By Paul Freeman [1988 Interview]

Robert Towne penned the screenplays for "Chinatown," its sequel "The Two Jakes," Hal Ashby's "The Last Detail" and "Shampoo," plus the first two "Mission: Impossible movies. Towne wrote and directed the sports dramas "Personal Best"and "Without Limits."

We interviewed him in 1988, upon the release of the crime thriller "Tequila Sunrise," starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell. Towne wrote and directed the film.

"When you're hell-bent on attacking evil, whether it's in the form of communism or drugs, it's important not to lose sight of the fact that if you live too long with the thought that you must wipe them out at all costs, you'll wind up with nothing worthwhile left to preserve," Robert Towne says. "Personal relationships, friendships, loyalties, all those values you were trying to save at the outset, you end up destroying."

Towne's writing often has dealt with the erosion of traditional values. He contributed to "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Godfather," co-wrote "Shampoo" and "The Yakuza," received an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of "The Last Detail" and won an Oscar for his original screenplay of "Chinatown."

He made his directorial debut with 1981's "Personal Best," which he also wrote and produced. It featured Mariel Hemingway as an aspiring Olympic athlete.

With his new film, a potent concoction called "Tequila Sunrise," which he wrote and directed, Towne returns to darker themes. Unlike "Chinatown, however, this tale is not without a hint of optimism.

At the core of the movie is the relationship between a pair of former high school buddies. One (Kurt Russell) became a cop, the other (Mel Gibson), a middleman in the narcotics trade. The drug merchant wants to go straight. The detective would like to help him, but the Drug Enforcement Agency will go to any lengths to protect the greater good.

The voltage meter jumps, when the two friends get involved with the same woman (Michelle Pfeiffer). In a tangled situation, where nothing is as it seems, she must determine whose needs and emotions are genuine.

Towne, 53, with wavy, ragged gray locks and salt-and-pepper beard, sips Perrier as he explains that he wrote the part of the cop with Russell in mind. "I had known him casually. In fact, he turned down the role of the coach in 'Personal Best,' which Scott Glenn ended up playing. I got to know Kurt through Goldie [Hawn, Russell's longtime love]. She had been a close friend of mine since we did 'Shampoo' together.

From socializing with Kurt, I observed things about him that I had never seen on film. He was engaging and unexpected and a hell of a lot of fun. I thought, 'I'm going to take this guy I've seen clowning around in Goldie's living room and put him in a movie. It'll be more interesting than anything he's done."

While the studio bickered with Towne over the selection of the folksy Russell as the tough, urban cop, a number of stars were considered for the role of the drug dealer, until Gibson was chosen. "Now it seems, in my mind, that nobody else could play that part," Towne says. "That character is in the classic tradition of the gunfighter trying to hang up his guns. Gibson has a combination of intensity, volatility and innocence. The audience believes everything he says. Without ever having him come out and say it, they trust that he's trying to do the right thing."

Onscreen, Russell and Gibson illuminate their characters' bond. "Because you went to high school with someone doesn't mean you can trade on that experience forever," Towne says. "You can't take friendship for granted. It's a living thing. The moment's going to come when these two men are going to have to make an existential choice: Are we still friends? Does the past matter to me?"

In creating this character, Towne conferred with a high school pal of his own, now a narcotics detective. What the filmmaker learned startled him.

"Very often, not just with old buddies, the people that cops are closest to are the criminals. They have a great deal in common. Even though the cop hates what the criminal stands for, think's he's dirty, there is a link there. They have shared experiences. They understand each other's problems.

"The most manipulative guy in the movie is the cop. He's fundamentally a decent man, but he has to lie and cheat in order to do the right thing. In his own way, his profession is just as personally corrupting as a hideous job like dealing drugs."

After moviegoers figure out who's doing what to whom in "Tequila Sunrise," they'll have to ponder the question of where to draw the line between right and wrong.

"We live in too much moral ambiguity," Towne says. "I remember a 'L'il Abner' where there was a can of poisoned beans somewhere in the country. So beans became illegal. Fearless Fosdick went around shooting everyone who tried to buy a can. There was one poisoned can and he's killing thousands of people. That's the reductio ad absurdum. There comes a time when you've got to evaluate your value system and say, 'Enough already.'

"In the 60s, this whole country got hooked on the idea that recreational drugs were a great thing to do. The dealer in the movie is no better or worse than anybody else. He went into it without considering the damage it might be doing. If you or I were Rip Van Winkle and fell asleep in 1968 and woke up in '88 and learned that drugs were an unqualified evil and could kill you, we'd probably want to go back to sleep.

"Those of us growing up in the 60s did a lot of things without thinking about the consequences. Time catches up with us and we think, 'Jesus! What's the matter with us?' But you can't obsessively blame the past as the source of evil in your life. A drunken binge is a symptom, not the root of a problem. You have to focus on what you can transform into positives.

"That's why the 'Just Say No' concept is lacking. It's a constrictive, puritanical notion to suggest that evil is in something other than yourself. You can't tell people to just say no. You've got to give some idea of what to say yes to."

Towne's cinematic ideas have fascinated countless film students. His script for "Chinatown" is used in scriptwriting classes as an example of perfect structure.

"There's a guy who charges a lot of money for this course on the principles of screenwriting, based on 'Chinatown' and 'Casablanca.' I thought, 'Jesus Christ! Maybe I ought to enroll! I might learn something.' I'm not being glib. I'm serious, because when you're writing, you're not doing it by any formula. It's like diving into a quagmire and when you resurface, you've got something. What the hell happens while you're down there, you don't know."

There is some organization to Towne's writing process, however. "I start telling a story to friends. After telling it enough times, it has some vague sort of shape. Then I reduce that to an outline and go from there to note cards, detailing scenes. At that point, I ignore what I've put down and let the characters wander through the structure, tampering with it to their hearts' content. It changes greatly as they become more realized, finding their own way. So, for me, it's a combination of sometimes leading, sometimes following."

Towne bears many wounds from battles he's fought in morally ambiguous Hollywood. He weathered major disputes on "Personal Best," Greystoke," "Tequila Sunrise" and projects sill in limbo. "Two Jakes," the long-awaited sequel to "Chinatown," finally will be shot in the spring, with Jack Nicholson starring and directing. Towne says he will assist in any way he can. The studios' maddening value system hasn't left him drowning in cynicism or bitterness.

"Personally, those conflicts hurt and discouraged me a great deal," he admits. "But the funny thing is, as I look at it now, I can see that the things I wrote in the 70s, which were made with much less difficulty, were a lot more pessimistic than my more recent work, such as "Tequila Sunrise." The whole experience probably made me want to write movies with happier endings."