The Books: “The Kid Stays In the Picture” (Robert Evans)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life, by Robert Evans

You want to know how Hollywood works? Read this book. Read the story of a man who RAN Hollywood for a good decade, and then had one of the most spectacular (meaning: awful, on a Greek-tragedy level spectacular) falls in Hollywood history. There’s a brilliance here. A shining brilliance, and honesty. You love him. You’re glad you never married him, and you glad you never crossed him, but you love him. This is a book so full of great lines that you can’t even process it as it is happening. Even with all the coke and the bad tans and the ubiquitous glasses and the women … Evans was an old-school mogul, with a keen artistic eye and sharp business sense, and a gift for relationships.

Most people who get into the movie business are eccentrics. Not the middle level people, perhaps – but the talent, and the big power guys. Now Michael Ovitz may be a “suit”, but you cannot tell me that that guy is not deeply eccentric. I’m not saying good/bad … that’s not what eccentric means. I mean, the guy is out there. This may be a minority opinion, but that’s how I see it. Perhaps all really really successful CEO types and moguls are, on some level, deeply eccentric people. It’s not easy to break ahead of the pack. Or to decide to break ahead of the pack, to make breaking ahead be the main focus of your life. We’re human beings, we’re collective, we instinctively group together … we are not sharks. So those who DO act like sharks … I don’t know. I see a deep eccentricity there. An individualistic spirit. Don’t assume I’m equating “good” or “bad” with any of this.

Robert Evans started out as an actor (that’s where the awesome title for his book – perfectly, really – comes from) … but his dream was always to be a producer. He grew up in New York City, of hard-working parents. His father was a dentist. Evans always worked his ass off, at whatever he did. He did a little bit of this, a little bit of that … working for his brother’s clothing company, where his gifts were recognized, and doing a bit of acting. He moved to Hollywood. He was a gorgeous man. Not my type, but absolutely gorgeous. Sleek and smooth and very slick. A poor man’s Cary Grant. He was noticed immediately, he had “movie star looks”. So he got into pictures, and I’ve never seen any of them – no idea if he was any good – but it certainly wasn’t his passion. He was always very smart (all of his problems notwithstanding) and in the 60s he bought the rights to a novel he thought promising and ended up producing the film of the book – and it wasn’t a shoddy production. Frank Sinatra was the star. Evans was in his element. He knew how to produce. He knew movies. Some of his comments about movies and production remind me of Hal Wallis, in my opinion one of the greatest producers of all time. (His memos during the filming of Casablanca are masterpieces of cinematic insight.) Anyway, Evans was going places fast. The New York Times profiled him, mentioning his aggression as a producer, and so it began.

Charles Bluhdorn was one of the main players in making Evans the mogul-phenom that he became. Bluhdorn headed up Gulf + Western, of which Paramount Studios was a part. Paramount was not doing well. Heads were gonna roll, and they did. It was a bloodbath, and Blurdorn, who had had his eye on Evans for a long time, hired him to head up Paramount and turn that ship around. It was an incredible decision on Bluhdorn’s part, very risky. Evans was a young man, only in his 30s. He hadn’t been tooling around Hollywood for 20 years, he was a relative newcomer. He didn’t climb his way to the top. He was plucked out of the crowd and placed there. There was always a lot of resentment towards him, and yet at the same time, once his reputation began to skyrocket, nobody cared about that, and everybody just wanted to get involved in his projects. He was Midas there for a while, he really was.

Evans went to work. Paramount was not successful at the time, but at the end of Evans’ time there, they were responsible for some of the most giant hits of the time – as well as some films which are now considered classics, and among the greatest American movies ever made. Harold and Maude, Love Story, The Conversation, The Godfather, etc. He also produced things independently (with Paramount’s permission – which was a hugely unpopular decision at the time) – and finally stepped down as head of Paramount so that he could focus solely on producing. He is responsible for Chinatown, let’s not forget.

He was one of the golden bad boys of Paramount. His friends are Jack Nicholson, Joe Esterhauz, Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski … famous enfant terribles. Evans, actually, had always been kind of a straight guy, didn’t really drink … It was drugs that did him in. Well, that and The Cotton Club.

His relationship with Francis Ford Coppola had always been stormy. Evans insists that much of The Godfather came from his head. He had Mario Puzo write the book, he saved Coppola from himself many times (according to Evans) – but Coppola was very much interested in being seen as an independent auteur, and so having Evans take any credit at all for any of The Godfather was enraging to Coppola. Evans felt he deserved more props. A lot of the book is him telling his side of the story – because he has been so smeared … but at the same time … well, you have to read it. It doesn’t come off as whiny. It comes off as pissed. If you’ve ever heard Evans speak, then you know that he wrote every damn word of this book … he wrote it as he speaks. Wouldn’t surprised me if he dictated the book, it sounds so much like him. Example. He takes Ali McGraw (his future wife who he then lost to Steve McQueen) to lunch. He wants her to star in Love Story. Listen to how he tells this tale. There are moments where I want to laugh, because he’s so … earnest, even in his vague sleaze … and then at the same time, he comes out with these zingers (like the “plan” line) which show his smarts and why he became who he became.

I set up a lunch date with Love Story’s mentor and star, MacGraw, at La Grenouille. By the time dessert was served, I would have made the phone book with her. Would you say she got to me? I sure in hell knew I didn’t get to her. With all my props, my position, my “boy wonder” rep, she was as turned off to me as I was turned on to her. My competition was a model/actor she had been living with for three years, sharing the bills in a 3 1/2 room apartment on West 77th Street. Almost purposefully, she kept on interjecting how in love she was. Leaving the restaurant, I hailed a cab. As it pulled up she gave me her last zinger.

“Hope we shoot in the summer. Robin and I are getting married in the fall. We plan to spend October in Venice. Ever been there?”

“Nope.”

“Then wait. Only go there when you’re madly in love.”

That’s it. I grabbed her arm, whispering, “Never plan, kid. Planning’s for the poor.”

She tried to snap back. “No way–”

“Let me finish, Miss Charm. An hour ago, Love Story was even money to end up in the shredder. You win, I lose. Got it? Stop being Miss Inverse Snob, will ya? It doesn’t wear well. Don’t turn your nose down to success. If anything goes wrong with you and Blondie between now and post time, I’m seven digits away.”

“Never plan, kid. Planning’s for the poor”?? I LOVE that. The whole book reads like that. Whether or not he actually said it becomes irrelevant. He’s riffing, he’s telling it like he remembered it. Like I said, he does come off as “sleazy” at times – but he never comes off as anything other than himself. There’s a self-deprecation to Evans, believe it or not, that makes him funny. Also, and this is one of the best things about the book: he does not protect himself by trying to be politically correct, or hanging his head. This guy was a shark. Sharks do not apologize for who they are. They act according to their nature. On the flipside of his wacko personal life, there is his WORK … and his comments about movies are phenomenal. He knew how to put projects together. He took huge risks … which sometimes worked out, sometimes failed … but without a sense of risk, you’re never gonna make something like Rosemary’s Baby.

Evans flew HIGH. Listen to him here:

Let’s get down to facts — like agents, managers, lawyers, money. Writing about where it’s at is easy pocket money; about how it feels, that’s different. Not only does it take talent, which most of these penholders don’t have, but writing about feelings takes a helluva lot more time. We’re in the business of deals, not excellence. The ten percenters know their clients can write three concept scripts a year. To write texture takes time; time is money and money is what pays their light bills.

You may not like Evans, and often I didn’t … but I’m not interested in him because I like him. He’s got one hell of a story, one of the great (and awful) Hollywood stories … and thank God he decided to tell it.

It was The Cotton Club that ruined his reputation. He was supposed to direct the film, and at that time he still had a ton of cache. But things started to go badly during the production (it’s one for the books, really, all the things that went wrong) – and Francis Ford Coppola was called to come in and save the production.

Costs escalated. The money was being spent – but it wasn’t on the screen. Evans was not doing well at that time. He had already been arrested for cocaine once – and things were spiralling out of control. Some of the folks who invested in The Cotton Club were really sleazy, unlike Evans – who was Hollywood sexist sleazy. Like, these people were the criminal fringe. One of them ended up getting murdered. I’m sure we all remember the trial. I won’t go into it. It’s too complicated for me to recount, and Evans goes into it at great length in his book. The feeling at the time, and I was barely paying attention and I got that feeling (as Vincent Bugliosi says, with certain trials, certain things are “in the air”) … that Evans was somehow involved in the murder. It seemed like he was on trial. Joan Didion wrote a great essay about that phenomenon called “LA Noir – where she analyzes the trial, and Evans’ peripheral part in it … but how the feeling “in the air” was that somehow he was involved.

Inside the system, the fact that no charge had been brought against the single person on the horizon who had a demonstrable connection with The Cotton Club was rendering Cotton Club, qua Cotton Club, increasingly problematic. Not only was Robert Evans not “on trial” in Division 47, but what was going on there was not even a “trial”, only a preliminary hearing, intended to determine whether the state had sufficient evidence and cause to prosecute those charged, none of whom was Evans …

There was always in the Cotton Club case a certain dreamland aspect, a looniness that derived in part from the ardent if misplaced faith of everyone involved, from the belief in windfalls, in sudden changes of fortune (five movies and four books would change someone’s fortune, a piece of The Cotton Club someone else’s, a high-visibility case the district attorney’s); in killings, both literal and figurative. In fact this kind of faith is not unusual in Los Angeles. In a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds and the B-2 Stealth bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates. A belief in extreme possibilities colors daily life. Anyone might have woken up one morning and been discovered at Schwab’s, or killed at Bob’s Big Boy. “Luck is all around you,” a silky voice says on the California State Lottery’s Lotto commercials, against a background track of “Dream a Little Dream Of Me”. “Imagine winning millions … what would you do?”

Evans paid a huge price for the Cotton Club debacle. It’s okay if you’re a sleaze in Hollywood, most people are, it’s the culture … but when you get dirty and involved with something shady, people drop you like a hot potato. And that’s what happened. Evans dropped off of the radar completely, and became a recluse. People like Jack Nicholson stuck by him, his friends would come visit him where he was holed up in his mansion, hiding from the world … and it is my impression that Evans spent about a decade in that manner, until he wrote Kid Stays In the Picture, which was a giant hit, and garnered him quite a lot of good will. A documentary was made of the book. That was a hit, too. I wouldn’t say his reputation was rehabilitated, but a lot of the memory of The Cotton Club has now vanished with time … and what remains is Evans’ body of work.

He’s a complicated character. He is easy to spoof. I mean, the prose of the book is sometimes laugh out loud funny. You think: He can’t be serious! But he is.

I can’t recommend it highly enough. Self-serving? Hell, yes. He deserves to defend himself in the public eye. Sleazy at times? Yes, this is a Hollywood story. But it’s never anything less than riveting. And man, is it about the business. To Evans and most people in Los Angeles, there is only one business, and that’s the business of making movies. The Kid Stays In the Picture is one of the great movie-business books of all time.

Here’s an excerpt about The Cotton Club, and his fallout (his 10th or 11th fallout) with Coppola.

EXCERPT FROM The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Notorious Life, by Robert Evans

The circuslike trial with its surprise knockout-punch victory, caused mucho media interest. More important, it illustrates, through the verbatim quotes, the difference between man and man.

Walking down the stairs of the federal courthouse, Channel 11’s Larry Atteberry asked me, “Do you think the picture will be a success despite all these problems?”

“Francis’s work is brilliant. And I hope we’ll be working together. We’ve fought together many times, only it wasn’t in court. I just hope we have the same luck as we had in The Godfather.”

Catching Coppola, Atteberry had a question for him. “What you were saying, that Evans would second-guess you if he were back in command.”

“That’s his middle name … that’s what he does all these years.”

Coppola had taken the stand earlier to defend the Doumanis and assert that “Evans caused chaos”. He had never experienced anything like this before, he stated.

How do you cause chaos when you’re barred from the set? Unquestionably the chaos was deeply lodged in Francis’s cerebellum. Yet I wouldn’t dignify his malicious diatribe. Publicly, I continued defending him and the brilliant work he had done on The Cotton Club.

Through good times, friendship comes easy. But when you have to weather grit, threats, and disasters, coming out friends is what true friendship is all about. Today both Ed and Fred Doumani and Victor Sayyah remain my close friends.

On October 1, 1984, Orion had its first preview of The Cotton Club in San Jose. Though I wasn’t invited, I was there, stared at as if I were a leper. Two hours later when the curtains closed and my blood pressure was way up, I grabbed the Doumanis. “Come back to the hotel with me, please.”

Their heads between their legs. Full depression time.

“Fellas, it can be saved. There’s a great picture there, but it’s not on the screen – it’s on Coppola’s cutting room floor. The guy went double budget and gave us half a picture. He took eleven musical numbers out – the most important one, ‘Stormy Weather’, cost over a million to shoot. The fucker didn’t put it in. He’s made a collage out of an era.”

The Doumanis now knew they’d been Elmer Gantryed by the Prince. I felt bad about it; whatever our fights, our arguments, I was the one who brought them in. Forget the fact that I had no points, no involvement. I wanted to help.

Like two prepubescent kids they looked up. ‘What should we do?”

From the darkness of night till the midday sun, I wrote a letter to Coppola, pouring my heart out to the maestro. Problems are easy to criticize, but solutions don’t come easy. Thirty-one pages of solutions, and fourteen hours later, I signed off.

Starting with the opening credits, I enthusiastically expressed how our original vision – The Godfather with music – could evolve into reality.

If the “Making of The Cotton Club” were a book rather than a chapter, I’d insist by contract that this entire critique be part of the text. For good reason hyperbole comes easy; the critique’s text, however, pinpoints the importance of what is commonly thought of as a nondescript profession – producer. What follows is the cover letter and the first paragraph of the thirty-one page critique, which exemplifies the spirit in which the entire document was written:

October 1, 1984

But now, you must know I have no personal financial involvement in The Cotton Club. If the picture does ten dollars or three hundred million it bears no effect on my bank account. It does on yours, however. My involvement now is totally one of pride, professionalism, moral obligation to the investors, and from a selfish point of view to our audiences who are anxiously awaiting your vision of the Cotton Club era. When Francis Coppola takes on a subject matter which combines the richness of the roaring Twenties, the Depression that followed, and interweaves as the foreground the struggle, birth, and sense of discovery to the world of the black entertainer and the greatness of his music, one expects an event. Anything less leaves you open to a backlash both from the audiences and the critics. Your pictorial investigation of it has been shot in the best Coppola fashion. And what are we left with? Montage followed by montage followed by montage followed by montage. What a cheat – to you as a storyteller … to you as a director … and to the audiences who expect more than MTV when they pay their five dollars …

You have shot, and brilliantly so, an ‘era film’. What we are left with, however, is a slick flick that is only somewhat entertaining. If Phil Karlson made The Cotton Club and it cost twenty million dollars, you could get away with it, but Francis Coppola’s name is on it instead, immediately making the audiences and critics anticipate something magical … Phil Karlson would not have had the brilliance of film that you have shot, but unforutnately much of that film is presently on the floor and not on the screen.

The picture has been shown twice. The consensus of the cards more than evidences what I’m saying. This is not Orion patronizing you, whose sole interest is to get the picture for Christmas. This is me telling you cold, hard facts that will affect your future even more than mine. There have been six pictures previewed that are being released for Christmas. Our picture has had the lowest audience ratings of the six. If it went out for bidding today, we would get theaters – not the ones we want, and certainly not the terms we want. This I know for a fact. I have spoken to two of the biggest exhibitors in the country. They already know the disappointing reaction to the film. And their hard-ons have become very soft. And these are friends, Francis – close friends. For Orion it is fine. With their deal they will get their money out if you delivered them a postage stamp. Believe me, Francis, their entire concern is to get their money out. For the Doumanis it means bankruptcy. They will never see one dime from the film. The renegotiation of the Orion deal gives Orion all first monies and leaves the Doumanis holding the bag. The only hope they have is that The Cotton Club is a smash – a big one. In its present form it is not, Francis. It is lackluster, not blockbuster. Let us not be ostriches. The audiences have told us. The exhibitors have told us. Bad word spreads quicker than good …

Am I negative on The Cotton Club? I most emphatically wish to express to you I am not. I would be less than candid, however, not to say that I am worried. Very worried. And terribly frustrated by not being used to my fullest abilities at this pivotal moment to help make The Cotton Club the smash it can be. It is your film, Francis, not mine. [But] not having communication at this very pivotal moment is very counterproductive. My god, Francis, if Gromyko and Reagan can meet and have an exchange of dialogue, who can’t we? You owe it to yourself – if no one else – to put personal feelings aside. use me. Use my objectivity, which you cannot have at this moment, being so closely attached to the film. Francis, you are shortchanging yourself, and badly. I state to you unequivocally that there is a great film here. I know it. I see it. A film that can be remembered. Unfortunately and understandably, you are running scared, not sure of what you have. You are taking shortcuts and by doing so you are irreperably damaging your canvas. Allowing The Cotton Club to fall into the category of just another movie. Don’t run scared, Francis. Go all the way. Give them a show. Give them the Coppola texture that is now on the floor. There is brilliance there. The longer and more textured the piece, the shorter it will play. Again, what better example is there than Godfather I? If I didn’t think it were there I would certainly not be this passionate in my plea to you.

Credits: I think the credits that were on the film before which were handwritten on black had simplicity and style. The credits as they are now open the picture with the wrong note – they are a title company’s jerk-off and more importantly they are most difficult to read. The simplicity of the other credits is far more you, and for that matter me, than the Deco credits presently on the film. Don’t let some half-assed artist sway you into being overly fashionable. Style and simplicity always overshadow and outlast fashion.

Reading and rereading the pages, suddenly smiles crossed the Doumanis’ faces, a first in months.

“What’s in the letter, has it all been shot?”

“And more.”

Like kids in a candy store. “We could have a winner!”

Holding the thirty-one pages in his hand, Ed spoke out. “Leaving now, driving up to Napa, delivering this by hand. Francis better listen, I’m gonna stand watchin’ him read it.”

With forty million of green on the line, Ed would have driven to Hong Kong. Napa was no short drive. At high speed six hours. For the first time the brothers saw light from darkness.

Twenty-eight hours later, the three of us sat together commiserating. After twelve hours of driving to and from and five hours patiently waiting for his highness to grant him an audience, he read the thirty-one pages. Ed related Francis’s reaction to us.

“He would rather see the picture do three hundred thousand and not three hundred million than have Evans get credit for being the saving grace.”

That December 8, The Cotton Club had its gala premiere in New York. The Prince purposely ignored my every written word, and the finished cut didn’t include one of my suggestions. It had hardly changed from that first underwhelming preview in San Jose. Cotton Club the film, unlike Harlem’s club, was not the talk of the town – any town. Somber would best describe its audience reaction. Somber as well described its box office results. Royalty always gets covered. Prince Machiavelli royally fucked all. He collected millions.

Film critic Ken Turran put it most succinctly when asked by Ted Koppel on “Nightline” what he thought about The Cotton Club.

I think that there’s no coherent story there just for openers. It really feels to me as if the film was thrown together, as if Coppola didn’t want to put in the work that goes in before, didn’t want to have a coherent script, didn’t want to take the trouble to do that. He wanted the exhiliaration of when you get on the set, which can be very exhilarating to a general in front of all those people. But I think you can’t just wing the movie. Movies have to be thought out ahead of time. They have to have, as The Godfather did, a book with a very solid plotline. You just can’t make it up as you go along.

What did I learn from this failure, this disaster, this five-year nightmare? A fat fuckin’ nothing! To say you “fucked up but learned from it” is bullshit, a cop-out. You can learn from a mistake. A mistake done twice is not a mistake, it’s called failure.

At an early age, a man of great wisdom gave me the key to making it.

“You learn from success, kid – not failure. If you’ve only touched it once, a term paper, a temp job, hitting a homer, dissect it. Was it timing, focus, homework? Get to the core. Find out the whys, the hows. That’s the key. Use it … go with it, don’t be afraid. When you get your shot, then you’ll be ready. Success ain’t easy, kid, but the more you taste it, the easier it gets. No different with failure.” The wise man smiled. “The more you taste it, the more you get it.” Putting his finger to his lips, “Shhh … Don’t spread it. It’s tough enough out there. Keep it to yourself.”