But the people, it seemed, no longer wanted people. In 1974 critic Stephen Farber warned of “Hollywood’s New Sensationalism,” a post-Exorcist trend toward “gaudier and more lurid” pictures predicated on sensation and visceral shock, a regression that historian Tom Gunning compared to film’s earliest, primitive period (1895–1906), a “cinema of attractions” that preceded the advent of narrative.
“One thing,” Evans told Bluhdorn. “If you’re going to fire me, I want you to do one thing.”
“What?”
“Hire Dick Sylbert as my replacement.”
No production designer had ever headed production at a major movie studio.
“He has taste, Charlie. He has elegance, taste, and glamour. And he’ll bring the best to the Mountain, Charlie, because he is the best. If you don’t hire Dick Sylbert, I’m not leaving!”
Bluhdorn agreed.
Of his own accord, Peter Bart left the studio. He had no intention of working for Diller, a thirty-three-year-old television executive, creator of Movie of the Week, who admitted to Bart he “didn’t really know the movies.”
“We’re gonna do great work together,” Evans gamely enthused to Diller. “Michael Douglas has a great project, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We should get in.”
“No one wants to see those movies.”
“Five million.”
“Bob—”
“Jack’s interested. Ashby’s interested.”
“Bob,” Diller said: “You work for me.”
* * *
Julie Payne felt the change. Something was happening at Hutton Drive. It was the one-two-three punch of Last Detail, Chinatown, and, early in 1975, Shampoo. Their phone now rang incessantly with calls from Robert’s associates, old and new, genuine and obsequious, with invitations to dinner, to parties, to tennis at Woodland, offers to write or rewrite. Dino De Laurentiis would pay Towne a hundred thousand dollars and unlimited Cuban cigars to write a single voice-over; Calley would give Towne more—money and an office at Warner Bros. and a title—just to read and report on scripts. Sue Mengers called, offering Towne a permanent seat at her dining room table. Evans wanted to know what was next for Mr. Shakespeare. White Dog, an adaptation of a Romain Gary novel? The sequel to Chinatown? What else?
Pauline Kael came to Los Angeles, lavishing Towne with adoration. Julie picked her up at the Beverly Wilshire and took her to lunch and dinner. “She was allergic to the sun,” Payne said. “She always looked like a beekeeper.” She talked, talked, talked that trip, but she didn’t want to talk Chinatown; she was crazy for Shampoo. Shampoo, she wrote, got Los Angeles better than Chinatown: “Los Angeles itself, the sprawl-city, opens the movie up, and the L.A. sense of freedom makes its own comment on the scrambling characters.” Towne, Beatty, and Ashby nailed “the emotional climate of the time and place. Los Angeles has become what it is because of the bright heat, which turns people into narcissists and sensuous provcateurs.” Her review was a singular rave for Robert Towne, a reinterpreter of old forms, “a great new screenwriter in a structured tradition—a flaky classicist.” He had at last shed the shackles of credited and uncredited script doctor and come into his own, a writer with a point of view, distinctly late-sixties American, boiled soft, not Watergate hard: “Towne’s heroes,” Kael wrote, “if we can take Gittes, of Chinatown, and [Shampoo’s] George, here, as fair examples, are hip to conventional society, and they assume that they reject its dreams. But in some corner of their heads they think that maybe the old romantic dream can be made to work.” She had a little crush, Payne thought, on Robert.
That year, all of Hollywood did. The phone at Hutton Drive once rang seventeen times in twenty minutes. But between rings their little house on the hill, formerly hushed with writer’s intention, took on strange new silences, edgy and absent of purpose. Payne filled them with concerns. She wavered over the big parties she didn’t want to host or attend, the coming hazards of fame and temptation, her own memories of neglect, the silences of her childhood on Beverly Drive. An old chord struck. She was scared.
She heard he had brought another woman to the Chinatown screening at the DGA. The one he asked her not to attend.
Towne didn’t seem to notice. His spectacular momentum powered him through awards season. So richly nominated, and a veritable shoo-in, he didn’t worry. He blazed. For the BAFTAs in London, Anthea made him a magnificent three-piece tuxedo, paid for by Evans, and Evans installed him and Julie in the resplendent Cecil Beaton Suite of the Connaught Hotel, arranging for a Rolls-Royce to ferry them to and from the ceremony, where he would be not once but twice nominated, for Chinatown and The Last Detail, which had opened in London only that year.
At the BAFTAs Towne was not seated with Polanski: “I said I wouldn’t work with him,” he laughed to Julie. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t have dinner with him!”
Spotting Towne across the room, Polanski bounded over and, putting their war in the past, joined in the laughter. It was that kind of night, for Chinatown was fast becoming that kind of movie: Towne won Best Screenplay honors, as writer of the year, for both The Last Detail and Chinatown; Nicholson won Best Actor for both; and Polanski, for Chinatown, won Best Director.
They were on a roll. That year, 1974, Polanski and Towne would win Golden Globes, as would the film itself, for Best Picture. At the New York Film Critics Circle Awards, held at Elaine’s—New York’s legendary literary hangout—Towne and Nicholson would win again, and celebrate back at the Carlyle in beyond-belief suites once again provided by Evans, their benefactor. “He would just give his friends everything,” Payne said. Back in Los Angeles, Towne would claim the Writers Guild Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen.
Thus it was no surprise when Chinatown received eleven Oscar nominations. The surprise was just how many nominations Paramount had received—an astonishing forty-three. No one could remember the last time a single studio so dominated the nominations, or had all five nominations in a single category—in this case, Best Costume Design—ever gone to a single studio, Paramount again. That year, three of the five Best Picture nominees—The Godfather Part II, Chinatown, and The Conversation—were Paramount’s. It was by any estimation Hollywood’s greatest showing of the decade; in 1974 the box office had reached a record $1.9 billion, and the films themselves, as evidenced by the nominees—Lenny, A Woman Under the Influence, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Harry and Tonto, Young Frankenstein, Hearts and Minds, Phantom of the Paradise, Murder on the Orient Express—were, in their way, winners all. Even the unnominated of 1974—among them Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, California Split, The Gambler, Parallax View, The Sugarland Express, Thieves Like Us, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three—showed what a great year it was for Hollywood.
In retrospect 1974 represents the final flowering of a film garden passionately tended by liberated studio executives and an unspoken agreement between audiences and filmmakers. As Towne had once observed, the American films of World War II benefited from shared beliefs; now, “there was a common assumption that something was wrong,” he said, “in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate and assassinations and riots” that gave rise to “a hunger on both sides for something new” and produced a Hollywood year as powerful as 1974. But the poison was in the perfume: These films, Towne said, “did their jobs too well. There was”—presently—“nothing left to expose.”