The Daily Telegraph - Features
How the studio behind these film classics could get its swagger back
Robert Evans was the producer who made the 1970s a golden age for Paramount – it needs another maverick like him, says Robbie Collin
Francis Ford Coppola hadn’t expected Robert Evans to strike a particularly respectful tone at the screening. But even he hadn’t foreseen him turning up in a hospital bed.
It was 1971, and Coppola was showing an early cut of The Godfather for his bosses at Paramount – a group which included Evans, the studio’s eccentric head of production, who went on to preside over some of the greatest films Hollywood ever produced. Coppola, then 32, was in the process of finishing one of the first of them – and the 41-year-old Evans had fought him on just about every major creative decision he’d taken while making it.
Their latest battleground was the edit. Evans had injured his back a few days previously, but was so determined not to cede any ground that he had his butler wheel him to the studio in a motorised cot. He’d dressed for the occasion, too. In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, critic Peter Biskind’s landmark account of 1970s Hollywood, he describes Evans’s outfit of “fine black silk pyjamas and black velvet slippers with gold foxes brocaded on the toes”.
Coppola would later recall hearing the motor whirring during the scenes Evans found boring, as he moved the reclining mechanism down to take a nap. Meanwhile, the screenwriter Robert Towne, who had helped shape a crucial late scene between Brando and Pacino, watched the bizarre pantomime in dismay. “If this man is running a studio,” Biskind describes him thinking, “this industry must be in big trouble.”
Except it wasn’t: quite the opposite. In fact, it’s the Paramount of today – the only independent studio from Hollywood’s golden age not owned by a mega conglomerate – that is now in beleaguered limbo, after its owner Shari Redstone scuttled a monthsin-the-making $2.3 billion (£1.8billion) merger with Skydance Media, right at the moment a deal was expected to be signed. The studio, which made its name on large-scale theatrical releases and cable and network television – but has struggled in the streaming era – could sorely do with some of Evans’s maverick magic.
Yes, Evans may have been a walking Hollywood cliché, with a ludicrous grace-and-favour 16-room house in Beverly Hills, an Olympian sex life, a mania for parties (the starrier the better), and the sort of cocaine intake that could give a rhinoceros heart failure. Yes, he married seven times – once to Ali McGraw, one of the hottest young actresses around – and yes, he once got caught up in a contract killing scandal after one of his producing partners was murdered by a drug dealer. (At the subsequent trial, the dealer – an ex-girlfriend – insisted Evans hadn’t been involved.)
But behind the teak complexion and Persil teeth lay enough wit and nerve to heave Paramount out of a historical slump and into a mini-golden age. During his eight-year tenure as head of production, he oversaw the making of the following films: The Godfather (parts I and II), Rosemary’s Baby, The Italian Job, Paper Moon, Love Story, A New Leaf,
The Conversation, The Odd Couple, Harold and Maude, True Grit, Serpico, The Great Gatsby. Oh, and Chinatown, written by one Robert Towne – who had evidently got over his misgivings about Evans when he came to him to strike a script deal, not long after the night of the black silk pyjamas. After the release of Chinatown, Evans left Paramount to work independently, but never replicated that extraordinary streak.
Incredibly, he had no prior experience as a producer, unless you count pretending to be one. A former child voice actor, he came to Hollywood in the 1950s to be in the movies – and his first named role, in Man of a Thousand Faces, was the great MGM production head Irving Thalberg.
Legend has it that he was cast after Thalberg’s ex-wife, Norma Shearer, spotted him lounging by the pool of the Beverly Hilton. And the story rings true, since Evans, 36 at the time, was popular with wives. In Easy Riders, Raging