RIP Robert Towne, who crystallised the ‘ideal’ of the genius 70s screenwriter. Everyone is going to mention Chinatown, of course, but I am more likely to rewatch The Last Detail, a rough, heartbreaking piece of realism that goes against the times and does something timeless.
Dipped briefly back into twitter & saw one of the few accounts I miss from there, John Frankensteiner, posting about how Towne hated the movie Greystoke so much he credited his script to his dog, who then went on to win an Oscar.
I watched The Last Detail thinking “Well, all this military stuff will probably bore me to death but I’m in a Nicholson-completist mood” & it blew me away.
It’s still extraordinary to me that there was that brief period when Hollywood would greenlight films that actually expressed some of the rot at the heart of the dominant culture & its institutions, & by God they’re never letting that happen again.
I’m still holding out hope that there will be again in the future, but we have to get through this whole period of even deeper institutional/cultural rot first. Just call me a cockeyed optimist.
Oh absolutely. We have Bong Joon-Ho, Sean Baker, Jordan Peele, Andrea Arnold, Claire Denis, etc etc. But the era of giant releases for difficult films like this isn’t coming back, i think.
