Thirty-five years ago, when Robert Towne was researching what became the Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown, he came across an out-of-print 1939 novel, Ask the Dust, by an Italian-American author named John Fante. He promised himself that, some day, he would make a movie about this story of an Italian-American writer's struggles to find fame and love and his painful affair with a Mexican-American waitress. Some day arrives tomorrow with the release of Ask the Dust, starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek.

Towne, once one of Hollywood's seventies iconoclasts, is now one of its sages. A tall, handsome man of 71, with long white locks and beard, he's dressed in a blue sports jacket, matching shirt and loose jeans. He tells the story slowly, seated in a hotel room bergère chair, while rolling a skinny cigar between his fingers, like an actor speaking a thoughtful soliloquy.

He had been struggling, he recalls, to get the sound of 1930s Los Angeles dialogue right for his Chinatown screenplay, when he came across Ask the Dust. He thought it was the best book about L.A. he had ever read and, for a while, his excitement about it sidetracked him from his screenplay, because he thought he'd like to adapt the novel for the screen instead. Ask the Dust, the second in a quartet about an Italian-American writer called Arturo Bandini in 1930s L.A., is generally considered Fante's masterpiece.

Towne found Fante, still living in Los Angeles. He called him and said he was interested in adapting the book into a movie. Fante was dismissive: "Who are you to think you can adapt anything?" he said.

Today, Towne is a legendary Hollywood figure, perhaps the movie business's best-known screenwriter and script doctor since Ben Hecht in the prewar era. He's renowned for his sure sense of natural dialogue and complex story structure. In the seventies, he was the pal of Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty. He wrote Oscar-nominated scripts in three successive years -- The Last Detail (1973), Chinatown (1974) and Shampoo (1975). As a script doctor, he worked on such seventies' movies as The Godfather, The Parallax View, Marathon Man and The Yakuza.

In the eighties, he suffered reversals and was unable to direct his two beloved projects, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, and the Chinatown sequel, The Two Jakes. In recent years, he has become Tom Cruise's favourite writer. After working on Days of Thunder, and subsequently on The Firm, he was hired to write the first two Mission Impossible films. Cruise was producer on Towne's film about runner Steve Prefontaine, Without Limits, and now on Ask the Dust.

The relationship, writer-to-writer, was fruitful. Towne found his voice for Chinatown. Fante, after an illustrious start in the 1930s, had dribbled away his talent on drinking, gambling and screenplay writing (his dozen credits include Walk on the Wild Side, Full of Life and the unproduced Orson Welles film, It's All True). Towne challenged him to write fiction again, and helped find a publisher for Fante's next novel, Brotherhood of the Grape.

Fante died in 1983, blind and a double amputee as a result of diabetes, after managing to dictate the last of the four Bandini novels, Dreams of Bunker Hill, to his wife. All of his books, including those that were unpublished in his lifetime and a letters collection, are still in print. He has also been the subject of a well-regarded biography, Full of Life, by Stephen Cooper, as a well several critical studies.

What had originally excited Towne about Ask the Dust was that it caught impressions on the edge of his memory of his L.A. childhood -- a pastel, bleached city, with the pervasive dust blowing in from the desert. Since then, Los Angeles has been filled with high-rises, pollution, and imported vegetation, including orange and eucalyptus trees, that keep the dust at bay. Fante's Los Angeles had the feeling of a city in decline, the shabby hotels, and the sharp ethnic divisions of people who arrived from everywhere intent on making new lives and fortunes for themselves.

The irony, of course, is that postwar L.A. reinvented itself so successfully that it was no longer possible for Towne to shoot their period movie there. Ask The Dust did end up going to far places, all the way to South Africa, where the Los Angeles of the thirties was rebuilt on football fields in the middle of Cape Town. Computer-generated imagery filled in the backdrops.

The breakthrough came when Colin Farrell agreed to play the lead and suddenly the financial taps opened. The casting of Salma Hayek as his love interest also helped.

We're talking about creating the verisimilitude in their love scenes -- Farrell as the hotheaded but virginal Bandini, Hayek as the sexually experienced, impatient older lover -- when Robert Towne says something unexpected, a reminder that a writer's doubts don't diminish with experience and renown.

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