Robert Towne

Sarah Morris
Robert Towne
2006
35mm / HD Digital
34:26 mins

“Robert Towne” is a portrait of a legendary Hollywood script-writer, director, producer and actor who was best known for his screenplays including Chinatown [1974], Shampoo [1975] and Personal Best [1982] and as a script doctor behind films such as Bonnie and Clyde [1967], The Parallax View [1974] and The Godfather [1972]. His works are marked by their moral ambivalence, realistic dialogue and ruthless dissection of cruel or corrupt systems of social authority. In Morris’s Robert Towne, the lens shift from a wide view of a city to an intimate portrait of an auteur. Morris describes him as an “elliptical figure” whose career exemplifies a certain characteristic mode of working in the film industry, marked by collaboration, shared or changing roles. The film examines the man whose work couples the surface of modern America’s economic and cultural success with a dark underbelly of conspiracies and individual power-relations and corporate corruption.