Robert Towne and Me: A Disaster Revisited

What a flubbed interview around Towne's Steve Prefontaine biopic 'Without Limits' reveals about a great sports movie and the two men at its center.

Robert Towne was the worst interview I ever did. 

It wasn’t his fault. At the time, Towne was swinging through the University of Miami for a special screening of Without Limits, his stirring and vastly under-appreciated 1998 biopic about Steve Prefontaine, the American long-distance phenom who electrified the collegiate track scene and competed in the 1972 Munich Olympics before dying in a car crash at age 24. I was still cutting my teeth as a freelancer for The A.V. Club while finishing up an M.A. in Cinema Studies, and could count on one hand the number of interviews I’d turned into features. Talking to a living legend like Towne for The A.V. Club—which, at the time, also had an editorial staff that could be counted on one hand—was a great opportunity for me and a good get for a publication looking to establish an identity separate from The Onion. The stakes were high for me. And I was nervous. 

After the screening ended, Towne sat down for short interviews outside with local press—I was promised 15 minutes, which is much leaner than I’d like or expect today—and I was at the back of the queue, which was presumably done by order of importance. As the guy before me finished, Towne got up and walked toward a chauffeured vehicle, likely joining his companion for an early evening dinner. The publicist dashed after him: “I’m sorry, Mr. Towne. We have one more interview.” My heart sank. The least important guy in the queue was now the person who was preventing the author of Chinatown, the greatest original script in (now) 50 years, from starting a night out in Miami, Florida. And so he sat down across from me and the interview commenced. 

For years, I’ve laughed away the humiliation of that experience by likening Towne to Prefontaine: My handwritten list of questions were right out in the open and he dashed through them like Pre through the finish line, with efficient strides and a champion’s elan. I had expected lengthy disquisitions on the push-and-pull between talent and will, and the mythology of a runner whose otherworldly charisma and premature death had made him track’s answer to James Dean. What I got instead were answers so clipped that I immediately panicked and moved on to question after question, hoping that one would finally get me something I could use. I ran out of questions in five minutes and he walked off into the dusk. I didn’t even bother to transcribe the interview. It was not fit for publication.