 a star screenwriter. "'There are no novels or plays I'm itching to write, and there never have been,' he wrote for Esquire magazine in 1991. And Robert Towne's movie character said things that stick with you. In the 1974 film Chinatown, for which he won the Academy Award, an informant calls L.A. gumshoe Jake Giddies, played by Jack Nicholson, and asks, "'Are you alone?' The private eye replies, "'Isn't everyone?'