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I
guess it’s the Ben-Franklinishness of Robert Evans’s story
that appeals to my cynical glee.
If you’re not familiar with Evans, here’s a rundown. As a
27-year-old New York businessman, an executive selling ladies’ pants,
Evans takes a business trip to Beverly Hills, where he takes a swim on
an off-day in the hotel pool. A woman catches his eye and begins asking
him if he’s an actor, because she’d really like him to play
Irving Thalberg in “Man of a Thousand Faces.” (Except,
well, he seems to have been in a movie five years before this, so it’s
not quite the random career change he describes.) He does, however, get
the part, and appears in several newspaper fluff pieces about businessman-to-movie-star
crap, as well as a couple more roles, including Pedro Romero the matador
in “The Sun Also Rises.” He is a terrible actor, overexposed
in the media, and everyone from Hemingway to Errol Flynn wants him fired.
The person who makes the titular decision to keep him in is legendary
producer Darryl
Zanuck.
Realizing his days as an actor are numbered, Evans eventually worms his
way into the offices at Paramount, becoming Senior VP. He does this –
and this is where my kinky interests come in – because of a newspaper
fluff piece describing him as the sort of incredible, flexible-minded,
hard-working guy Hollywood can’t afford to lose. After saving Paramount
by making a few completely shot-in-the-dark decisions, greenlighting “Rosemary’s
Baby,” “Love Story, “ “The Odd Couple,”
“The Godfather,” and on and on, he decides to get out and
start producing films himself, eventually making Chinatown, “Marathon
Man,” “Black Sunday,” “Urban Cowboy,” and
so on.
In “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” a documentary based on
his autobiography, all this is narrated by the man himself, who repeats
that “Luck is when opportunity meets preparation,” and that
he had an eye for interesting, fabulous material. This is, of course,
undercut by the fact that he admits he hadn’t a clue what the hell
“Chinatown” was about, and seems to have depended extremely
heavily on the opinions of other readers. A telling clip of Dustin Hoffman’s
speech at the Producer’s Guild Awards in honor of Evans (special
feature only) shows Hoffman repeating a few days of dialogue with Evans
(in a dead-on impersonation) about a particular script. Evans insists
for hours it’s the most fabulous thing he’s ever read, that
Hoffman must read it, absolutely, that night, without fail. The next day,
Hoffman returns to the set and tells him it’s crap. Evans nods,
says, “Yeah, just as I thought. It’ll never work.”
What you start to realize is that reality, for Evans, is whatever people
with the power to create consensus say it is. The directors of the documentary,
Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein, repeatedly stress in the commentary
that Evans desperately tried to convince them to make it into a tragic
love story about his marriage to Ali McGraw (who left him for Steve McQueen)
and end it with him producing “Chinatown,” at the height of
his career, before the drug bust, the entanglement with a murder case,
and the flop of “The Cotton Club.” But then the instant Morgan
and Burstein say, “No, we’d like to do this and that. It’s
more brave and original this way,” he’s happy to go along
with it.
His success is not an obsession with being represented in a sunny light;
his success comes from making nice with the people who decide what light
to show you in. He constantly reiterates that he was a bad actor. Why?
I’m guessing it’s because he got terrible reviews. There is
no self-against-the-world in Evans, just self-moving-through-the-world.
You try to massage the world’s image of you, but once it becomes
critical, all you can do is absorb that image and move on.
All of this is to say I find public figures who are totally aware of and
respond to their public image as if it’s more real than their own
self-image terribly fascinating. Is it possible that Robert Evans doesn’t
even have a self-image? That he is completely subsumed within the persona
depicted by the media? Does he even have opinions of films and scripts
completely apart from the opinions given to him by others? His enthusiasm
is certainly infectious. Is that all one needs, along with a pretty face?[B]
AWB
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