Robert Towne was a giant, a pillar of the new American cinema, arguably the greatest era in the medium’s short history. He was one of the movie kids, the first generation of filmmakers who went to film school and learned how to make movies by studying other movies.
He understood, as did everyone else, how the country had been torn apart by the backlash to Civil Rights and the two glorious years of progress in the late 1960s, which ultimately saw the assassination and burial of every major progressive leader who emerged in the United States, making the fatal mistake of promising to unite the poor against the rich.
The Movie Kids were the product of a relatively new idea that movies were not just a commodity, a product/pastime with sometimes incredible liquidity, but an art form and a political weapon that could capture and convey the spirit of an era.
After experiencing one of the few “downturns” at the end of the old Hollywood studio era, the town handed the keys to the kingdom to the “spoiled kids” – the arrogant, pretentious geniuses and other types of scholars who for a time, in their desperation, had the big commercial corporations investing in their eccentric pet projects.
One of the talents that Robert Towne turned to was none other than Tom Cruise. Now Tom’s success seems to reflect the enthusiastic mentorship of his predecessor Robert Towne!”