Most people who get into the movie business are eccentrics. Or, this used to be the case. 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. Perhaps all 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 even decide to break ahead of the pack, to make breaking ahead be the focus of your life. We’re human beings, we instinctively group together, we are not sharks. So those who DO act like sharks … they’re the ones who often have the biggest impact.
Robert Evans was a shark. A shark who loved movies.
He started out as an actor (that’s where the awesome title for his memoir, a MUST READ, The Kid Stays in the Picture came from) but his dream was always to be a producer. He grew up in New York City. His parents were hard-working people. His father was a dentist. Evans started out working for his brother’s clothing company, where his gifts were recognized, and also doing a bit of acting. He moved to Hollywood. He was a gorgeous man. Not my type, but absolutely gorgeous: sleek and smooth and slick. A poor man’s Cary Grant. He was noticed immediately for his “movie star looks”, so he got into pictures.
If you’ve seen The Best of Everything (which you should), then you know he played a wonderful douchebag.
He was always very smart – he would never be at the mercy of the “industry” like most actors are – and in the 60s he bought the rights to a novel he thought promising and ended up producing the film of the book. 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 David Selznick and his famous memos, and some remind me of Hal Wallis, brilliant and devoted producers who made a lot of money but, crucially, were not just “money men.” (Again: they were deeply eccentric. They understood movies, stories, structure, they could pinpoint what was missing, they knew how to fix it.) 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 starting to roll. Frankly, it was a bloodbath, and Bluhdorn, who had had his eye on Evans for a long time, hired him to head up Paramount and turn the ship around. It was a very risky decision on Bluhdorn’s part, very risky. Evans was a young man. He was 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 (which would come back to haunt 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.
At the end of Evans’ time at Paramount, they were responsible for many films which were massive hits – critically as well as commercially – many of 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 – 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.
He was one of the golden bad boys of Paramount. His friends were Jack Nicholson, Joe Esterhauz, Warren Beatty, Roman Polanski … enfant terribles.
Evans, actually, had always been kind of a straight and narrow guy, he 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 tapped Mario Puzo to write the book, and he saved Coppola from himself many times (according to Evans) . Coppola, however, was very much interested in being seen as an independent auteur, and so having Evans take any credit for any of The Godfather was enraging. Evans felt he deserved more props. A lot of his book is him telling his side of the story, because he has been so smeared in the press.
If you’ve ever heard Evans speak, then you know that he wrote every damn word of this book. Wouldn’t surprised me if he dictated the book, it sounds so much like him. Example. He takes Ali McGraw (his future wife whom he then lost to Steve McQueen) to lunch.
He wants her to star in Love Story. Listen to how he tells it.
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?? WHAT.
The whole book reads like that. Whether or not he actually said it becomes, ultimately, irrelevant. He’s riffing, he’s telling it like he remembered it. He never comes off as anything other than himself. He may be sleazy, to some degree, but he’s also earnest. There was also a self-deprecation to Evans, believe it or not, and this makes him funny. Also, and this is one of the best things about the book: he does not protect himself. Sharks do not apologize for being sharks. They act according to their nature. On the flipside of his wacko personal life, there was his WORK. 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.
It was The Cotton Club that ruined him. 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, and Francis Ford Coppola was called in.
Costs escalated. The money was being spent but it wasn’t on the screen. (I haven’t seen the recently released director’s cut yet and I really must.) Evans was not doing well at the time. He had already been arrested for cocaine and things were spiralling out of control. Some of the folks involved in The Cotton Club were really sleazy, unlike Evans – who was Hollywood sleazy, but not sleazy sleazy. Like, these people were the criminal fringe. One of them ended up getting murdered. I’m sure we all remember the trial. Or maybe not. I do. Evans goes into it at great length in his book. The feeling at the time, and I was barely paying attention to it, was that Evans was somehow involved in the murder. It seemed like he was on trial. Joan Didion wrote a great essay about this phenomenon called “LA Noir – where she analyzes the situation. First of all: it WASN’T a murder trial. It was just a HEARING and Evans’ role was 100% peripheral – but there was a feeling “in the air” about him.
Joan Didion:
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 all of this. It’s okay if you’re a tough guy and a shark 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. (A similar thing happened to Peter Bogdanovich. His girlfriend was murdered. He didn’t do anything wrong. But people fled from him as though his “bad luck” was catching.) Evans dropped off of the radar, 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. A documentary was made of the book. That was a hit, too. And you should see it. It’s great. 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’ impressive body of work.
To Evans, there was 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.
A favorite excerpt, about The Cotton Club debacle.
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.”
I think about this passage – and that advice – all the time.
Rest in peace, legend.
), but it’s elsewhere too. Tosches lives in a dreamspace/nightmarescape behind his mind’s eye, where he fixates on his topic, he fixates on it to the degree that everything else falls away. He was one of the most obsessive writers on the planet. Nobody could write like he did and not be totally obsessed. 
