The word “legend” refers to a great many people who have worked in Hollywood. But when you’re talking about a movie star or a fabled director, the essence of the legend can be found up …
. In hiring Francis Ford Coppola, Evans grasped that the then-moribund gangster genre needed a major helping of ethnic authenticity; as much as that, he saw that it needed to be epic. The result was a new benchmark in operatic Hollywood realism. At the same time, Evans understood the populist lure of “,” a romance with four-hanky storytelling values that couldn’t have been more antithetical to those of the New Hollywood.
But the thing about Robert Evans is that he walked the walk. When he left the studio aristocracy and ventured out on his own, making features on contract to Paramount, he could easily have landed in the weeds, but instead he took Robert Towne’s script for “,” which was originally so dense that no one could understand it, and used his producer’s alchemy to mold it into a great movie.
For a while, he could do no wrong, and his media presence, which he cultivated with Trumpian cunning, escalated right along with that of his friend Jack Nicholson. Yet the culture was changing, and Evans, as one of the kings of it, was having too much fun to notice. In 1980, he was tagged in a drug bust , and the descent that followed was as decisive as the rise. That he lost his touch as a producer had as much to do with the era as it did with him.
Was his downfall out of Greek drama — as in fate, karma, his own nature catching up with itself? Was he Charles Foster Kane as profiled by “E! True Hollywood Story”? Holed up in his Hollywood chateau , with no one interested in working with him, he was, for a while, just that. And when Dustin Hoffman, in 1997, based his performance as a Hollywood producer in “Wag the Dog” on Evans , it seemed as if it was Evans’ manic-nerd demeanor that was becoming legendary.
He had a comeback, of sorts . Yet the ultimate truth of Robert Evans’ career is that it was his instincts as a producer that were legendary. He believed in the movies he was making. And it was his destiny to arrive at a moment when the revolutionary artists who were coming up in Hollywood needed someone to believe in them. Robert Evans was that someone. In producing the films he did, he changed film history, making himself a timeless character within it.
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