Does Robert Towne’s ‘Chinatown’ Oscar Need an Asterisk?

The advance obituary is an odd little literary mongrel. If it involves an interview, there is a tacit understanding between the interviewer and the subject that the substance of the interview, like the story of the subject’s life, won’t see print until the subject has had the decency to drop dead.

Most subjects take this in stride, part of the price of being a noteworthy person. For instance, when I interviewed Keith Botsford, a longtime friend and collaborator of Saul Bellow’s, for a planned New York Times obit, he was cordial, forthcoming, witty. The man was a born storyteller, and he was obviously delighted to be given one last chance to tell the story of his life in his own way. Four years after that interview, Botsford died at 90, and the obituary ran last summer.

I had a very different experience when I got assigned to write the advance obit of , now 85, the screenwriter who won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for in 1975. When I called Towne’s agent in Los Angeles to ask if he could arrange a telephone interview, the man was aghast. “That’s so ” he said. “I would ask Robert to agree to be interviewed for his own obituary. What are you thinking?” As I hung up the phone, I was thinking that people in Lala Land are all soft in the head. I wrote the obit without ever talking to Towne.