“Screenwriter Robert Towne and director Roman Polanski, working for the first time with a script not written by him, created a work of art disguised as a commercial movie,” says veteran film ...

Towne, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles at 89, won a single Oscar, for writing “that movie for Jack [Nicholson],” as Sam Wasson recounts in his 2020 book “The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the L ...