The picture ended.
An eerie quiet filled the theater, and Evans interrogated the silence for a tell: Were they asleep? That not a body moved could have indicated either dumbstruck awe or paralytic revulsion. Which was it? Defensively he had premised a marketing scheme on concealment. No prepublicity, no softcover novelization, no glamorous tie-ins with the movie’s costumes or music, as he had done on Gatsby. Jack would get his footprints in Grauman’s cement, which had already been arranged, but as best he could, Evans would keep Chinatown a mystery, like a secret worth keeping—or, would they say, a product not worth selling?
In the lobby Sue Mengers rushed toward him: “What kind of dreck is this shit?”
Gossip columnist Rona Barrett: “How could you make this picture?”
Freddie Fields didn’t try to contain his delight: “Sorry, kid.”
Dressed for victory in suede vest and open-necked shirt, Evans, smiling anyway, lit a cigar and headed to Chasen’s—catered Chinese instead of chili—kissing and backslapping Jack and Anjelica, talent agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar, Kris Kristofferson, Dunaway, Sue and her husband, Jean-Claude Tramont, well past midnight. It was another night of work.
What could he do now? The picture was done. It was done.
His fate was no longer his to control. Perhaps his opponents were right: Running the studio and producing was too high a gamble. He had already earned Beatty’s and director Alan Pakula’s wrath for setting the release of The Parallax View for June 14, potentially burying it a mere week before he opened Chinatown. And his wars with Yablans were taking their toll. “After Chinatown,” Evans confessed that year, “I think I’ll concentrate on running the studio for a while.” He might even leave Hollywood: “The movie industry outgrows everybody.” They were coming for him.
Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times loved Chinatown. He named it the best of the year, and Roger Ebert plainly hailed it a tour de force. Most critics followed suit, praising every facet of the production, the uncompromising intelligence of the screenplay, the design, Nicholson and Polanski, the very idea of using an “old-fashioned” genre, like a detective movie, to touch audiences with unsuspected grandeur, a tragedy of the modern world. Chinatown, it was almost universally agreed, was that rare, if not unprecedented, private-eye movie that was really about something. The voice of (qualified) dissent would come from Pauline Kael: “The film holds you, in a suffocating way,” she wrote. “Polanski never lets the story tell itself. It’s all over-deliberate, mauve, nightmarish; everyone is yellow-lacquered, and evil runs rampant. You don’t care who is hurt, since everything is blighted. And yet the nastiness has a look, and a fascination.”
Drawn by the reviews, people came.
On June 20 the line outside Grauman’s Chinese swelled with L.A. adults hip to the movies. They had read Champlin, his praise of Chinatown’s “vision of a time, a place, and a life-style,” its “total recapturing of a past, in its plot, its vivid characterizations, its carefully calculated and accelerating pace, its whole demonstration of a medium mastered,” a film, he wrote, that “reminds you again—and thrillingly—that motion pictures are larger, not smaller than life; they are not processed at drugstores and they are not television.” Not television, no. The adults of Los Angeles would have to go out to see Chinatown (kids, angling for something more dangerous than television, would have to sneak in); they would have to set aside an entire evening; to see Chinatown they would have to spend time and money (tickets, nanny, parking, popcorn, dinner)—an investment that, rather than diminish the experience, actually dignified the film, the filmmakers, and the entire moviegoing enterprise with value and anticipation, the romance and high talk and longing for something important almost about to happen. Even standing in line was an event. As Chinatown opened in only three theaters in L.A. (the Chinese, Westwood’s National, and a drive-in in Van Nuys), none of them multiplexes, the city’s adult filmgoers were all funneled to one of only a handful of common points. Waiting in line, they were their own society, greeting like-minded strangers, trading movie gossip, flirting, passing joints, debating The Parallax View, Blazing Saddles, Thieves Like Us, The Conversation, The Sugarland Express, citing Pauline by her first name, Canby by his second, gauging the faces of the preceding audience as they flooded from the theater: Would we wear those expressions in two hours’ time? Would what happened to them happen to us?
America’s morale fell further that summer, but the sidewalk filmgoers kept a sturdier faith. They were adults, they were well informed by informed critics, and they went to the movies because the movies were still good.
“Longing on a large scale is what makes history,” writes Don DeLillo.
Hollywood had answered their call.
* * *
Evans was elated. He had been in the business long enough to know that these were the kinds of reviews that predicted Oscar nominations, and while he didn’t expect Chinatown to do titanic business, having decided—unlike Paramount’s Godfather strategy—to open the picture slowly, hoping for the kind of word of mouth Chinatown was now getting, it would not be long before he knew for certain he had a modest hit on his hands. But even more than that, he had, at last, what he had been angling for since he first stepped into his big office at the studio, since even before, when he learned the meaning of the word “producer”: respect. Not power—as an executive he had already had that—but the patina of awe and good fortune that comes to one intimately affiliated with an actual work of art. He had not produced The Godfather; he had not produced Love Story. He had produced Chinatown. “We had something,” he said, “that had something. We had a little magic.”
It wouldn’t last. What he had felt coming finally came.
In September 1974 Charlie Bluhdorn had given up on trying to smooth the way between Yablans and Evans: “[They] hated each other too much,” explained Peter Bart. “Both wanted more money and more fame.” Yablans would exit. And Evans, at the peak of his power and success, would find himself demoted, withdrawn as head of the studio, and given a production deal. He would be only a producer now.
It would be, surprisingly, something of a relief to Evans to step from the throne, shed the politics and headaches, and join his friends, the artists, in doing exclusively what he had set out to do in the first place: make movies.
At the top of Paramount, Bluhdorn installed a new president, Barry Diller. Evans would report to him, effective in six months’ time.
On one level Evans’s demotion made no sense. With more than twenty films released and nearly $300 million in after-tax profits, 1974 had been a banner year for Paramount: the studio’s best ever. Emotional turmoil aside, Evans had done an extraordinary job. But of Paramount’s incredible 1974, only $103 million were attributable to Evans’s motion picture releases, a marked decline from 1973’s $120 million, 1972’s $142 million, and 1971’s $139 million. The difference was television: the big screen was down; the small was up. And Barry Diller would be coming from ABC.
If Evans had followed the box-office trend—one that forecast Hollywood’s out-and-out submission to escapist entertainment—that had begun with Universal’s Airport in 1970, and given Paramount a disaster picture to match the monster returns of Fox’s Poseidon Adventure (1972’s highest grosser after The Godfather) or Fox’s Towering Inferno (1974’s top grosser) or Universal’s Earthquake (1974’s third highest), his position might have been different. But Evans disdained disaster movies. He had made a concerted policy of avoiding the pack for what he deemed “man-woman” stories: “I’ve always been a proponent of people pictures,” he said.