Robert Towne, the screenwriting icon who won an Academy Award for “Chinatown,” has died. Robert Towne, the screenwriting icon who won an Academy Award for his original script for “Chinatown,” died Monday at his home in Los Angeles. Two years later, the press was calling Towne “the hottest writer in Hollywood.” Bookending his Academy Award-winning script for “Chinatown” were Oscar …
Reassuringly, the two golden ages of American film each arrived in the wake of utter chaos. The roughly simultaneous advent of talking pictures and the Great Depression ushered in the glories of the 1930s; decades later, the collapse of both the Hollywood studio system and American optimism in Vietnam helped soften the ground for such 1970s classics as “Chinatown,” “The …
Imagine being invited out for an evening meal only to discover that your fellow guests comprised Nigel Farage, Dominic Cummings, Andrew Neil, David Cameron and Boris Johnson. “No novel is perfect but Scoop is as close to a perfect comic novel as you can get,” states Boyd, “and I think it has the funniest chapter in all of English literature, …
