Robert Evans became a legend in Hollywood: the larger-than-larger-than-life studio chief and flamboyant impresario, married seven times and a hypnotically charming raconteur and seducer by vocation. This was a producer with the soul of a 1930s mogul and somehow also the soul of a difficult and demanding movie director.
Like the great studio bosses before the second world war golden age, he started in the rag trade, and after a brief acting stint (notably playing the legendary mogul Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces) he became a producer. As head of production, he turned Paramount’s reputation around with a string of shrewd projects, which his Midas touch turned into critical and box-office gold.
Evans was a great progenitor of the American new wave, the mentor to film-makers such as Francis Ford Coppola and Roman Polanski, and the father figure to some great movies, including The Godfather, Love Story, The Conversation, Serpico, The Great Gatsby (with Robert Redford) and many more. He was capricious and imperious, with a rumbling gravelly voice, a ruined sybaritic handsomeness and a generous hint of camp, which held women and men under his spell. He could turn on precisely calibrated bursts of charm for stars or directors, hot-tempered outrage for their agents, morphing into pleading and devastating waves of flattery; the same eloquence and passion could be fire-hosed upwards at his own superiors.
Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas affectionately called him “the devil”, and many wondered if he was indeed the inspiration for a certain off-screen character in one of his biggest hits: Rosemary’s Baby. Certainly he inspired the cynical and outrageous producer figure played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1997 political satire Wag the Dog, and is thought to be a model for the overbearing studio boss in Orson Welles’ unreleased tinseltown comedy The Other Side of the Wind.
The most famous anecdote – or at any rate the most revealing – concerns his reaction to seeing the first cut of Coppola’s The Godfather. He considered it too short. “You shot a saga, but you turned in a trailer. Go back and make a picture,” he barked at Coppola, who duly went away and came back with the epic that made his name. Long films were greatly suspected by producers and exhibitors, because they reduced the number of daily performances and box-office take. But Evans knew that was short-sighted: he had a real creative say in his films and it was a prerogative he did not hesitate to exercise.
His producing career hit the buffers in the 80s after a cocaine conviction, but Evans lingered in the Hollywood folk memory. His 1994 autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture was a riotous movie memoir, considered the best since David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon; the subsequent film version, produced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, cemented his reputation, and other great wheeler-dealing villain-heroes were created in his image in television shows such as Entourage and Better Call Saul. In fact, Robert Evans had a kind of 21st-century afterlife as a buccaneering yet absurd player. That doesn’t do him justice. He was a risk-taker who loved cinema and loved directors; he made demands of them and no one wanted to let him down. In doing so, he revitalised Hollywood.
