![]() ![]() He emerged from these shambles only in the nineties, with the publication, in 1994, of “ The Kid Stays in the Picture,” his sardonically zingy memoir, which was also adapted into a documentary, in 2002.Įvans was born in 1930 to a Jewish family in New York, and spent his youth acting in radio plays and working with his older brother as a salesman of women’s slacks. His cocaine use, already prodigious, achieved legendary proportions, and he was tied to, though never charged in connection with, the murder of the producer Roy Radin by Miami drug dealers. Evans eventually left the post to produce under his own name, and his life gradually descended into professional and personal chaos. By producing work that pushed beyond the staid, conventional moviemaking of the traditional studio system, he helped to usher in the New Hollywood era, a time of big-budget movies that were intended, self-consciously, as art, and not as mere commercial entertainment. During his tenure, he presided over Francis Ford Coppola’s first and second “Godfather” installments, and Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” among many other films. Evans, one of the most memorable characters in Biskind’s book, was the head of Paramount Pictures between 19. I thought about all of this again when I learned that the movie producer Robert Evans had died, this past Saturday, at age eighty-nine, in his home in Beverly Hills. In this case, the sheer over-the-topness of the period offers a glimpse into a Hollywood culture that is only now beginning to be dismantled. In “ Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” Thomas de Quincey described the pleasure of learning about the “moral ulcers or scars” behind “that ‘decent drapery’ which time or indulgence to human frailty might have drawn over them.” It is a similar feeling to ripping through a true-crime novel, or a “blind items revealed” gossip column: there is a fascination in reading about people’s stupid, brutal, and scandalous behavior. But there is also something enjoyable, for someone like me, who is removed-temperamentally, temporally, geographically-in reading about the kind of dark goings on that are not typically discussed in polite society. Partly, there is some relief in reading these books today and reflecting on the relative progress we’ve made. But I remain enthralled by their histories of Hollywood. The picture that writers like Biskind and Phillips draw isn’t pretty, and their approach toward the prevailing attitudes of the era is often laissez-faire. As Julia Phillips wrote in her memoir “ You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again,” when she started out, in the late sixties, as one of the only female movie producers in the industry, there were “no women in the business but stars, secretaries, and bimbos.” Women were overlooked professionally when they were not being instrumentally assessed, and often used or abused, for their sexual appeal. For much of my adult life, one of my favorite books has been Peter Biskind’s “ Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,” which recounts the shoddy, sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll antics of the industry’s principal players, who were almost always men. But it also made me realize how much I have been gripped, over the years, by the lore of Hollywood in the seventies, which was replete with male behavior that, when not outright criminal, was at the very least gross and sexist. As these events began to unfold, it was gratifying to think that women in Hollywood might now be able to pursue their professional goals more fully, unharmed and untrammelled. ![]() ![]() In the months that followed, accruing #MeToo revelations led to the downfall of producers, performers, and executives for long-employed tactics of harassment, intimidation, and assault. It has now been just over two years since the Harvey Weinstein allegations were reported in the Times as well as in this magazine, in the early days of October, 2017. ![]()
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