Fresh Air - Remembering Actor Martin Mull And Screenwriter Robert Towne

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Martin Mull, who died June 27, appeared in the 1970s series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and later starred in Fernwood 2 Night. David Bianculli offers an appreciation, then we revisit Terry Gross' 1995 interview with Mull. Robert Towne, who died July 1, was nominated for an Oscar in 1974 for his screenplay for The Last Detail, and won the Academy Award in 1975 for his screenplay for Chinatown. He spoke to Terry Gross in 1988.Justin Chang reviews A Quiet Place: Day One.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. Today, we're starting off by remembering Martin Mull, the comedian, musician, actor, and artist who died last Thursday at age 80. We'll feature portions of an interview between Mull and Terry Gross from 1995, and we'll begin with this appreciation. Martin Mull was born in Chicago in 1943 and grew up in Ohio and Connecticut. In college, he earned bachelor's and master's

degrees in fine art and painted throughout his life. But Martin Mull became famous as a musician, comedian, and actor. Martin Mull played electric and acoustic guitar, singing his own compositions in his signature sardonic style, Songs such as this. Don't put off till tomorrow What you can do today Don't leave things half finished Thank you. Thank you very much. That's all I've ever done on that. I should probably finish it up. You seem to like it.

Over the years, Mull released several comedy albums with music and served as the opening act for more successful musicians who loved his sense of humor, from Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel to Randy Newman and Frank Zappa. And TV talk show hosts loved him too. He was both a guest and a guest host on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show and also appeared on talk shows hosted by David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, and Craig Ferguson. That's partly because before any of them but Carson was presiding over and deconstructing the talk show format, Martin Mull was doing the same thing, brilliantly, in the late 1970s.

Mull's first job on television as an actor was on Norman Lear's groundbreaking parody of a daytime soap opera. It was a syndicated series called Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, set in the mythical town of Fernwood, Ohio. Mull played a physically abusive husband named Garth Gimble, a despicable misogynist character who met a well-deserved but untimely death. He was accidentally impaled on an aluminum Christmas tree. So Garth Gimble was dead.

But Lear so loved Martin Mull as a performer that he built an entirely new series around him. It was a spin-off called Fernwood Tonight, a parody of a local TV talk show. Mull played smarmy talk show host Barth Gimbel, the twin brother of Garth. Barth's second banana, the hilariously clueless Jerry Hubbard, was played by the great Fred Willard. The two did a lot of improv, making Fernwood Tonight a precursor to such shows as Curb Your Enthusiasm. And in making fun of the backstage as well as onstage elements of the talk show format, Mull's series predated, by an entire generation,

the brilliance of Gary Shandling on The Larry Sanders Show. In addition, Fernwood Tonight was mining comedy from a lot more than just a TV show. In addition, Fernwood Tonight was mining comedy from a lot more than just a TV show. Everything seemed to be fair game. Even such subsequently iffy concepts as poking fun at small-town insulation and prejudice. By having Barth and his sidekick Jerry open the phone lines so their viewers could ask questions

of a very rare visitor to Fernwood. Hello, talk to a Jew. You're on the air. Is this the Jew? No, no, no, no, no way. No, no. This is Barth Gimbel. The Jew is sitting beside me to my right. Would you like to talk to him? No, it's okay. I'll talk to you and you can give him this message. Gladly. I'd like to know when Barbra Streisand's next movie will be out.

Okay. You heard that over the speaker here, so okay. You can go right ahead. Well, I don't know, but I'd like to see it myself, though. I think she's very good. You must be very proud of her. Yes. Yes, I am.

Okay? Okay. Thank you. You're Uh, yes. Yes, I am. Okay? Uh, uh, okay. Thank you. You're welcome, dear. Boy, this is popular. Hello. Talk to a Jew. You're on the air.

Uh, I'd like to know why Mr. Rose isn't wearing the beanie. You heard the question. It's about the alleged beanie, whatever she's referring to. I think the call is referring to the yarmulke that's usually worn on the head by very religious Jews or when we're in the synagogue. And it's when you're in the synagogue that you wear the ones without the propeller? Jerry! Fernwood Tonight wasn't a hit, but it was a cult sensation. A year later, Norman Lear altered the setting and upgraded the premise

to a national talk show called America Tonight. Carol Burnett, Burt Lancaster, and Charlton Heston eagerly came aboard. And by the time America Tonight was over in 1978, Mull's career was launched. He appeared as himself in the 1980s revival specials by the Smothers Brothers, hired not in spite of his push-the-envelope comic approach, but because of it. Good evening. The fact that you have chosen to watch the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour this evening is proof enough for me that you are among the best and brightest of the American people. You demand the truth, and why shouldn't you?

Openness, frankness, and candor have always flourished on this Mother's Brothers stage. It is in that spirit that I now say to you what I must. It's time to lay to rest this entire Brothers business. They are not brothers. It has all just been a big lie, an elaborate masquerade, if you will. And why? Well, quite simply, because 30 years ago, people took a pretty dim view of two grown men living together. Sharing a common lifestyle, dressing alike, and singing children's songs.

That was then. Thank God, now is now. And we have finally come to see that the true measure of a man is not what he does behind closed doors, but rather what he says he was doing. Join me then, won't you, in accepting and enjoying Mr. Dick Smothers and his lovely wife, Tommy. From that point on, Martin Mull made a career out of being hired for TV shows and movies by comics, writers, and directors who treasured his particularly dry and offbeat sense of humor. Gary Shandling had him on Larry Sanders. Roseanne Barr hired him for several seasons of her hit ABC sitcom, Roseanne, playing her boss,

who was gay and whose partner was played by none other than Fred Willard. On film, Mull worked opposite Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire and Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom, and co-starred in the comic version of Clue. Ellen DeGeneres and Bonnie Hunt hired him for their sitcoms. So did Julia Louis-Dreyfus for Veep, in which her White House occupant, Selina Meyer, consulted a foul-mouthed veteran political operative named Bob

to advise her and her staff. Bob, for several episodes, was played by Martin Mull. Bob, what do you think? Are we going to win this thing? I mean, really, honestly, your true gut. Well, Madam President, I've got big balls, but neither one of them are crystal. Oh, darn it. This reminds me of something that Dick Nixon used to say to Henry Kissinger back when that tricky son of a bitch was trying to get us out of that messy business called Vietnam.

Vietnam, right. He would say, Henry, I can lead a horse to water, but I can't milk it. Milk it? I don't even know what that means. I love it. That was in 2016, when even on the looser standards of HBO, Martin Mull could swing for the comic fences, which he had done for his entire career. Back in 1995, the gay characters played by Mull and Willard were married on Roseanne, nearly 20 years before Modern Family, another ABC sitcom,

married its gay couple, Cam and Mitch, to great fanfare. Also back in 1995, Martin Mull released a book called Martin Mull Paintings, Drawings, and Words and had a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. That's when Terry spoke with Martin Mull. You've said that to say that art school changed my life would be a vast understatement. It created it. How did art school change your life? Well, gee, let's see. I'm sure that's probably more literate than it need be,

but I actually do feel very much that way. I grew up in northern Ohio in a very small little agrarian community and was wearing, you know, jeans and muddy boots to school. And then I moved to Connecticut for two years and all of a sudden everyone was in a Mercedes and in a crew neck sweater that cost more than my father made a year. And then finally went to art school again. And all of a sudden, everyone was back in jeans and muddy boots. And I thought, well, that's more like it. And I realized that I could be an adult in that world. And the kind of questions that had kind of kept me an outsider prior to that were now not only acceptable, but necessary. And it seemed like I actually blossomed at the time. I felt like I

became alive then. So is there any connection to be made between your paintings and your comic persona? Well, I would have to say that my comic persona paid for almost all of the paint used in the making of these works, And if that sounds like a flip answer, it's actually more true than you might imagine. So you weren't making money selling paintings? No, not for a long time. And initially, my forays into show business were simply to fund my art.

That while I was in college during the folk music scare of the 60s, when that stuff almost caught on, I, like everyone else, was playing guitar. And once I got my master's degree, realized there was nothing but, there was no doctorate, there was nothing but earning a decent living and facing the Vietnam draft at that point.

I had to figure out something to do with myself, so I started playing music full-time. That led to singing, where I'm a dreadful singer, so that led to talking a lot. And all of this has been kind of a comedy of errors and a series of delightful accidents that I've been able to put a roof over my family doing what I do. So how did you go about fashioning a persona for yourself? Well, part of my performance persona, I think, was fashioned after other performers, and especially other performers who seemed to be up the creek without a paddle, the ones that were totally at a loss. By that, I would mean very local radio or television

personalities. Hence, when I did Fernwood Tonight, the host of that show was one of these people who was an under-equipped, over-achieving performer. That was the kind of persona I wanted to go for. Over-equipped, under-achieving. Yes.

What do you mean? No, you have it just the opposite. It was under-equipped and over-achieving. Oh, somebody who's getting by on very little talent. Someone's squeezing by on very little talent and trying to make the most of it. And, gee, that may be close to the truth. You also developed this kind of like smug, oily public persona in some of your performances. Well, that would come hand in glove with what I just said.

Right. some of your performances? Well, that would come hand in glove to what I just said, the under-equipped, but overachieving and refusing to, just undaunted in his ability to ever admit to his failures. And there's also this sense of, in some of the performances, the really square person who thinks he's really hip. Exactly. Or that he's not only hip, but a major success, even when he's not. I recall once there was a concert when, put it this way, crowd control was not one of our problems. Right. Where I think there were only about eight or 10 people in the audience that would have held about 25,000 or something. And my persona on stage, I immediately said something to the audience about how grateful I was that we did this by invite something. And my persona on stage, I immediately said something to the audience about how grateful I was that we did this by invite only. And I certainly didn't want the rest of

that riffraff here. And I'm glad you all could show up. And it's sort of like taking that making a virtue of your vice. Let's return to Terry's 1995 interview with actor, comic, and painter Martin Mull, who died last week at age 80. His first acting job was playing a despicable, abusive husband on Norman Lear's 1970s syndicated series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which poked fun at soap operas like Peyton Place. Terry asked him how he got that job. I had gone out to California on the heels of a divorce with a couple of guitars and a suitcase and had been a big fan of Mary Hartman and went to see Norman Lear's organization about the possibility of writing for them,

because I had at that point fancied myself capable of doing that and was told that there were no openings and forget it. But I did meet Norman, And then six months later, the part of Garth Gimbel, the wife abuser, came up and they asked me to come in and read for it. And lo and behold, I got the part. And it was somewhat terrifying in that the reason I wanted to be connected with the show is I thought it was absolutely hilarious and that what work I had done as a comedian on stage might stand me in fairly good stead to at least cut my teeth as an actor doing something funny. Unfortunately, the role I got of a wife abuser, I personally, as I sit here right now and at the time as well, find nothing whatsoever

amusing about wife abuse. So it was really learning to act a little bit by being thrown in the icy waters. So how did you get around this? I looked desperately for anything to try to take the focus off that which I was and that which I was doing. There was one scene, in fact, when I actually even had to, at least the camera had to think that I had actually struck this woman. And it was around a Christmas time, and I grabbed for a little, like, paper mache Frosty the Snowman to use as a weapon or anything like that to try to take the onus off it and the sting off it. But I recall at the end of that scene being in a state where I actually had to just go for a very, very long walk. It was horrible. Fernwood Tonight was, I think, one of the early examples of television mocking itself.

At its lowest. Well, TV mocking its own programs. The cheesy, small-town, amateur version of The Tonight Show. Exactly. And why don't you describe your character as the host? His name was Barth Gimbel. He would wear lime-colored sharkskin suits and atrocious shirts, Hawaiian shirts, bleached his hair, trimmed his mustache down like Don Amici,

and basically thought, as far as he was concerned, that he was God's gift to the airwaves. And my co-host was Fred Willard, who was probably one of the best improvisational minds of our any generation. And between the two of us, we basically set television back a quantum leap. Well, after, you know, Mocking TV on A Friend With Tonight and Mary Hartman and everything, you ended up where you are now on Roseanne, you know, one of the top-rated shows for years, the top-rated show, playing Leon, who you got hired to be her boss. Right. How did you get on Roseanne?

Well, at that time, Roseanne and Tom Arnold, who was her husband, lived a few doors away. I had known Rosie for a couple of years prior to that. We had done some local talk shows and were just kind of friendly as we met each other on the street kind of thing. He mentioned that there was a possibility, would Roseanne like, would I like to come on and play Roseanne's boss? And since at that point I was not on a series and it was the number one show on television, that was probably one of the dumbest questions that has ever been asked me. You know, I just was basically,

when, where, how much, I'm there. So I took the job without even another thought. He then mentioned that there was going to be something unique about my character, in this case, that I was gay. And I am not in real life, but I thought a bit about this. And my real concern, however, was that people from the gay community might feel very short-shrifted

because, you know, there are so many capable actors that could have played the part, and here they go and get a straight guy to play this, and that I could take a lot of heat and a lot of flack for that. But on the contrary, we've actually won awards for the portrayal of Leon Karp. And so I feel very good about that. Now, I want to go back to 1980, which I think is the year that you were diagnosed with terminal cancer. Yeah. I guess they were wrong. Yeah, they were. And the Marcus Welby Award for Bedside Manor has to go to this bozo from UCLA who called me up and gave me two years to live over the phone. Oh, no. Which right there, it occurred to me, could be cause of death. Wow.

You know, phone call, cause of death. That's what the autopsy would have to list. I mean, to get this kind of news over the phone, I don't know. And they were all set to inject me with some sort of cow bacillus, something that Elsie Borden is running around with out in her limbs, and you know the kind of spots they have on their skin. So it turned out that actually my dermatologist had gotten all of it, but it was at that point diagnosed as terminal melanoma, and needless to say, gave me great pause. It also tended to shift my gears rather dramatically

in terms of where I was going to focus my energies. So how did you change gears after you were given this prognosis? Well, painting became the most important thing in my life at that point. Why? Because I realized it was probably the truest thing to me that it was, it was the area where I wanted to do the most work. I also shifted my, my, uh, my marital situation changed. I, I shortly thereafter remarried, uh, my wife, Wendy, whom I have a lovely nine-year-old daughter and, uh, just kind of got my ducks in a row and put my values where I think they should be.

Now, have you over the years showed the people who you worked with in show business your paintings? And I could think of a couple of reasons why. One is so that they could be very impressed with your work. Another is so they could just learn more about you. And still a third is some people in show business are very wealthy and maybe they'd buy some. Well, number three, I would reverse the order. The nice thing about some of the people in show business is they are kind of depression proof. They do have this kind of slush fund that allows for the buying of art. Steve Martin, whom I mentioned earlier, is a dear old

friend and also one of the preeminent collectors of contemporary art in this country today, has been more than kind toward me. I think over the years he's purchased about 19 of my works, so I'm very honored about that. And Norman Lear as well has purchased some works. They've been very, very kind and very supportive. That's great. Well, Martin Mull, I want to thank you a lot for talking with us. My pleasure. Thank you. Martin Mull, speaking with Terry Gross in 1995. He died last week at age 80.

After a break, we'll remember screenwriter Robert Towne, whose classic screenplays included Chinatown, Shampoo, and The Last Detail. He died last week at age 89. And film critic Justin Chang reviews the new horror movie prequel, A Quiet Place, day one. Here's Martin Mull performing The Time of My Life, a song from the 2018 film A Feudal and Stupid Gesture. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. It isn't as if I died But let's say I had Would that be all that bad? Hey, I've had a hell of a ride

I've had the time of my life It's all been milk and honey This message comes from WISE, It's all been milk and honey. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bean Cooley, professor of television studies at Rowan University. Visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University. We're going to remember screenwriter Robert Towne, who died last week at the age of 89. In the 1970s, a great decade for movies, he established himself as one of Hollywood's best screenwriters. Film critic Pauline Kael described him as a flaky classicist, with an ear for unaffected dialogue and a gift for never forcing a point. Towne won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Chinatown, a story of murder, corruption,

family scandals, and a scheme to control the drought-stricken water supply of Los Angeles. Jack Nicholson starred as Jake, a private investigator, with John Huston as Noah Cross, a millionaire in on the water scheme, and more. Here's a scene. Going to be a lot of irate citizens when they find out that they're paying for water that they're not going to get. Oh, that's all taken care of. See, Mr. Gitz, either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water. How are you going to do that? By incorporating the valley into the city. Simple as that. How much are you worth? I have no idea. How much do you want?

I just want to know what you're worth. Over 10 million? Oh, my, yes. Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford? The future, Mr. Gitz. The future. Towne also was nominated for his screenplay for the film The Last Detail, again starring Jack Nicholson, and for the film Shampoo, which starred Warren Beatty as a hairdresser who can't stay faithful to any one woman.

In this scene, his girlfriend, played by Goldie Hawn, has found another woman's earring in his apartment. She confronts him about his infidelities. That's why I went to beauty school. I mean, they're always there, and I just... You know, I don't know what I'm apologizing for. So sometimes I go into that shop and they're so great looking, you know, and I'm doing their hair and they feel great and they smell great. Or I could be out on the street, you know, and I could just stop at a stoplight or go into an elevator. There's a beautiful girl.

I don't know. I mean, that's it. It makes my day. I mean, it makes me feel like I'm going to live forever. And as far as I'm concerned, with what I'd like to have done at this point in my life, I know I should have accomplished more, but I got no regrets.

I mean, Jesus, because I, I mean, I, um... I... Ah. Ah. Maybe that means I don't love him. Maybe it means I don't love you. I don't know. Nobody's going to tell me I don't like him very much. In addition to writing his own screenplays,

Towne was brought in as a script doctor for Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather. We'll hear later about the scene in The Godfather that he wrote. In 1982, he wrote and directed the film Personal Best about a lesbian relationship between two athletes competing for the Olympics. And when Terry Gross talked to him in 1988, he had just written and directed the thriller Tequila Sunrise. She asked him about writing Chinatown. As a screenwriter and director, you have to work with silences in movies,

and I think you've used silence very effectively both as a screenwriter and director. In Chinatown, for instance, there are scenes where Nicholson is trailing, for instance, Faye Dunaway, and, I mean, there isn't any dialogue in that, but it's very gripping, and you had to imagine that in your mind. In Personal Best, there are sequences where there really isn't a lot of dialogue at all. It's very visual. It's interactive between the two characters.

Does silence have a different meaning when you're writing and when you're directing, and is it frustrating as a writer to write silences in? No. I think that so much of screenwriting is what I guess you would call, if you were an architect, negative space. In screenwriting, what you don't say is at least as important as what you do say. I don't find it frustrating at all. I find it demanding. It's a discipline to try to imagine exactly how much you don't want said. And

one of the benefits, of course, of directing is that you can control that. It is a difficult thing to control. You can put it on the page, but you can't really control how it's going to be implemented, which, of course, is a reason for directing yourself. You wrote the screenplay for Chinatown. Roman Polanski directed it. Polanski played a small role in the film. He played the part of a henchman who's hired to intimidate Nicholson to get off the case.

And what Polanski does is take out a pocket knife, stick it into Nicholson's nose, and basically slit his nostril open. Whose idea was it to cast Polanski in the role? Was it yours or his? I think that was Roman's idea. The line that you gave him to say was, know what happens to nosy fellows, they lose their noses. Why did you want to cut the nose? It seems like such an interesting, really offbeat way of hurting somebody. Well, again, I was looking for a way to do something that I felt would appeal to your imagination in terms of just a tiny little violent act that was scary. I really didn't want to go into the kinds of violence that had been rife throughout films at that time.

I wanted to have a minimal amount of violence, but I wanted to suggest that it was nevertheless a very violent world out there, so I thought of something that I would really hate to have happen to me, and it was that. And it seemed appropriate for a detective anyway. A detective who is, you who is like a hound, sniffing out the trail of some kind of criminal or villain.

It just seemed like the perfect thing to do. What was very subversive about it was that it meant that Jack Nicholson, the leading man, had a bandage on his nose for half the movie. And even when he took the bandage off, he had a big cut and stitches on his nose for half the movie. And even when he took the bandage off, he had a big cut and stitches on his nose. Well, once again, in most movies, you can see people fight in a way that would have crushed skulls,

created probably quadriplegics with both combatants, and they emerge unscathed from the battle and continue to go out throughout the film with a bruise here or there, which disappears in the next scene. Well, in fact, that doesn't happen. I mean, if somebody gets hurt, it hurts. Just a tiny little slit in your nose can really smart,

and it can affect the way you look and feel for weeks, and in this case, for the rest of the movie. It was just an attempt to, just like Chinatown was an attempt to deal with a real crime that, you know, involved something as seemingly prosaic as land and water, that little act of violence was an attempt to suggest that you can really hurt people by doing almost nothing at all, just a tiny little slit of their nose.

I want to ask you a little bit about writing a climactic scene, a scene in which there's really a turning point in the story or in the character development. In Chinatown, the real turning point scene, or at least one of them, is when Faye Dunaway reveals that the woman whose identity she's been hiding is really her daughter as a result of an incestuous relationship her father had the Faye Dunaway father had raped her when when she was 15 and I want to just play a clip from this scene and then ask you a little bit about

the considerations in in writing this kind of climax I don't know what you are talking about this is the craziest the most most insane thing. Stop it! I'm gonna make it easy for you. You were jealous. You had a fight. He fell. He hit his head. It was an accident. But his girl is a witness. So you had to shut her up. You don't have the guts to harm her, but you got the money to keep her mouth shut.

Yes or no? No! Who is she? And don't give me that crap about your sister because you don't have a sister. I'll tell you... I'll tell you the truth. Good. What's her name? Catherine. Catherine who?

She's my daughter. I said I want the truth! She's my daughter I said I want the truth she's my sister she's my daughter my sister my daughter I said I want the truth it's a really such a dramatic way of bringing across that revelation and to have, especially with the slaps in between, I don't know if people can make that out in the clip that we heard. But can I ask you about planning that, writing that climax, and if you had written in the slaps,

if you thought that that would add to the drama of the moment well yes they they were written in i think that any revelation of any kind is only credible particularly one that is is uh shameful at least whether or not there's any moralist stigma attached to it. It certainly is embarrassing for the Faye Dunaway character to have to admit to it. The only way you're going to believe that what she says is true is if she's reluctant to talk about it, and that's putting it mildly. I think that as a general rule, anything that you want an audience to believe is something that a character has to reveal reluctantly. Any kind of free and easy revelation is one that I think we automatically

suspect is not true. We just, you know, glibness is, whether or not it is in fact true. It's certainly dramatically true that glibness is generally tantamount to insincerity. Chinatown has one of the most often repeated lines of recent film history, and that is just about the last line of the film, Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. And that's said by one of Nicholson's assistants after everything's gone wrong, after Faye Dunaway's been killed

and the evil father is free. How did you come up with that line? Did you realize it would have as much resonance as it did and that people would be repeating it for years after? No, but the line was intended to be what it is, and I guess it just worked. Chinatown itself, I guess, is a sort of metaphor for the futility of good intentions. You simply, individual actions don't necessarily matter, even though we'd like them to, even though we'd all like to be like Rambo

and think we could single-handedly win a war that we lost. And Chinatown suggests that a good man or a man who is not necessarily good all the time but would like to do something decent has his hands full when he tries to disentangle the Gordian knot that is really the kind of thing that most of us have to disentangle if we're going to do anything decent. And most of us, ever since we've seen popular entertainments like James Bond, where he's licensed to kill, have always felt that, yes, we've kind of worshipped the job. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. We've got to get those... You know, we've got to destroy the city in order to save it.

We've got to win at all costs. And I think that you have to reach a point where you say, do I have to win at all costs? Am I going to be saving more than I'm destroying? Screenwriter and director Robert Townee speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. More after a break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to Terry's 1988 interview with screenwriter and director Robert Towne, who died last week at age 89. His screenplays include Chinatown, Shampoo, The Last Detail, and The Firm.

And he was an uncredited contributor on many 1970s film classics, including Bonnie and Clyde, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Parallax View, and The Godfather. In a way, in Hollywood, one of the ways you got your start was as a script doctor. You were brought in to solve problems on movies that I guess had serious problems with them. You were brought in as a script doctor for Bonnie and Clyde and for The Godfather. Could you give me an example of the type of problem you were brought in to solve?

On one of those two skin places? Yeah. On The Godfather, there had never been a scene in the novel that existed between Marlon and Al Pacino, where the father whose favorite son was the one that was to take over as the head of this criminal family, there had never been a scene where he was able to sit down and say, you're going to take over and this is what it's going to be. And they needed it. And suddenly they came to the point where they were going to lose Marlon in 24 hours and they didn't have that scene. And they basically, as it was originally suggested to me,

wanted a scene where the father let the son know he loved him. And it was my job to go in and write that scene, which I did by suggesting that the father's concern for his son and his son's future and his need to take over, because he was the only one who was fit to take over this criminal business, was so great that he was obsessively worried about all the day-to-day details of bodyguards and phones and tapped phones,

and through expressing that concern, he let his son know that he was bitterly sorry that he had to pass on the dubious honor of being the head of the family. And the son let the father know that he accepted because it was inevitable. And I wrote the scene. Your wife and children, are you happy with them?

Very happy. That's good. I hope you don't mind the way I keep going over this Barsini business. No, not at all. It's an old habit. I spend my life trying Barsini business. No, not at all. It's an old habit. I spend my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men. How's your boy?

He's good. You know, he looks more like you every day. He's smarter than I am. Three years old, he can read the funny papers. Read the funny papers. I want you to raise that for telephone, man. Check all the calls ago You know I did it already

Good man, I took care of that. Oh, that's right What's the matter what's bothering you I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it. I'll handle it. I told you I can handle it. I'll handle it. Were there directors who let you on the set, let you sit in before you started directing yourself? And I ask this knowing that a lot of times screenwriters aren't really welcomed on the screen because the director wants to be able to make choices himself or herself

without the screenwriter standing over their shoulder and making their own suggestions. I have always been, maybe it's because I started so much of my work by doing rewrites that I didn't have the kind of threatening cachet of the originator of a piece of material, which I think is always a threat to a director since it reminds him that he's in the role of basically an interpretive artist. And since I wasn't in that position, I was less of a threat in the early stages of my career, and it did allow me to be on sets. I was expected to be on sets

because I was rewriting very often on a daily basis and had to be there with the pages for everyone to go over what I'd done to see if it was going to work, so I automatically spent a great deal of time on sets. Almost every director I ever worked with not only allowed me on the set, but insisted on it. Is that how you learned how to direct, by watching? I don't know how anybody learns to direct. I suppose the best training I had was how I learned to write, by being in acting classes and watching really fine actors improvise.

I think that it not only helped me in terms of screenwriting, but it probably was the single best training I had to work with actors in movies. Robert Towne speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. The prolific and influential screenwriter died last week at age 89. Go home, Jake. I'm doing you a favor. Go home, Jake. I'm doing you a favor. Come on, Jake. Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown. All right, come on.

Clear the area. On the sidewalk. On the sidewalk. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new horror movie prequel, A Quiet Place, Day One. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Things have been looking up at the summer box office with the successes of Inside Out 2

and the alien invasion thriller A Quiet Place Day One. It's a prequel to the first two Quiet Place movies and it stars Lupita Nyong'o as a woman who finds herself in New York City when the deadly attack on humanity first begins. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review. It's no surprise that A Quiet Place Day One has fared so well with audiences. Horror is a reliable draw in theaters, and the Quiet Place movies, about deadly aliens that can hear a twig snap from miles away,

are especially fun to watch in a packed house. Like the human characters on screen, we stay silent, daring not to cough, scream, or slurp our sodas too loudly. The first two movies, both directed by John Krasinski, followed an upstate New York family struggling to survive several months after the aliens first arrived. Part of what made the movies so creepily effective was that they told us little about the monsters themselves, where they came from, or what they were doing on planet Earth, beyond killing as many humans as possible. Now, with A Quiet Place Day One, the series shifts gears. Taking over for Krasinski, the writer-director Michael Sarnosky rewinds back to the very start of the invasion and introduces a new set of

characters. Lupita Nyong'o plays Samira, a terminally ill woman who finds herself on a day trip to New York City, along with other patients from her hospice. Samira didn't want to come, but she'd been promised pizza and couldn't resist. She's brought along her support cat, whose name is Frodo. That's fitting, of course, since Manhattan is about to become a present-day Mordor, a land of ash, smoke, and destruction, as the aliens descend from the sky and immediately begin their murderous rampage. The aliens are blind and hunt entirely by sound, which means that anyone who screams is toast. But Samira is one of a bunch of survivors who hush up early on and quickly realize that they can't make any noise. This seems to contradict the first movie,

which implied that it took humanity longer than five minutes to figure out the rules of this lethal game. It's all a little fuzzy, and it's disappointing that A Quiet Place Day One doesn't give us a bigger, clearer picture of the global invasion. Instead, it focuses on Samira and her new friend Eric, an English law student played by an appealing Joseph Quinn from Stranger Things. Eric is shell-shocked and quickly latches on to Samira, following her wherever she goes. Against her better judgment, she lets him.

In this wordless scene, the two try to dodge shriek and smash their way into the building. For the most part, though, A Quiet Place Day One does not consist of wall-to-wall mayhem. At times, it seems to forget it's an action movie. I say this with some admiration. Sarnoski made a striking debut in 2021 with the Nicolas Cage drama Pig, a darkly funny crime story that was also a moving rumination on love and loss. He attempts something equally poignant and character-driven here, with lengthy scenes of Samira and Eric getting to know each other. The two leads have a sweet end-of-the-world chemistry, and Yongo, so good in Jordan Peele's

Us, proves that she can anchor another horror vehicle without uttering so much as a scream. At a certain point, though, it's not enough. The absence of a broader narrative context made sense in the first movie, but with this latest, or rather earliest, chapter, I found myself wanting to learn more. Sarnoski does provide some sweeping details. The fact that the aliens can't swim plays out in ingenious ways on an island like Manhattan, and the director plants at least one clue about the aliens that will probably pay off in another Quiet Place movie down the road. Day One does have two big things going for it, namely that it's a movie for pizza lovers and cat lovers. While other survivors head south to evacuate by ferry boat, Samira goes north in search of her favorite pizza parlor.

She knows she doesn't have long, and before the cancer or the aliens get her, she wants that slice. And Frodo is with her every step of the way. Cats are natural scene-stealers, and Frodo is especially compelling in part because you keep worrying that he'll hiss or yowl or cough up a hairball. But no, Frodo turns out to be one implausibly quiet cat, which is a relief since one wrong noise could have quickly turned the movie into apocalypse meow. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed A Quiet Place day one. On Monday's show, performing and directing dangerous and wild movie stunts, we talk with David Leitch, who was a stunt double for Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and Keanu Reeves.

Leitch produced and directed the new action comedy film The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling, as a stuntman who has to perform stunts in his real life in order to save his life. I hope you can join us. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business

and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.