its way, it’s as old a story as ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ It ends, as all great love stories do, tragically. [But] it makes us believe that there is such a thing as love.” In the opening shot of “Ask the Dust,” which was filmed in South Africa, Towne pans a series of drawings of the California landscape over a radio weather report. The drawings come to life, taking us to the Alta Loma Hotel on Bunker Hill, where Mexicans and Jews are not welcome. It is here that Bandini finds a room. The view outside his window? A dusty palm tree. “You can feel the sand that comes in from the Mojave, even between the sheets,” writes Bandini. Although self-absorbed, Bandini is surprisingly likeable, as played by Farrell. As for Hayek’s Camilla, her feisty spirit can still be found in almost any small downtown coffee shop’given the ongoing racial tension in L.A. (Note: In 1988, as an entertainment writer for The Toronto Star, I interviewed Robert Towne when “Tequila Sunrise,” which he also both wrote and directed, was released. At the time, Towne said he saw the film as a modern morality tale about loyalty, friendship and love and hinted that some day he could end up as a character in one of his own films. As what? I predicted as an incurable romantic, which could certainly describe Bandini. Towne says his next film, which he’s already working on for Sony, is the tale of an American mining engineer, Wendell Fertig. It will be set during World War II and filmed in the Philippines.)