Robert Evans¶
At a glance¶
- Born
- June 29, 1930, New York — as Robert J. Shapera
- Died
- October 26, 2019, Beverly Hills, aged 89
- Role
- Head of production, Paramount Pictures, 1967–1974
- Godfather role
- Studio executive — champion, obstacle, and self-appointed author
- Memoir
- The Kid Stays in the Picture (1994)
We didn't strive for commercial. We went for original. We fell on our asses on some of them, but we also touched magic. Robert Evans
Before¶
He was a child radio actor, then a partner in his brother's womenswear business (Evan-Picone), and then — in the single most Hollywood origin story available — was spotted by Norma Shearer beside a hotel pool in 1956 and cast as her late husband Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces.
He was not a good actor and knew it. He moved to producing in 1962, and in 1966 Charles Bluhdorn — whose conglomerate Gulf+Western had just bought a moribund Paramount — installed him as production vice-president, then head of production in 1967. He was 36 and had produced almost nothing.
He then presided over one of the great runs any studio executive has had: Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, Chinatown, True Grit, Harold and Maude, The Conversation, Serpico.
The Godfather¶
His actual contributions are real and are frequently overstated — mostly by him.
What he got right: he backed the picture when the studio's own Mafia film had just flopped; he protected Coppola at moments when Bluhdorn wanted him gone; and — the one nobody disputes — he fought for the length. Paramount's exhibitors wanted the film cut to a little over two hours. Evans insisted on the full 175 minutes, and was right.
What he got wrong: he wanted Alain Delon or Redford instead of Pacino, and pushed hard for it. He hated Nino Rota's score and tried to replace it. He wanted the film set in the present day and on a backlot.
What he claimed: that he essentially made the film — that he recut it, saved it, and that Coppola's version was unreleasable. Coppola has disputed this vehemently for fifty years and the two men spent decades in public disagreement about it. The documentary record broadly favors Coppola. The best available account, Mark Seal's Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, treats Evans as a genuine but self-mythologizing participant.
He was not credited as producer. Albert S. Ruddy was, and Ruddy collected the Best Picture Oscar, which Evans never fully got over.
After¶
Chinatown (1974) is the one he produced himself and the one that vindicates him: an original screenplay, a difficult director, an unhappy ending he refused to soften.
Then the fall. The Cotton Club (1984) — reuniting him with Coppola, disastrously — became entangled with the murder of the theatrical promoter Roy Radin, a case in which Evans was called to testify and was never charged. In 1980 he pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking, a misdemeanor conviction later expunged, and his career effectively stopped. Two films in twelve years.
Then a strange late renaissance. His 1994 memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture — which he narrated himself for the audiobook in a voice that became instantly imitable — was a bestseller and then a well-regarded 2002 documentary. He became a beloved figure precisely because he was so obviously unreliable and so completely unembarrassed about it.
He suffered a severe stroke in 1998, recovered, and produced intermittently. He died on October 26, 2019, aged 89.
Matthew Goode plays him in The Offer (2022), and the performance was the show's consensus highlight — a full-throttle impression of a man who was already a caricature of himself.