Legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans is dead at 89
Evans helped make such classics and blockbusters as the first two Godfather films, Love Story, Black Sunday, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.
By HANNAH BROWNFILE PHOTO: Producer Robert Evans poses at the second annual "Rebels With a Cause" gala at Paramount Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, California March 20, 2014(photo credit: REUTERS/MARIO ANZUONI/FILE PHOTO)
The kid stayed in the picture, until Sunday.Robert Evans, a legendary Hollywood producer and studio executive whose autobiography was titled The Kid Stays the Picture, which was an important catchphrase in his life, died on Sunday at 89, a spokesperson for his family confirmed on Monday.He helped make such classics and blockbusters as the first twoGodfather films, Love Story, Black Sunday, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, but he was almost as well known for his arrogance, for his out-of control drug use that led to a scandal involving the Mafia and for his marriages to and involvement with dozens of beautiful actresses, as he was for his talent.Born in 1930 in New York City into a Jewish family — his father was a dentist in Harlem — Evans original name was Robert J. Shapera. His first career was in the shmatta business — he worked for his brother, Charles, who founded an apparel company, Evan Picone. While on a business trip to Los Angeles in 1956, movie star Norma Shearer spotted the handsome young Evans by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel and got him cast in the movie, A Man With a Thousand Faces. He was also cast as one of the leads in the adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, opposite such established stars as Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power. Gardner and Hemingway himself reportedly opposed the casting of this newcomer and pressured studio head Darryl F. Zanuck to fire him. “The kid stays in the picture,” was Zanuck’s now famous response.But the kid — and until the end of his life, he had a child’s exuberance and a huge ego —didn’t stay in many more pictures. He moved into producing, where his real talent lay. He became head of production at Paramount Studios in the late sixties, where he reigned until the mid-seventies, working with and often clashing with his directors but churning out an extraordinary string of movies that,in addition to the Godfather films and Polanski’s two great Hollywood movies, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, included Harold and Maude, The Great Gatsby, The Conversation, True Grit, Serpico and The Odd Couple.In 1969, he married the most famous of his seven wives, Ali MacGraw, who went on to star the following year in the megahit Love Story, which Evans oversaw. MacGraw then left him for her costar in The Getaway, Steve McQueen.Although he never hid his Jewishness (it was his father who changed the family name to Evans) it wasn’t something he played up. But he said it was important to him to make the 1977 film, Black Sunday, a film about a Palestinian terrorist group’s plot to blow up the Goodyear blimp over the Superbowl.In an interview on Brian Linehan’s television show, City Lights, when the film was released, he said a friend advised him, when adapting the novel Black Sunday to the screen,“If you can make it apolitical — don’t make it anti-Arab or anti-Israel, or pro-Arab or pro-Israel, try to kill that element of it and bring out the anti-terrorism. If you can get that across and still tell a very entertaining and absorbing story, you’re talking about the most important subject matter that’s facing our decade, in the Seventies.” He said Black Sunday was “the most exciting experience since Godfather for me to have made and I have had the biggest audience reaction to it.”Leaving Paramount to produce his own films, he had problems with drug use and his career foundered. In 1983, while he was producing Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Clue with Richard Gere, one of the financiers of the film was killed, allegedly by mobsters, and Evans became part of the murder investigation. The film flopped and it was a low point for the then very troubled producer.But he had a few comebacks. His most recent hit was the 2003 film, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. He also made his own legend famous, writing an autobiography and appearing in a documentary about his life called The Kid Stays in the Picture.Ironically, Coppola just re-edited The Cotton Club as The Cotton Club Encore and it was re-released in theaters on October 11 and will be coming out on DVD and streaming platforms in December, a coda Evans no doubt would have appreciated.
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