Robert Towne, Screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and More, Dies at 89

Mr. Towne was no stranger to the pleasures and perils of that hedonistic time. His first marriage, to the actress Julie Payne, ended bitterly after he had affairs with both Patrice Donnelly and Mariel Hemingway, who co-starred as track athletes in the first film he directed, the 1982 box-office flop “Personal Best.” (There were also rumors of rampant cocaine use on the set.) His career began a long decline at about the same time, although he never stopped writing.

Mr. Towne was born Robert Bertram Schwartz on Nov. 23, 1934, in Los Angeles, and spent his early years in the blue-collar fishing port of San Pedro, Calif. When he was about 7, he saw his first movie, “Sergeant York.” He later said he got hooked on movies that day.

His father, Lou, owned a women’s clothing store but had his eye on bigger things. He changed the family name from Schwartz to Towne, got into the real estate business, and eventually moved with his wife, Helen, and their two sons to the gated community of Rolling Hills in affluent Palos Verdes, Calif.

Robert attended the exclusive Chadwick School there, then studied philosophy and English at Pomona College, graduating in 1956. While taking an acting class, he met another aspiring thespian, Jack Nicholson. The two would become close friends and collaborators, although they would eventually fall out over the making of a sequel to “Chinatown.”

Mr. Towne began his career writing for television shows like “The Outer Limits” and “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and for Roger Corman’s B-movie factory. He both wrote and acted in “The Last Woman on Earth” (1960), a typically bare-bones Corman production. More prestigious work, much of it uncredited rewrites of others’ scripts, soon followed.

His “Chinatown” Oscar did not come without agony. The movie focuses on a private eye, Jake Gittes (Mr. Nicholson), who uncovers a complicated scheme by which power brokers in 1930s Los Angeles plan to get rich by controlling the drought-stricken city’s water supply. The movie’s dark undertow comes from Gittes’s discovery that the murdered water commissioner’s wife, Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), gave birth to a daughter after being raped by her diabolical father, Noah Cross (John Huston).