Roman Polanski: A life on celluloid

“I did lose my way many times,” said Robert Towne in a recent interview. “It took an ungodly amount of time to work on it — it was 10 months of solid work, and before that, there were several months of letting it gel enough to write it.” The process was worth it to Towne, however — he walked away with an Oscar for best original screenplay, the only one the film received in a year mostly overrun by “The Godfather Part II.” Director Roman Polanski’s film, starring Jack Nicholson as a 1930s detective who gets in over his head with intertwined scandals of murder, sodomy and real estate development, has become a modern classic

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