Biography for
Robert Towne More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

Mini Biography

Writer, director, producer, actor. Born in Los Angeles, California, USA, and raised in the seaport town of San Pedro. Got his start acting and writing for legendary exploitation director/producer Roger Corman. Came into his own during the 1970s when he was regarded as one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood. Began directing with mixed success in 1982. One of the best script doctors in Hollywood, he contributed crucial scenes to such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972).

Spouse

Trade Mark

Reputation as Script Doctor Extraordinaire

Trivia

Had his name replaced in the final credits of Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) after he saw the film. The name he substituted, "P.H. Vazak", was that of his sheepdog. Wrote the garden scene between Marlon Brando and Al Pacino for The Godfather (1972). A long-time friend of Jack Nicholson whom he met while attending Jeff Corey's acting classes in the late 1950s.

Attended Pomona College.

Father of Katharine Towne

Ex-son-in-law of actors John Payne and Anne Shirley.

Is good friends with Tom Cruise.

Ex-father-in-law of Charlie Hunnam.

According to one book ("Easy Riders and Raging Bulls" by Peter Biskind), Towne is a bit of a hypochondriac who visits his doctors constantly.

Frequentley seen at Los Angeles Laker games sitting to the right of Jack Nicholson.

Father of Chiara Towne.

Next door Los Angeles neighbor is Sydney Pollack.

Towne's very first writing assignment was on a Roger Corman vehicle titled, "Fraternity Hell Week." The B-movie never did make to the screen as the script was ultimately lost.

Personal Quotes

"Because the one thing you know when you're shooting a script, and I've been on a lot of sets, is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind."

"The [American] dream was more "If you can be similar in that way, you can be American and have equal opportunities." Whereas today it's, how can I put it? It's kind of Balkanized: Black pride. Gay pride. White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant pride. All of these things, you know, they're more polarized, aren't they? The red and blue states. Christians, that's the most insidious aspect of it, giving into this great Christian image of America. That's the most frightening thing of all. Whereas [in the past] they're trying to find things that unite us, to minimize the differences. Whereas today there's this belief in empowerment and entitlement by maximizing differences. I'm not so sure that that's healthy. I don't mean that it's not healthy to want to hang onto your culture. But I think it's unhealthy to set it up against somebody else's and say "ours is better." Then there's the Christian Right saying that this is a Christian country when it's not."

"There are the big tent-pole movies and the struggling independents. All these movies that we've spoken about, like Chinatown and Last Detail, would probably be independent movies today, and would not be financed in the normal course of things. And that's unhealthy. The amount of ancillary effort unrelated to what goes up on-screen by filmmakers, all of us, having to beg, borrow, and steal to finance, to go out there with hat in hand, the struggle we have to do in preparation just for the movies to happen, is a drain. It's like I was saying to George Clooney at a film festival recently, it's a drain on you, it's time-consuming, it's energy-consuming. You get to the point where you're so fucking tired you feel like you've already done the movie, just trying to get enough money to make it. In the old days, the amount of time it took to make Ask The Dust, I could have made three movies and not been so tired and thought, "God, I never want to do this again."" [On today's Hollywood (March 2006)]

"Money problems are what led me to projects like `Days of Thunder.' I needed to pay my bills."

Where Are They Now

(January 2004) approached to write/direct a remake of "The 39 Steps".

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