Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

  But lately Ashley’s behavior had taken a dark turn. Once a family man, he was now showing up at parties with flashy young bimbos, and he was openly into coke.

  While filmmakers, agents, and studio executives were usually surreptitious about their drug habits, Ashley’s behavior represented a new, almost defiant openness. Following in the footsteps of Dennis Hopper, smoking pot was becoming commonplace on film sets. A Hal Ashby set without a cloud of marijuana smoke was unthinkable. Roman Polanski smoked not only pot but invited friends to join him at a friendly neighborhood opium den.

  Julia Phillips, a gifted film producer and feminist who later wrote You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, became an admitted crack user. She once showed up in my office to protest my rejection of one of her producing projects. “You obviously don’t trust women,” she charged. “Otherwise you’d green-light my project.”

  “It has nothing to do with women,” I responded. “Look at yourself. Half your hair looks like it was burned off.”

  “I torched myself. It was an accident.”

  I was dumbfounded. “So why should a studio entrust an expensive movie to a crack addict?” I asked. My comments had little impact. My alleged lack of confidence in women later was reiterated in her book.

  Not surprisingly, Evans’s long absences from the office changed the dynamic of both our personal and working relationships. There had always been a trust and openness in our interactions, but that was over.

  Evans had always loved the spotlight. He coveted every photo op, but now he was retreating even from these public moments. He was avoiding dinners and industry functions. His weekend “tennis scene,” whose participants had ranged from Teddy Kennedy to Henry Kissinger, not to mention random actresses and models, was canceled.

  His wife, Ali, was also growing alienated by his behavior. Her career had stalled, and she was living with an absentee husband.

  She, too, understood that while The Godfather had become an obsessive do-or-die mission, several other issues rankled him, and he was not the sort of man who concealed his irritation. First and foremost came his realization that he was now desperately behind schedule. Yablans had promised exhibitors that The Godfather would be the studio’s big Christmas release. When Evans made the phone call that he needed at least two more months to deliver the finished picture, Yablans was furious. He left the shouting to Bluhdorn, who ranted. “Everyone on our distribution staff has seen the first cut and they think you’re crazy to hold it back.”

  Evans’s response: “If you want another Paint Your Wagon, release the movie in its present form.”

  The argument raged on for several days. Despite his fragile physical condition, Evans was unwavering. He threatened to quit. Bluhdorn declined. Bluhdorn and Yablans called Coppola, begging him to intervene, but the director said Evans had taken the movie away from him.

  Bluhdorn felt stymied. The whole crisis stemmed from Evans’s incompetence, Yablans told his boss.

  The release of The Godfather was delayed until March. Meanwhile, Yablans stuck Harold and Maude in the empty Christmas slot, as though to tell his Hollywood executives, “This is what you hath wrought.”

  In Yablans’s mind he had lost the battle but won the war. Charlie Bluhdorn would at last come to terms with the reality that the studio could not be left in the hands of an erratic production chief who believed he was Thalberg incarnate. Yablans was wrong. It was Yablans, not Evans, who was headed for trouble.

  The record-shattering opening of The Godfather, in March, immediately reinforced Bluhdorn’s faith in Bob Evans. The critics loved the movie. Audiences were lining up all over the world, and Francis Coppola was accepting the plaudits. Frank Yablans and Bob Evans posed for photo after photo, the perfect teammates in the eyes of the world.

  The photos, with their show of effusive amity, only increased my own sense of foreboding. Yablans and Evans, in reality, were barely on speaking terms. When I spoke with Yablans I could tell he was all but overwhelmed with jealousy. Evans was emerging as the Paramount hero, not Yablans. But I also realized that Yablans’s suspicions about cocaine had now resurfaced, and this time they were valid. Released from the pressure of The Godfather, Evans seemed to be descending into the world of blow.

  His back problems were the cause, he told me. An actress had noticed his agony and had advocated cocaine as its remedy. She even produced a small sample. When Evans mentioned that he had started using coke I didn’t think much of it. Yet there was a curious naivete about his announcement—he seemed like a young boy trying his first cigarette.

  Oddly, though Evans had grown up in Manhattan and had been keenly aware of the drug culture, he himself had never been a user. Efforts to smoke pot led him to coughing fits. Hard drugs simply had no appeal to him.

  I myself had developed a casual fondness for cocaine, but to me it was a party drug—a once or twice a month plaything.

  The notion of using cocaine on a habitual basis seemed outlandish to me, but mine was a nonaddictive personality, and Bob Evans was the mirror opposite. At a time when he should be wallowing in his new success and fame, he was, in fact, retreating from reality.

  Meanwhile a new battle was about to envelope the Paramount hierarchy.

  With Francis Coppola now enshrined among the world’s elite directors, Charlie Bluhdorn was determined to elicit more movies from him. As it turned out, he and Coppola had been nurturing roughly the same idea—one that was inimical to Frank Yablans.

  The scheme, in broadest terms, was to establish a new company, led by Coppola, which would have complete autonomy within a limited budget range and would effectively own its own product. The G & W chairman and the filmmaker decided that the deal would involve not only Coppola but also his two close friends, Peter Bogdanovich and Billy Friedkin.

  Bluhdorn was ecstatic: Paramount would be mobilizing the talents of three of the hottest filmmakers in the world, and Coppola, having delivered a massively commercial mainstream movie, now wanted to get back to the genre that most interested him—low-budget independent films that he could totally control.

  Excited by his concept, Bluhdorn summoned Yablans to deliver the news. “This will be regarded as a major coup for Paramount,” Bluhdorn enthused. Knowing Yablans’s bias against Evans, he added that the studio would have no role in the new entity, called the Directors Company—Coppola had demanded Evans’s exclusion and Bluhdorn had consented.

  Yablans was not appeased. “The idea is shit,” he told his boss. “It’s a dumb idea and I refuse to have anything to do with it.”

  The debate, once again, was acrimonious. Yablans told Bluhdorn he was giving away the store, that no filmmaker deserved this much autonomy, that these three in particular would use Paramount money to make esoteric films that audiences would reject.

  Bluhdorn informed his president that he would move ahead with the company despite his opposition. In fact he planned to fly the three directors to New York for a friendly meeting the following week. Evans, Yablans, and Bart would attend, he said, and Yablans would have to be hospitable to the assemblage and pledge his support for their efforts.

  The “peace meeting” took place but did not go as Bluhdorn had hoped. Several minutes into the discussion, Yablans raised a sensitive issue—exclusivity. Under the Bluhdorn-Coppola structure, the Directors Company was to become the primary focus of the three directors’ activities, but each would still be free to accept offers from other entities.

  Yablans disagreed with this. He felt strongly that the directors owed all their films to the new company. Billy Friedkin dissented; the notion of exclusivity was both impractical and offensive, he argued. Yablans reiterated his point of view even more forcefully. Friedkin, a famously volatile filmmaker, leapt to his feet. “I think you’re an asshole,” he told Yablans, and stalked out of the meeting.

  Yablans was delighted, but Bluhdorn was undaunted. Despite the blowup, the Directors Company would go on to produce great movies, he decreed.

  He turne
d out to be briefly correct. Over the next eighteen months, the first two films to emerge from the Directors Company, Paper Moon and The Conversation, perfectly fulfilled its mission—intelligent films made on modest budgets without studio interference. However, Bogdanovich’s next offering, Daisy Miller, turned out to be exactly the sort of smugly onanistic effort that Yablans had forecast.

  Friedkin, from the beginning, kept his distance; he declined to make any films at all for the venture of which he was a reluctant partner. Since Evans, too, was steadfast in his indifference, it was left for me to find a modus vivendi for the Directors Company. I developed the screenplay for Paper Moon with Alvin Sargent, a gifted screenwriter, as a mainstream Paramount project, but, to help jump-start the new entity, I submitted the project to Bogdanovich as a potential Directors Company film. Bogdanovich was reluctant at first to embrace what had been developed as a regular studio film, but, persuaded by his then-wife, Polly Platt, he decided to take it on. It turned out to be a smart decision.

  I now found myself as the only Paramount executive who regularly spoke with Bogdanovich and Coppola and was entrusted to watch dailies. I was enjoying our rapport, but, given the ever-growing atmosphere of fear and loathing, I knew the enterprise would be short-lived. Yablans was unrelenting in his opposition. And while Coppola would meet occasionally with Bluhdorn to spin grandiose plans for the company, he shortly became bogged down in the editing of The Conversation. It was a brilliant movie about topics dear to his heart—paranoia and the invasion of privacy—but he struggled for over a year in the editing room to find its narrative arc.

  Meanwhile, the war between Yablans and Evans was finding a new hot spot—Chinatown. At its inception, Chinatown seemed like an inspired scheme to ameliorate tensions within the company and channel Evans’s energies in a new, more productive direction. In the end, however, it turned out to be the final spark that would immolate Paramount’s combustible management.

  Written by Robert Towne, Chinatown was a Raymond Chandler–like detective story built around a dense thicket of a plot. It was Towne’s aim to dramatize how corrupt developers contrived to create a boomtown in Los Angeles by diverting water from farm land, bribing any cops or local bureaucrats who tried to intervene. Towne envisioned his friend Jack Nicholson as ideal casting for the private eye, with Nicholson also serving as a consultant on the script.

  The prospect of a Nicholson private-eye movie delighted Evans, especially given the terms of a new deal he was about to close with Bluhdorn.

  Under his new arrangement, Evans would be free to personally produce one or two films a year under his own banner while still serving as chief of production, with profits to be divided fifty-fifty with the studio. The only previous production chief to be rewarded with a deal of this model was Darryl F. Zanuck some thirty years earlier.

  In fact, the new Evans production deal represented a sort of peace treaty between Bluhdorn and Sidney Korshak, who had been dispatched by Evans to seek out an improved compensation package following the extraordinary success of The Godfather. The film had represented a windfall for Paramount, Korshak argued. Because of some deft dealmaking, the studio had retained fully 84 percent of the profits (neither Brando nor Coppola had negotiated significant profit participations). Hence, Korshak now demanded a major pay raise for Evans, who was making a paltry $350,000 a year. However, a big boost for Evans would also inevitably mean an improved package for Yablans, and Bluhdorn was intent on keeping the appetites of his young executives under control. The compromise: Evans would now become both a producer and a production head.

  When Evans learned of the Korshak compromise—he’d hoped for an immediate pay increase—he was disappointed, but his consigliere persuaded him that he could turn the situation to his advantage. All he needed was one hit and his new banner would represent a coup. Besides, Evans would also have access to the best studio material and control over marketing resources.

  Chinatown was thus a key to Evans’s brave new world, but a problematic one. A notoriously slow writer, Towne agonized over every plot point of his script. The political complexities of water diversion did not interest Evans, nor did the subplot of incest involving Noah Cross, the corrupt developer, and his daughter, Evelyn. Evans knew Towne’s father had tried his hand at being a developer and felt his writing might entail working out some familial neuroses that were clouding the plot.

  When Towne finally delivered his script, Evans dispatched it to me and our reactions were identical: The script was almost impossible to follow without resorting to the sort of chart you made in college when burrowing through a Tolstoy novel. Characters came and went. Layers of subtext appeared and disappeared. It was brilliant stuff, but it was also off-putting.

  Evans was frustrated. His production banner was ready to start, he had his first script in hand, which he couldn’t quite understand, but now he needed a stratagem to propel things forward.

  His thoughts turned to his old friend Roman Polanski. Three years had passed since the Manson murders, and the filmmaker was still free-floating around Europe—his life unfocused. Polanski had always been drawn to convoluted plots. And he needed a job.

  Even as Evans was reaching out to Polanski, Paramount went public with the announcement of his new deal. Predictably, Yablans was outraged. But his indignation was echoed by several important stars and directors who were prepping films at the studio. Among the protesters was Warren Beatty, a close friend of Evans, who told Bluhdorn that the deal meant that Evans’s movies would always come ahead of all others when it came to ad spending or prime release dates.

  Beatty and I had been working closely on The Parallax View—also based on a Bob Towne script—and Beatty was now infuriated that his film would be upstaged by Chinatown. “Bobby has to make a choice—either he runs the studio or he produces pictures,” Beatty told me.

  Not one to worry about consistency, Yablans now presented Evans with his own demands. Chinatown, he said, was a confusing mess of a script and Evans was crazy to make it his first film, but if that was his position, Yablans wanted to share in Evans’s points. It would be a fifty-fifty split, and that was not a suggestion. It was a demand.

  There was an additional demand as well. Time magazine was planning a cover story on Evans, and Yablans now insisted on a shared cover. A stunned Evans protested that he couldn’t control Time’s editorial decisions, but Yablans warned, “If you don’t deliver the cover I will make every hour of every day of your life so miserable you’ll wish you were dead.”

  Evans surrendered on the fifty-fifty deal, but he alone decorated the cover of Time.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Outlaws

  During the heyday of the studio system, in the thirties and forties, Hollywood directors clearly understood their place in the pecking order. The typical director was assigned his movies—he could turn them down but risked offending the studio chief. He was encouraged to work with writers to sharpen the shooting script, but only under the scrutiny of studio apparatchiks. Upon completion of principal photography, he awaited his next assignment while editors worked on the cut of his previous film. There was no question about the final cut. That resided in the hands of the studio.

  At Paramount, I witnessed the final vestiges of that system. On True Grit, for example, Henry Hathaway, a salty old studio veteran, directed the actors and ran the set but the edit was supervised by his producer, Hal Wallis, a onetime production chief at Warner Bros.

  Hathaway understood the old ground rules. He trusted Wallis’s ability to supervise the editors and deliver a cut that would make both the performers and the director look good. Besides, that was the way the system worked.

  But all that was soon to change. To the young filmmakers now making their impact, control was crucial. They wanted to edit their films and select the score and even have a say in the promotion. Their rallying cry was heard loud and clear: They wanted final cut.

  In reality, a select circle of filmmakers had already achieved this objec
tive. No distributor was going to mess around with a David Lean movie, for example. Alfred Hitchcock was not about to bend to corporate interference. I was having lunch with Hitchcock once when he informed me cheerfully how he’d preserved total secrecy during the making of Psycho (even to the point of buying up every copy of the book so no one would steal the plot). “Unless theater owners guaranteed me that no one would be admitted after the movie started, I would not let them show the film,” he said, his eyes twinkling over his remembered success.

  But the maverick young filmmakers now making their demands did not have the credentials of a Lean or Hitchcock. What they had going for them was brashness—and the luck of good timing. The old system was broken. The new rules were up for grabs.

  It was the French auteurs, of course, who had effectively raised the ante. America’s young filmmakers revered the work of Truffaut, Godard, and their contemporaries. They were in awe, not only of their creativity, but also of their control.

  The French filmmakers, however, usually raised the money for their films, often recruiting their own private Medicis—wealthy businessmen who venerated the talents of the new auteur class. French directors thus became proprietors of their own work and, as copyright owners, exerted creative control.

  The young Americans, by contrast, were funded by studios and the copyright belonged to the financier. Whatever their artistic ambitions, and however great their egos, they were, in fact, employees who worked at the pleasure of their employers, and their employers often showed their displeasure.

  From my first moments at Paramount I could sense a growing tension. The revolution was at hand and I was to find myself regarded as both friend and enemy to each side.

  Paramount was not the only studio at which these battles were being fought, but since Evans and I had been the most aggressive in recruiting a colorful young cast of filmmakers, it was inevitable that our studio would become a prime battleground.