The Evans Method: A Dash of Passion

What could it possibly say about today’s movie business that the coolest guy in Hollywood is an over-the-hill 72-year-old ex-studio chief who hasn’t had a hit in years? That would be larger-than-life producer Robert Evans, star of “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” a new documentary about the long-ago head of Paramount Pictures that has generated a tidal wave of glowing reviews and press coverage.

The first actor to head a movie studio, Evans helped engineer such classics as “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “The Godfather” and “Chinatown” before spiraling out of control on cocaine and being caught up in a messy murder investigation during the making of “The Cotton Club.”

But who says there are no second acts in show business? Thanks to the new film and the cult popularity of an audio version of his 1994 memoir, also titled “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Evans has a whole new career as a hipster raconteur. How hip? Well, MTV was just out at Evans’ Woodland estate filming a series of spots plugging the channel’s upcoming MTV Video Awards.

“Lemme tell you, pal,” he says in a spot for best female video, his voice rumbling like a New York subway train, “any man who thinks he knows the mind of a woman is a man who knows nothing.”

When I was at Evans’ house the other night, the phone rang often, usually with a young woman on the other end of the line. Vanity Fair publisher Graydon Carter, who produced “The Kid,” confessed to the New York Observer that his 9-year-old daughter regularly badgers him with the question, “Is Bob coming over for dinner tonight?”

In a year in which the movies are grossing more but have less ambition than ever before, it’s telling that we have such abiding nostalgia for throwbacks like Evans and the late Lew Wasserman who, in their very different ways, represented an independence and originality that has vanished from today’s corporate suites.

His face tanned the color of a beef bullion cube, Evans is one of the great self-invented characters of our age, an age that’s especially in love with confessional entertainment, be it John McEnroe’s tell-all autobiography or MTV’s real-life sitcom “The Osbournes.” Without any prompting, Evans punctuates our dinner conversation with gory details about his recovery from a 1998 stroke--suffered in a movie pitch meeting--including a demonstration of a new “heel-to-toe” form of walking he’s mastered. As far as his sexual performance is concerned, he offers assurances: “I’m still a competitor--the dames aren’t complaining.”

Surely there’s a big component of camp appeal here. But our fascination isn’t just with Evans, but with the era he embodies. His comeback is inextricably tied to our longing for the days when Hollywood executives weren’t pawns of giant conglomerates, but swashbucklers who aspired to greatness. Evans’ reign at Paramount (1966 to 1975) neatly coincides with the last golden age of Hollywood, a Camelot-like time when a young generation of high-living maverick filmmakers reinvigorated the movie business.

It’s no surprise that young directors like Brett Ratner, David O. Russell and Wes Anderson are eager to sit at Evans’ feet, soaking up the stories of his seesaw relationships with Francis Coppola, Roman Polanski and Blake Edwards, who Evans says once challenged him to a duel.

“The studio mind-set today is all about franchises, but Bob was an idea man,” says Ratner, director of a franchise series himself, “Rush Hour.” “If Bob were running Paramount today I’d make a movie there in a minute. He never made a movie that was a generic copy of something else.”

Russell, who interviewed Evans at the recent L.A. Film Festival, admits it would be unthinkable for someone as freewheeling as Evans to run a studio today. “Bob couldn’t work at a sterile product factory like today’s Paramount,” says Russell, director of “Three Kings.” “He loved movies that were messy and passionate--his response to film was always emotional. Today it’s almost a sign of weakness in the corporate culture to be excited or emotional about anything.”

Evans is loath to compare his tenure as head of production at Paramount with the studio today. Viacom chief Sumner Redstone was at the producer’s side after his stroke, and studio head Sherry Lansing has extended him many personal kindnesses. But events speak for themselves; when Evans produced “The Saint,” the film went through 11 writers and ended up having nothing to do with the project he originally embarked on.

Evans has opposed efforts to remake “Love Story,” though the studio, he says, is still trying. “I wouldn’t touch it,” he says. “I’d need to take a Lysol bath afterward.”

To learn why movies are so uninspired today, it’s worth taking a closer look at how things were different during his heyday. In business terms, Paramount today is a huge success. But its movies are bland and formulaic. When Evans took power, the studio was owned by Gulf & Western czar Charles Bluhdorn, a volatile immigrant entrepreneur who cooked the company’s books, erupted in rages and was ruled by his emotions. When Evans lit up the Gulf & Western building like a theater marquee for the opening of “Love Story,” Bluhdorn cried like a baby.

Bluhdorn was something today’s tycoons are not--an inveterate risk-taker. His biggest gamble was Evans himself, who had utterly no qualifications to run a studio when Bluhdorn gave him the job after reading a New York Times piece by Peter Bart (soon to be Evans’ right-hand man) that portrayed Evans as a crafty hustler who was beating the slow-moving studios to hot literary properties by buying books before their authors had even finished writing them.

This Sammy Glick-style savvy appealed to Bluhdorn, who was smart enough to realize that his movie studio was in desperate need of fresh executive talent.

Business was bad all over, but especially so at Paramount. To save money, Bluhdorn in 1970 moved the studio’s production headquarters to Canon Drive in Beverly Hills, freeing up the lot to be rented out for TV production. “They were shooting porno films on the lot,” recalls Bart, now editor of Variety. “It was a good time to be somewhere else. The minute we got to Beverly Hills, everything started to work, probably because there was no studio bureaucracy.”

That’s an understatement. In 1974, when Paramount made “The Godfather II,” “Chinatown” and “The Conversation,” the studio’s production staff consisted of Evans, Bart, a pair of story editors, a post-production executive and a business affairs attorney. Six people. As Evans likes to say: “Less was more.”

Today’s studios are overflowing with executives, but few have the power to make a meaningful decision. When Bart fell in love with a script, as he did with “Harold and Maude,” he made Evans take the script to the john, lock the door and not come out till he’d finished reading it. Knowing Bluhdorn would go berserk if he discovered they were making a film about an 18-year-old boy who falls in love with an 80-year-old woman, no one told him what the film was about until it was finished.

“We lied to everybody,” Evans says. “We just said it was a love story, because Charlie liked love stories.”

Evans once told Esquire, “My business is gambling. It’s the gambling instinct that makes me tick.” He admits that when he greenlit Robert Towne’s “Chinatown” script, he didn’t “understand a

“But I understand talent,” Evans says. “And if you have Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski and Bob Towne, you take the bet that you’re gonna have a great movie. Success is all about betting on your instincts. That’s the problem with today’s business. It’s not an art form, it’s a barter form. The studios are run by committees of MBAs, but I’ve never seen an MBA who knows how to make people cry.”

Evans had a thousand flaws besides being vain and self-destructive. But when it came to movies, he was a romantic, not a businessman, which is probably why he has such a cult following today. Because romance is exactly what’s missing from today’s movie business. It’s a longshot that Evans will ever make a great movie again, but he hasn’t thrown in the towel. He’s still hustling, pushing this project along, getting that script written. He doesn’t know how to give up.

His most recent movie was a feeble remake of “The Out of Towners.” “It was terrible,” he admits. “Goldie Hawn’s salary cost more than the original movie.”

So why’d you make it, I ask. Evans stares at me through his blue-tinted glasses. “Hey,” he says. “I needed the gig.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes .com.