Robert Towne(1934-2024)

According to an interview Towne gave he said his relationship, in the fifties, with dancer Barrie Chase led to one of his greatest successes. Barrie had been married to a hairdresser named Gene Shacove who had become the hottest stylist in Beverly Hills by the late fifties, as well as one of the most notorious womanizers. Towne was intrigued that a hairdresser was straight and asked to meet him. Barrie arranged for Towne to pick her up when she was getting her hair done, and when he walked into the salon he was stunned. It was full of the most beautiful women in LA, and Shacove was moving from woman to woman running his hands through their hair, whispering in their ear, and generally behaving like a "rooster in the hen house". It took almost twenty years but Towne finally crafted his impressions of that day into a successful script- Shampoo.

Because the one thing you know when you're shooting a script, and I've been on a lot of sets, is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind.