- Industry
Remembering Robert Evans
The Godfather, Chinatown, Harold and Maude, Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather Part II, and Serpico.
Roman Polanski, for their Golden Globe best picture award winner, Chinatown.
Jack Nicholson. Years after his period of success ended, Evans found himself on hard times. In order to avoid bankruptcy, he made a deal to sell his house and be allowed to live in it paying the monthly rent. A few years later when Jack hit the jackpot with the deal he made with Warner Bros. for playing the Joker in Batman, he got the buyer to sell him back the house, which he then gifted to Evans.
Darryl Zanuck stood by him against the demands of director Henry King that he should be fired. Zanuck’s reply “The kid stays in the picture,” became another Hollywood legend.
The Sun Also Rises, the one King wanted him fired from. But even before his contract expired, Evans recognized his shortcomings and even though he had done 300 radio shows before his eighteenth birthday, he decided his future lay not in acting, but in producing.
Frank Sinatra was a huge hit and prompted a New York Times entertainment writer to do a story about him extolling the virtues of his aggressive style. The story was read by Charles Bluhdorn, as inexperienced in running a studio as was Evans, and on a hunch, he made him vice-president in charge of production at Paramount. This was at a time when the studio had been acquired by Gulf & Western, a conglomerate, and after a few disastrous years was about to go under.
In 1975. at the 32nd Golden Globes, with presenter Catherine Deneuve and Best Actress nominee Faye Dunaway, with the Chinatown Golden Globes for Best Picture and, in absentia, Best Director for Roman Polanski. hfpa archives
The Odd Couple, Rosemary’s Baby, The Italian Job, True Grit, Love Story, Harold and Maude, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Serpico, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Save the Tiger, The Conversation, Chinatown, and The Great Gatsby made Paramount the most successful Hollywood studio for nine years.
Marathon Man, Black Sunday, and Urban Cowboy were successful others, particularly Robert Altman’s Popeye, were not.
Francis Ford Coppola’sThe Cotton Club proved his undoing, and he never recovered from that nor the notoriety that inferred that he had been a party to the murder of his co-producer Roy Radin.
Robert Towne’s sprawling script into a masterpiece, it was Evans who ran any interference from studio heads, and it was he who was instrumental in scrapping an avant-garde score and hiring Jerry Goldsmith to write a new one which transformed the picture.
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:#222222’>What kind of dreck is this?” a famous LA times columnist was overheard saying.