Last month I had the honor of opening the NoirCon convention of dark mystery writers and fans by introducing and commenting on a screening of Chinatown.
One of the questions I dealt with was the authorship of this, the greatest of all film noirs. The long-acknowledged writer of the screenplay is, of course, the celebrated Robert Towne. Legendary for his uncredited efforts on Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather and for his authorship of other masterworks like The Last Detail and Shampoo, Towne won the Academy Award for Best Writing for his work on Chinatown, but the story turns out to have been much more complicated than that.
Let me tell it to you from a personal point of view. When I first came to Hollywood as an intern on a film called The Last Married Couple in America, John Herman Shaner, the production’s screenwriter, took me under his wing and shared some of the things he’d learned during his decades in Tinseltown.
It turned out that John was close friends with Jack Nicholson. In fact, he’d been roommates with Jack during their days at Roger Corman’s studio—the best film school in the world. Their other roomies? Robert Towne and a guy named Ed or Ned or Ted.
For evidence of the truth of John’s claims, check out the original Little Shop of Horrors. John, I discovered some years later, had played the dentist, and Jack, his pain-loving patient. There’s also the fact that he wrote Goin’ South, the film that introduced Mary Steenburgen, for his old friend. There is, in other words, good reason to take what John had to say seriously.
Here’s what he told me. Of the four friends, Ed or Ned or Ted was by far the most brilliant, the most talented of the four, and yet he alone failed to make any kind of mark on film history. What, I wondered for decades, ever happened to that fourth man?
The answer came a few years ago with the publication of Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye, an account of the making of Chinatown and of its status as the last great flowering of the film Renaissance that took place in the late sixties and early seventies. In it Wasson reveals that Towne had an unacknowledged collaborator on Chinatown and virtually all of his other work. The identity of that collaborator? His Pomona College roommate, Edward Taylor.
It seems that Towne, who was notorious for his compulsive re-writing and his inability to finish his screenplays, went to Taylor whenever he came up against a problem. According to Wasson, who documents his work carefully and is working from interviews with Towne’s ex-wife, Taylor’s step-daughter and several mutual friends, Taylor was the virtual co-author of Chinatown…along, of course, with director Roman Polanski, who did extensive rewrites, eliminating confusing sub-plots, focusing the screenplay, maintaining Giddes’ point of view exclusively, and completely reconceiving the ending.
Ed or Ned or Ted—Edward Taylor, for all Wasson’s documentation, remains a mystery. A man without ego or ambition? A man who loved writing for the screen but cared not a whit for acknowledgment of his contributions? A man to whom fame and fortune meant nothing but for whom friendship meant everything? One thing for certain, he was, all his life, an invisible man. It is only now, after his death and that of his friend Towne, that we are starting to see him and to recognize his talent.
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