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By
Published: Jun 13, 2011
Category: Memoir [4]
You never know what’s around the corner.
That, perhaps, is the moral of Peter Bart’s film career.
There he was, a young New York Times reporter, married and a father, happy covering New York. Suddenly he was asked to report from Los Angeles. He had no interest. In the men’s room, he asked David Halberstam what would happen if he declined. “You probably end up holding a very small piece of what you’re currently holding,” Halberstam said. So off to LA went Bart.
Bob Evans was a young man about town. He was not an actor, but he kept getting big parts. Peter Bart wrote him up. Charles Bludhorn, head of Gulf + Western, read that piece and decided --- you’re sitting down? --- that Evans should be head of production at the London office of Paramount Pictures. Six months later, Evans was running Paramount in LA.
This gave Bob Evans an equally bizarre idea: Peter Bart should quit the Times and help him run Paramount. “I wasn’t equipped for this job,” Evans said, “so I want someone at my side who is also unprepared.” And that is how, in 1967, a 35-year-old reporter tumbled into the movie business.
[Disclosure: At the end of Bart’s tenure at Paramount, I was his neighbor in Los Angeles. We’ve been kinda sorta friends ever since.]
Paramount was so feudal that Bart had to threaten a minion to get decent office furniture. Bludhorn interfered at every turn, approving big-budget projects that were clearly destined to die fast and hard. Evans worked hard by day, but at night no one partied harder. Ah, the ‘60s….
“Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex)” mostly deals with the revolution that Bart and Evans made at Paramount --- getting rid of legacy directors and bring in upstarts like Francis Coppola and Roman Polanski. Bart gives you the 30,000-foor view, and he’s eloquent at that altitude. But that’s not why we read books about Hollywood, is it? We want the dish. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here [3]. For the Kindle edition, click here [5].]
Like: Bob Evans and Warren Beatty playing a game only they could: one called out a phone number, the other responded with the name of the woman it belonged to.
Like: Evans hiring Ali MacGraw for “Love Story,” marrying her and doing a dazzling dance with her at the premiere, knowing full well she was having an affair with Steve McQueen.
Like: Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie actually doing it during a sex scene in “Don’t Look Now” and then Warren Beatty, who was no longer involved with Christie, telling Bart they were going to edit the scene “hair by hair.” [They did.]
And I haven’t mentioned the “fun” stuff. “Virtually every party, and they were almost nightly, had their standard offering and lines of cocaine and piles of joints," Bart writes. “I smoked the joints and welcomed an occasional cocaine high after an arduous day, and the hot tubs became habitual as did the subsurface wandering hands." If you know anything about the movie business today, you know it is different now --- most notably, that it is run by MBAs and accountants. Which is, of course, what we want in our executive class.
The thing is, in just seven years, Evans and Bart made "Rosemary's Baby," "Goodbye Columbus," "Catch-22," "Nashville," "The Conversation," "Love Story," "True Grit," "Chinatown" and "The Godfather." You might ask --- you can’t help but ask --- what have the new guys made? And, just to close the circle, what are the names of the dishy memoirs they’ve written?