Robert Towne, who has died aged 89, wrote a dazzling hat-trick of screenplays that helped define the great American cinema of the 1970s: The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975). He also did extravagantly paid work as a script doctor, adding a scene or a few pages of dialogue to other writers’ screenplays, or completing what is known in the industry as a “polish”.
If a script was flawed or lacking, directors and studios went to Towne. “You must adopt the first precept of Hippocrates, which is to do no harm,” he said about this sideline. “You try to extend the material, not to impose yourself on it.” Sometimes, as with The Godfather (1971), he could provide a pick-me-up to a patient that was already fighting fit. In other cases, such as Armageddon (1998), he could do little more than slap a sticking plaster on a broken leg.
