Combustible Celluloid


New movie reviews, DVD reviews, interviews, and all things film.

 
Home | Archive | About | Cinematical.com | Lists | News | Links | E-mail me | Sign up for my weekly newsletter!  
 



Ajami ***
Green Zone **1/2
Remember Me **1/2
She's Out of My League ***
2009 Oscars
More
 




Blank Generation
The Box
Capitalism: A Love Story
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak
Undead: The Vampire Collection
Up in the Air
The 25 Best DVDs of 2009
More
 

Film Features

2009: The Year's Ten Best Films
The Decade's Ten Best Films: 2000-2009
My 2003 Interview with Brittany Murphy
San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards 2009
Richard Linklater
John Woo
Jared and Jerusha Hess
Essential Halloween Movies
Michael Stuhlbarg
Jane Campion
Bobcat Goldthwait
Hugh Dancy
Kathryn Bigelow
Willem Dafoe: The 2009 CineVegas Interview
David Carradine
A 2002 Interview with Edward Asner
Vinessa Shaw
Henry Selick
2008: The Year's Ten Best Films
The San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards 2008
The 25 Best DVDs of 2008
Bruce Campbell
Darren Aronofsky and Marisa Tomei
Josh Brolin
A Tribute to Paul Newman
Steve Coogan on Hamlet 2
Manny Farber (1917-2008)
Bernie Mac (1957-2008)
Emily Mortimer
Brad Anderson
Don Cheadle at CineVegas
Abel Ferrara at CineVegas
Tina Sinatra
My Top 100 Films [Updated]
My Top 60 Directors [Updated]
The Top 50 Movies of the Past Ten Years (1997-2006)
Terry Zwigoff on the new Bad Santa Director's Cut
Alfonso Cuarón Interview
Guillermo Del Toro Interview
Christmas Movies
Combustible Celluloid's Big Guide to Halloween & Horror Movies
Cult Movies
Actress Interview Gallery
The Top 100
More Features and Interviews
 

Film Books

Not Quite a Memoir: Of Films, Books, the World, by Judy Stone
James Agee: The Library of America Collection, by James Agee
Just Making Movies, by Ronald L. Davis
Guide to Essential Movies, by Joe Leydon
Cecil B. DeMille's Hollywood, by Robert S. Birchard
Profoundly Disturbing, by Joe Bob Briggs
A Third Face, by Samuel Fuller
Dark Lover, by Emily Leider
Agee on Film, by James Agee
Lulu in Hollywood, by Louise Brooks
Negative Space, by Manny Farber
5001 Nights at the Movies, by Pauline Kael
More Books
 



Home
Reviews A-C
Reviews D-F
Reviews G-J
Reviews K-M
Reviews N-Q
Reviews R-T
Reviews U-Z
 

The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

 
SEARCH MOVIES / CELEB

Advanced Search

 
© 1997-2009 Combustible Celluloid



Interview with Robert Towne

From 'Dust' to 'Dust'

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Robert Towne Movies on DVD

Robert Towne has reached full circle.

Towne's newest film, Ask the Dust, which opens this week in Bay Area theaters, has been slowly evolving for several decades.

Arguably the most celebrated living American screenwriter, Towne, 71, began his career writing "B" pictures like Last Woman on Earth (1960) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965) for director Roger Corman.

Like many others from the Corman camp, Towne quickly graduated to fame and fortune during Hollywood's 1970s "Renaissance." He made a good living, and developed a powerful reputation among Hollywood's heavy-hitters, as an ingenious "script doctor," or one who can cleverly polish an ailing screenplay.

Usually script doctors are well paid, but do not receive screen credit. His reported contributions include Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Jack Nicholson's Drive, He Said (1971), The Godfather (1972), Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View (1974), Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks (1976) and many others.

Even more impressive is Towne's list of credited works, which includes three consecutive Oscar nominees, The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975). He won his only Oscar for Chinatown. He was nominated a fourth time in 1984 for a screenplay he disowned, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and so his dog, P.H. Vazak, technically received the nomination.

As did Preston Sturges, Ben Hecht and Woody Allen before him, it wasn't long before Towne made his debut as a director in 1982 with Personal Best a moving story of two women athletes and their criss-crossed emotional feelings for one another.

Towne followed that with two more efforts, Tequila Sunrise (1988) and Without Limits (1998).

During all this activity, Ask the Dust sat simmering on the back burner.

Based on the 1939 cult novel by John Fante, the film revolves around an Italian-American writer, Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell), who has arrived in Los Angeles seeking fame and fortune. Spending his last dime in a coffee shop, he meets a feisty Mexican waitress, Camilla (Salma Hayek) and finds himself both enchanted by her awesome beauty and repelled by racial factors -- both her Mexican heritage and his own self-loathing.

Towne found the novel while researching Chinatown, looking for material that would honestly describe that particular era of Los Angeles. He became so entranced by it that he decided to meet with its author -- himself a screenwriter -- in person.

"I was an unknown. I hadn't written anything of note," Towne says during a recent visit to San Francisco. According to Towne, Fante greeted the young fan with accusations like "What makes you think you're any kind of judge of my work?"

"He was hilariously rude," Towne says, speaking slowly and carefully working a cigar around in his lips.

But Fante's "tall, lovely wife Joyce," stepped in to save the day, saying, 'John he's a nice boy.' He's paying you a compliment.'

Towne continues. "We talked about the book, and I said, 'John, I think this is the best book about Los Angeles ever written. It's a much better book than The Day of the Locust. And he said, 'You're goddam right it is.'"

Towne and Fante became friends, and the author gave the young screenwriter not only the screen rights to Ask the Dust, but also a first edition, "which he signed to me in the hope that I would take it to far places."

Towne says he got hung up on Chinatown, then on Shampoo and a series of other projects. The rights lapsed, and in 1993 Towne found himself working for the new owner, Mel Brooks, writing the script gratis in exchange for the opportunity to direct.

Interestingly, Towne says that very little has changed since the original 1993 draft, except for some expanded scenes in the film's second half.

In adapting the novel, Towne found that he needed to take the book's love triangle and distill it closer to a two-way romance. In the book, the Italian writer is attracted to the Mexican barmaid, and the barmaid is attracted to a white man.

"In order to deal with the themes of racism in the book and make it dramatic, I felt that it had to be a real love story," he says. "Now they're attracted to one another, but repelled by their ethnic origins, so that there was something to overcome. They had to overcome their own prejudices, which had been imposed by the culture -- their own shame at being Mexican and Italian."

Back then, Johnny Depp expressed interest in playing the role of the author, but when Towne took the script to Salma Hayek, she turned it down on the basis that, if she played an illiterate Mexican barmaid at that stage of her career, she would be stuck in that role forever.

"Finally, Colin Farrell showed up on my doorstep, only he wasn't Colin Farrell -- he was just this Irish kid who had read the script and wanted to do it. And I liked him so much, I said OK," Towne says. "We still couldn't get it made with him, but thankfully three years later he became a movie star."

Meanwhile, Hayek made Frida (2002) and earned an Oscar nomination. "I think that gave her more freedom," Towne says. "She read it years later and said, 'I don't know why I turned it down to begin with.' At this point, I can't think of another actress in the role."

Ironically, Towne was unable to shoot 1930s Los Angeles in modern-day Los Angeles, at least for the film's small budget. So he and his stars worked for no money ("I mean no money," Towne says) in order to re-create the film's world in South Africa. They even built Bunker Hill on a high school football field in Capetown.

Now that the finished project has finally arrived in theaters, Towne muses on the idea of directing his own screenplays. He has worked with some of the greatest directors in the world (Roman Polanski, Arthur Penn, Brian De Palma, John Woo, etc.) and there are always things that the writer wishes had turned out differently.

Though Towne is crafty in phrasing his answer, he admits that he prefers directing his own scripts with one respect: "It's more satisfying to the extent that, if you don't like it, there's some relief in that. There's no one to blame but yourself."

February 7, 2006

Search for Robert Towne movie reviews
Home
News
Search Reviews
Classic Movies
DVDs
Features
Film Books
Gallery
Links
About
The Rating System
Email Me
All scribblings © 1997-2010 Combustible Celluloid