“Peter, I need you at Paramount.”
“What?”
“I don’t trust anyone. I trust you.”
“Evans, I’m a journalist.”
“You know the business.”
Disney, Warner, Selznick, Hitchcock, Wasserman—Bart had interviewed them all. As The New York Times’s man in Hollywood, a turf then underexplored by major news outlets, most of which regarded movie journalism as gossip, Bart practically had the beat to himself. No one outside Hollywood knew Hollywood better. “The Times sent me out to Los Angeles to cover the political changes,” Bart said, “but they said specifically, they don’t want to cover Hollywood, so don’t cover that stuff.” He did anyway, and in the course of his reporting, saw what was really going on: the industry was in a state of panic. “You’d have to be brain dead,” Bart said, “not to realize that the studios were broke and you could go in there and really have an impact.”
“You read, Peter,” Evans explained. “You have taste. That’s what this is all going to be about—taste.”
“And their taste?”
Evans had that one sewed up. “We won’t tell them how to sell and they won’t tell us what to make.” A pledge of freedom—Evans had Bluhdorn’s support on that.
“What’s the worst they can do?” Evans asked. “Peter, what have we got to lose?”
They went to Palm Springs, to Riccio, their favorite restaurant, and spread their cards on the table: In 1966 the studio was deeply in the red: Is Paris Burning?, a critical and commercial disaster, went a million over budget, and so had El Dorado and This Property Is Condemned; and Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad, over budget by $2.175 million, had been shelved for a year. In fact, over the last decade, Paramount had produced only a handful of worthy films: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Hud, and, in 1966, Seconds. How had the studio survived? “We were,” Evans said, “up to our necks in shit.”
Alfie had taught Evans something, though. Modest of budget and conception in an age of road-show spectaculars and notably starless—the film made Michael Caine, not the other way around—Alfie was proof positive that some big movies had humble beginnings.
“It’s back to basics,” Evans explained to Bart in Palm Springs. “It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the screen. If you don’t have a script, you’ve got nothing.”
Evans’s assertion ran against the grain in midsixties Hollywood, where a gerontocracy in crisis was fighting the small screen with grand expenditure, the more-is-more strategy of the road-show economy. Bluhdorn’s own taste wasn’t much different: He went in for lavish musicals and war epics, the sort of cast-of-a-thousand-stars productions he, along with many of his generation, identified with Hollywood glamour and prestige, like his Paramount pet, Darling Lili, a World War I musical staring Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson, a project Evans and Bart abhorred.
“What would happen,” Bart schemed to Evans, “if we brought in really interesting and accessible novels and plays and brought in bright young people to make them? Instead of dealing with grumpy old people like Henry Hathaway and Howard Hawks.”
It was a dream proposition for Robert Evans: commercial security, a whisper of art, the old genres revisited, classicism modernized. The glamour Bluhdorn mandated they would deliver; the kiss would still be a kiss—but maybe, this time around, a little French.
Battle plan in hand, Evans and Bart returned to Los Angeles and divided to conquer. Evans, the front man, would handle the studio politics; Bluhdorn, the board of directors. Evans would handle the personalities in front of and behind the camera, he would honey-darling the agents, put the movies together, and see it to it that they came out right. Bart, his right hand, would read like crazy. He would sniff out movie material, work with writers to develop ideas, and court talent into Evans’s hands. It was perfect. “There was not one moment,” Bart said, “I can ever recall, not ever, of anger or tension between Evans and I.”
Back at the studio, Bart said, Evans struggled to “clean up Bluhdorn’s faux-pas,” the wreckage of tone-deaf films they inherited, while Bart scouted for material. Meanwhile, new bad-idea movies, many preceding Bluhdorn’s takeover, kept breaking their concentration, clogging the pipeline. Paint Your Wagon, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Skidoo—how were they supposed to release these things? In the fall of 1969 Paramount hit a new low, by one count a $22 million pretax loss. Among recent releases, only The Odd Couple turned a good profit. Film production was down; most soundstages were occupied by television shows, their staff and crews imported by the networks, orphaning Paramount’s own reserve of office personnel and film technicians. Against the wall, Bluhdorn let go of close to 150 of his own employees and began to talk about selling off half the lot—which would nudge production onto location and divest filmmakers of the in-house expertise of the studio’s own wardrobe, set design, and lighting departments, the prepaid advantages and convenience of working at home. Without a studio lot, it would be harder to control the elements, harder to schedule. Each production, like an independent film, would be assembled from scratch, everything would move slower and, accordingly, fewer films would be produced. Fewer risks would be taken. The films themselves, colored by the realities of actual location, would likely assume naturalistic qualities—by no means a defect, but to Evans, compelled by the aesthetics of romance, the greenhouse splendor of on-the-lot production—“I’ve been to Paris France and I’ve been to Paris Paramount,” Ernst Lubitsch famously observed. “Paris Paramount is better”—selling half the lot was tantamount to half a goodbye. But where Evans felt the loss, Martin Davis, senior VP of Gulf & Western and Bluhdorn’s second in command, saw fast cash. The romance of Paramount? “These kids,” he rationalized, “aren’t going to the movies to take home dreams.” Davis was no dreamer. He was, Peter Bart said, “the worst dirtbag who ever lived.”
Half the lot—the features half, not the television half—went up for sale in October 1969. Months later, Bluhdorn found a buyer in Società Generale Immobiliare, a huge Italian corporation with Vatican (and mob) ties. In April 1970, as the terms of the sale were arranged, Evans and Bart and two dozen associates were relocated off the lot to a small building on 202 North Canon Drive, a few paces from Evans’s table at the Bistro in Beverly Hills—a nice neighborhood, but no matter how they tried to spin it, the buyer and the move sent a humiliating distress signal to Hollywood.
Paramount’s board of directors, meanwhile, kept pressuring Bluhdorn to close on the Italian deal—and fast. In the coming year Love Story was the only film Paramount had slated for production.
Under the gun, Evans and Bart would carpool to the offices on Canon Drive. “That hour with Peter to and from the office,” Evans said, “was where we got our best work done.” Driving from Woodland to Rexford, Rexford to Sunset, exchanging views of last night’s readings, last night’s screening, synchronizing their aims for the meetings ahead, no phone calls, no interruptions, no single compromise disrupted their focus in their war room on wheels. How would they get Roman Polanski into Rosemary’s Baby? Bart had a plan: “I talked to a friend of Roman’s,” Bart explained, “and learned that the way to get Roman’s interest was skiing and girls.” For the former they had Downhill Racer; the latter, Robert Evans. How to get Coppola into The Godfather, a book he shrugged off? “I knew [Warner Bros. executive John] Calley had dumped Francis and he was broke,” Bart said. “I was the only person who was persistent enough to talk Francis into it by reminding him of his fear of poverty, reminding him of his tuition payments.” Bart actually kept a notebook of all the lies he had to tell: “Lies,” he said, “are the way to get a movie started: ‘So-and-so’s really interested.’” Among their early endeavors, only Love Story, in contrast to badass fare like Easy Rider, was consciously assembled to make money. Their original director, Larry Peerce, was the arty sort who satisfied the Palm Springs mandate, but when he expressed an interest in politicizing Love Story—he’d make the character of Oliver into a Vietnam vet—Bart and Evans, in the ride to work, nixed him in favor of Arthur Hiller.