Interview with Robert Towne

Abstract

In this interview, legendary Hollywood screenwriter Robert Towne explains how discovering Ask the Dust influenced his writing. The novel’s depiction of 1930s Los Angeles and the era-specific dialogue of its characters helped inform his writing of the Academy Award-winning screenplay for Chinatown (1974). Wishing to go on and adapt Ask the Dust to the screen—a process that would end up taking decades—the young Towne sought out the novel’s aging, ill, and irascible Fante, earning a hard-won friendship that in his own advancing years Towne recalls with affection.