And then Ali MacGraw dived into the pool at Woodland, and in December 1970, Love Story—and Robert Evans and Peter Bart—saved Paramount. Going forward, Evans and Bart would have nothing to prove. “We had,” Bart said, “total freedom.” They were, Evans said, “pishers no more.” The garden gates opened, and Charlie Bluhdorn—joining their parade, Love Story’s explosion, the sensational audience reaction, the advance dollar signs, the Christmas cheer, the foregone vistas of more and greener meadows rolling out ahead of them—rushed a box office in New York, hollered to the theater manager, “Raise the fucking prices, don’t just stand there!” and planted a kiss on Evans’s cheek. Bluhdorn—who, for all his bluster, loved Evans like the beautiful and beautifully assimilated version of himself he dreamed he could be but knew he never would—was crying. “America,” he murmured, putting an arm around Evans’s shoulder. “Imagine, twelve years ago I was walking the streets selling typewriters door-to-door.”
Gulf & Western retained control of Paramount, but henceforth it belonged to one man—Robert Evans.
* * *
And so it began. From Bart and Evans’s Palm Springs decree blossomed a truly miraculous run of acknowledged American classics. At the studio Evans called “the Mountain,” Polanski, Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Towne, Hal Ashby, Nicholas Roeg, Michael Ritchie, Gordon Willis, Alan J. Pakula, Dick Sylbert, Anthea Sylbert, and others produced some of their most defining work. In the first half of the seventies, among the major studios, only Warner Bros.—with Deliverance, Klute, The Exorcist, Mean Streets, and the works of Stanley Kubrick—approached Paramount’s epochal record of artistic and commercial achievement. Bluhdorn himself attributed it to the spirit of purposeful collaboration, exchanging profligate productions and runaway salaries for small budgets and personal fervor—the films filmmakers wanted to make. Sharing in the risks, Bluhdorn saw they really would save money by making art. “And when these people don’t feel like marionettes pushed around by big studios, they become live,” he said of Paramount’s filmmakers. “They work like slaves for themselves.” Removed from the lot, Paramount’s offices at Canon Drive assumed the personality of an independent production company. “The minute we moved,” Bart explained, “everything changed. We lost all the committees, and it came down to a tiny group of us. We were all working faster, more closely together. Everything began to get a little sizzle, and all of a sudden good projects began to come to us.” In the summer of 1972 Bluhdorn hatched the highly improbable, almost utopian idea for the Directors Company. Within a limited budget range, about thirty million dollars to be distributed over a dozen pictures, the three Directors Company directors, Coppola, William Friedkin, and Bogdanovich would have complete artistic autonomy and on a nonexclusive basis to the studio. The Directors Company was Paramount’s gift to star auteurs, a deal clearly and in every way biased toward filmmakers, so much so that it earned the ire of Paramount executives certain Bluhdorn was giving away the store—which he was.
“You von’t belief vat I’ve done,” Bludhorn enthused to Paramount executive Frank Yablans, the fiercest, crassest one of the bunch. “An impossible dream, an impossible dream!”
Yablans, based in New York, was not paid to dream but to guard the bottom line.
“I think it’s shit,” Yablans barked. “I think it’s the worst, stupidest, dumbest idea I ever heard in my life. And I’m not gonna have any part of it. Why don’t you just give ’em the company, Charlie? What the fuck are you paying me for?”
The mood at Canon Drive was far sunnier. “Evans and I loved the idea,” Bart said. “These good little projects started coming to us.” In 1972 Friedkin stalled, taking work elsewhere, but the Directors Company allowed Coppola The Conversation and Bogdanovich Paper Moon, masterpieces of Paramount’s—and indeed Hollywood’s—most progressive, art-forward venture of the 1970s.
Floodgates opened. The river rush of corporate money and the latitude, conferred upon studio leaders like Evans and Calley to conduct business as they saw fit, fostered an industrywide reflowering. But it was due to the particular style and charisma of Evans, and the bestowals of his Woodland estate, that he and Bart consistently attracted and maintained artists inclined toward the manner of glamour and classical ideals adjudged Old Hollywood. It was different at Warner Bros. John Calley—to his great credit—freed directors from his own (highly refined) inclinations. He didn’t have a style: “I was really comfortable with directors,” Calley said. “We started doing pictures without producers almost immediately. Directors had to run the fucker.” (Bart, walking with fellow journalist turned producer Howard Stringer, spotted Calley in Beverly Hills one sunny afternoon, and Stringer remarked: “Do you ever notice that when John Calley passes he leaves no shadow?”) Not so Evans, who favored painterly beauty and moods less suited to the faster film stocks and portable technologies of the Vietnam years than to the across-a-crowded-room yearnings of World War II of his youth. Thus would Chinatown, set in the seductive past against the smoke spirals and ivory Plymouths of the late thirties, assume for Evans a special gleam (despite its messy script, still without an ending). It was his homecoming, a victory flag he staked on the mountaintop. It would also be his first film at Paramount not just as executive but as producer. If Evans was king before, now he was king-emperor.
In 1973 Evans declared the film the maiden voyage of his newly inaugurated Robert Evans Productions, Bluhdorn’s thank-you bonus for saving the studio. Under the terms of Evans’s highly unusual new deal, he would produce his own pictures for Paramount, one a year for five years, and simultaneously maintain his position as Paramount’s head of production. It was a virtually unprecedented arrangement. Not since the estimable Darryl F. Zanuck, thirty years earlier, had such a sweetheart deal been offered to a studio chief. With unfettered access to studio finances, manpower, and production and marketing resources, Evans the executive could conceivably direct unlimited assets to Evans the producer. What couldn’t he do now? His Chinatown would want for nothing.
Others feared their films would go hungry. “Bobby has to make a choice,” Warren Beatty confided to Bart. “Either he runs the studio or produces pictures.” Beatty’s unease was echoed by many at the studio, most vocally by Frank Yablans. Though Yablans was, in the words of Paramount’s Charles Glenn, “a genius of film distribution,” responsible for the revolutionary release strategy of The Godfather, his clumsy power plays and blatant and incessant boasting—“I saved Bluhdorn’s ass,” he would claim—ruptured his relationship with Evans to such a degree that Bluhdorn’s 1971 promotion of Yablans to president was roundly considered the boss’s way of just shutting Yablans up. The promotion was troubling to no less than Yablans’s brother, Paramount’s West Coast sales manager, who took it upon himself to prepare Evans for the coming storm: “This is never going to work,” he warned. “Trust me—Frank Yablans is crazy. I should know—I’m his brother. He’s doing well where he is, but he’ll never be able to handle this much power.” The next day Yablans fired his brother.