Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Towne

Towne’s little shrug of a sentence is a master class in how Hollywood history gets narrated: censorship as both villain and alibi, creativity as a scramble, and artistry as something that survives almost by accident. The “But, uh” matters. It’s not just verbal filler; it’s a soft pivot away from responsibility, a way of saying, don’t pin me down, this was the system. He frames censorship less as a moral argument than as a blunt production constraint: “you just absolutely couldn’t.” The absolutism does the work of closing debate, turning an ethical and political regime into weather.

Then comes the revealing part: “we had to go from there.” That’s the screenwriter’s pragmatism, but also a quiet admission that the story’s shape, maybe even its meaning, was negotiated under pressure. He “doesn’t remember” what he changed it to, which reads like selective amnesia, or at least a reminder of how many revisions in studio filmmaking are designed to disappear. The original impulse gets buried; what remains is the finished film and the mythology around it.

Ending on “Duvall is just excellent in it” is another dodge and another truth. When the narrative gets uncomfortable (children, censorship, what was altered), Towne retreats to performance, the safest praise in the business. It’s also a nod to cinema’s great trick: actors can make compromised material feel inevitable. The subtext is that the industry launders its constraints into craft, and asks you to applaud the result rather than interrogate what couldn’t be shown.