"The Smell Of The Ocean, The Pepper Trees And Eucalyptus Trees, The Dragonflies Everywhere": Screenwriter Robert Towne's Return To Los Angeles

Robert Towne, screenwriter of "Chinatown" reminisces about his hometown, L.A., and talks about creating a new film from the great John Fante novel "Ask The Dust."

" 'Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town,' the Italian-American would be-author Arturo Bandini (Fante's fictional alter-ego) rhapsodises in a flush of Walt Whitman-like purple prose early on in Ask the Dust. He is staying in a cheap hotel in Bunker Hill in the very middle of the city, stealing milk and buying cheap oranges to keep himself alive. Disease and poverty surround him. The racial problems that will disfigure the city for generations to come are already in evidence. Nonetheless, Bandini, who has come to California from the midwest, maintains a resolutely romantic view of his new hometown. Towne's new screen adaptation of Ask the Dust shares this romanticism. It portrays the L.A. of the 1930s as a place where the sun always shines. Even struggling writers like Bandini (played by Colin Farrell) dress in immaculate suits and smart hats that make them look like Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's hardboiled but always elegant private eye..."

Link: Guardian Unlimited Film | Interviews | Home Towne.

Woman with purple stars on her breasts in a Los Angeles parking lot, above.