Robert Towne News

NYT: When the history of the Obama presidency is written, one particular day may prove to be a turning point, the moment a president set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war.

Classic movies can be dusted off and re-presented every few years in anniversary editions; less-than classic films can be offered up as nostalgia.

The Film: "Well, to tell you the truth, I lied a little". -- J.J. Gittes, Chinatown When a film lover thinks of Roman Polanski's body of work, it usually involves two sharply-divided brackets of cinema: a catalogue of tense psychodrama in the vein of both Repulsion and The Tenant , and, of course, the noir-like mystery in Chinatown .

Chinatown is one of Roman Polanski's most celebrated pictures. But the - auteur' who tends to be most closely associated with it is screenwriter Robert Towne, who won the only Oscar among the movie's 11 nominations.

Which was distracting. With braces." Anne Applebaum*, for reasons that are not entirely clear, is making a fool of herself.

A couple of powerful flashbacks to the Los Angeles of his childhood convinced Robert Towne to write "Chinatown," still widely considered his best screenplay in a four-decade career of stellar movie scripts.

An important question to ask, no? Not necessarily for the sake of justice - as a 76-year-old, he's unlikely to be prosecuted again - but for the sake of determining just how much child molestation a masterpiece like 'Chinatown' entitles you to.

If you think you were confused and challenged by the famously labyrinthine plot of "Chinatown," imagine how the screenwriter felt.

A Reuters interview with Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne captures Towne's low-keyed, rather diplomatic defense of a kind of filmmaking that was relatively free of executive interference and marketing perceptions of what audiences wanted.

A couple of powerful flashbacks to the Los Angeles of his childhood persuaded Robert Towne to write "Chinatown." Images View Larger Image One flashback came during a walk along the ocean in the early 1970s, when the quality of the light, the sea air and the smell of eucalyptus sent him into a reverie.

Few screenwriters exemplified the renaissance in Hollywood filmmaking that took place in the 1970s more than Robert Towne.