Widely regarded as one of the greatest screenwriters to emerge from the New Hollywood scene, Robert Towne picked up an Academy Award for Chinatown, penned and directed cult favorite Personal Best, and worked with Tom Cruise on Days of Thunder, The Firm, and not just one, but two Mission Impossibles. However, his first credit, 1960’s Last Woman on Earth, didn’t exactly suggest greatness ahead.
To be fair, Towne had barely any time to pen its three-hander screenplay, with the whole film very much an afterthought designed to literally cash in on a new Puerto Rican law. Filmmaker Roger Corman, who’d mentored him since they met at an acting class, had traveled to the Caribbean island following the launch of Operation Bootstrap, a tax-exempting initiative which Governor Luis Muñoz Marín hoped would boost the nation’s economy.
