But rather than supply the City of Los Angeles with the water it had paid twenty-five million dollars for, the masterminds brought the aqueduct only as far as the north end of the San Fernando Valley, a hundred thousand acres of which they had clandestinely bought up a year earlier. The newly irrigated land, which they had purchased for a song, netted them an estimated profit of one hundred million dollars. They got rich, but the citizens of Los Angeles were robbed, Owens Valley land workers lost their livelihoods, hundreds of acres were decimated, and the “the rape of Owens Valley,” as McWilliams put it, persisted unvanquished. The bad guys won.
Reading on, Towne was overcome with indignation. This was living injustice, corruption on a massive scale. “When a crime can no longer contain or content itself with the past,” Towne said, “and insists on visiting the future it’s no longer a crime—it becomes a sin, and very difficult to punish.” A crime that happened, that is happening, right in front of our eyes.
* * *
In Los Angeles, developers were carving up the earth around Hutton Drive. To make room for a new middle-class neighborhood, hundreds of acres of mountains and wildlife were being bulldozed by seventy-foot Caterpillar D9s, blown apart by dynamite, and, it was evident to Payne and Towne, outmoded laws and nefarious loopholes—all to wrest a small section of private road from canyon residents. The developers had assured the residents of Hutton Drive they would cut a new road from Mulholland and keep off their driveway, but giant trucks and tractors kept rolling in, destroying, in succession, twelve mailboxes and any semblance of canyon peace. The noise was incessant and rubble was everywhere. “They’re dynamiting,” Payne said, “and patios are falling down, there’s dirt in the air, you can’t turn on your air conditioning, you can’t breathe. There are actually divorces.”
Payne, undaunted, started to investigate. She discovered that their city councilman, who was supposed to protect their interests, was developing a golf course one canyon over. “We started snooping around,” Payne said. “It turns out if you wanted to dynamite, you just go file the paperwork at the fire department.” The Benedict Canyon Association scraped together the money to file a California Supreme Court lawsuit against the development, and while they waited for their court date, seventeen different federations of canyons, drawing together in Benedict’s defense, were called in to forcibly block the developers out of the private road. Hundreds of cars parked at the bottom of Payne and Towne’s driveway, walling in a mammoth D9, and in retaliation a D9 dumped on Payne’s car as she was driving up the hill, and she slid dangerously.
“That drove me down to City Hall,” Towne said, “to see just exactly how City Hall worked.” There, at a meeting, he saw “how crooked and corrupt things were.” He watched as a prominent committee member, after mulling the improbable terms of the development, declared, incredibly, “This project is so bad, it will never get made. So I’m going to approve it.” Towne was dumbstruck. “The destruction of the city had been affecting me even then,” he said. “[The] city was so naturally beautiful, seeing it indiscriminately chewed up.… I mean, Los Angeles, more than most cities, seems to me to have always been a place where people never thought they would come to live but had to strike it rich and get out of there. It was a place to be mined, whether for gold or oil, or fame and Hollywood. You make your bundle and get out regardless of the collateral damage that’s done to the city.”
My God, he thought. My home. “Everybody’s out to make a buck,” he realized. “They’re hustling. They’re going to mine it until it runs dry.”
But there was nothing they could do. The noise, the devastation, the unceasing invasion raged on.
Towne, meanwhile, kept writing as best he could. Shampoo, the script he was still cowriting with Warren Beatty, was hitting red lights at every studio, but his adaptation of the novel The Last Detail—about a group of sailors escorting a maligned convict to jail—was proceeding at a healthy clip. In the script, Towne decided, his sailors would swear like actual sailors. The draft he turned into Columbia had as many as forty “motherfuckers,” Towne explained, “because it was actually an expression of their impotence. All one [could] do in the face of the injustice in there was swear.”
Columbia wouldn’t have it.
In a letter disseminated to the principals, executive Peter Guber presented the studio’s demands in no uncertain terms:
In the fight on the train, excise “fucking asshole” and “you fucking move.”
After the fight, Buddusky says, “He’s a fucking mess.”
In front of the café, Buddusky says, “Fuck the crowd,” and Mule says, “We’ll miss the fucking train.”
Inside the bar scene, take out the third “mother fucker.”
Etc.
In light of the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, the drugs in Easy Rider, the sex in Carnal Knowledge, in light of “this newfound freedom we suddenly had,” Towne said, it was flat-out regressive to stall a project in 1971 for profanity. The toppling of the Production Code, Hollywood’s cobwebbed bureau of self-censorship, had yielded an extraordinary wave of freer filmmaking that may have raised conservative eyebrows, but, as its strong box office indicated, was at long last luring Americans away from their televisions. For the first time since its inception, Hollywood was a young business again. But Columbia’s David Begelman—at fifty, the oldest studio head in power—apparently hadn’t gotten the message.
“Bob,” asked Begelman, “would twenty ‘motherfuckers’ be more dramatic than forty ‘motherfuckers’?”
“Yes, David, but the swearing is not used for dramatic emphasis. It’s used to underline the impotence of these men who will do nothing but swear even though they know they’re doing something unjust by taking this poor, neurotic little kid to jail for eight years for stealing forty bucks.”
Columbia held its stance. “[It] was,” Towne said, “a sort of Mexican standoff.” Jack Nicholson, who by now had considerable leverage, stood by Towne and his script. The Last Detail would be made their way or not at all.
And outside Towne’s home-office window the Caterpillar D9s chewed up more earth. “We lived that way,” Payne said, “for four years” while they waited for the movie to be made.
* * *
Towne needed money.
To self-finance the writing of the detective movie he envisioned for Nicholson, he took a quick job with Francis Ford Coppola, a friend from their Roger Corman days. On the phone, a panicked Coppola told Towne he was about to lose Brando and still didn’t like the scene he had written, late in The Godfather, where Don Corleone and Michael speak father to son, master and apprentice. As written, the scene was too explicit. The emotion, Coppola said, needed to be underneath the words, not in them. Towne dropped everything and flew to New York, where he looked at the rushes and conferred with Pacino and Brando for ideas. “Just once,” Brando told him, “I want Vito not to be inarticulate. He’s talking to his son; he’s telling the truth; he’d know what he has to say.” Towne raced back to the hotel, ate some deli, and wrote from ten that night till four-thirty the next morning, Coppola picked him up at seven, and they hurried to the set. Pages in hand, Brando read his new dialogue aloud: “I refused to be a fool, dancing on the string held by all those big shots. I don’t apologize—that’s my life—but I thought that, that when it was your time, that you would be the one to hold the string.” The “string” Towne got from the jacket of Mario Puzo’s novel. Coppola liked it, they rehearsed it, they shot it. Towne flew home, the rescuer. He said: “It’s like the relief pitcher in baseball coming into the game with the bases loaded.”