I learned this morning of the death of Robert Towne at 89. I had never seen his face before. From the picture in the New York Times, looking at his eyes, I could tell at once that he was Jewish.<\/p>\n
How odd, I thought to myself. “Towne” is not a Jewish name. Then I read the obituary, and learned that he was born Robert Schwartz.<\/p>\n
It all made more sense to me then, the undercurrent of incredible sadness that runs through his best screenwriting. The line “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” is a metaphor for infinitely larger tragedies.<\/p>\n
We need our poets. We need them to speak to what is unspeakable, yet must be spoken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I learned this morning of the death of Robert Towne at 89. I had never seen his face before. From the picture in the New York Times, looking at his eyes, I could tell at once that he was Jewish. How odd, I thought to myself. “Towne” is not a Jewish name. Then I read … Continue reading “Robert Towne”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26605"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26605"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26605\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26606,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26605\/revisions\/26606"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}