“Forgotten Hollywood”- The Sun Also Sets…
Manny P. here…
“`Robert Evans was an actor and a Hollywood producer. He became a Paramount Pictures production chief who backed seminal 1970s movies, including Chinatown, The Godfather, Love Story, and Harold and Maude.
ROBERT EVANS
“`While visiting Los Angeles on business, actress Norma Shearer saw Evans sunbathing by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She asked producers to hire him to portray her late husband, movie mogul Irving Thalberg, in Man of a Thousand Faces, a biography about horror movie star Lon Chaney, and starring James Cagney in the title role. Darryl Zanuck signed Evans to a contract at Twentieth Century Fox and cast him as a bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises.
“`Zanuck eventually offered Evans a three-picture deal as a producer. Paramount Pictures hired him to head production. He quickly converted the studio into the biggest hit machine in Hollywood. From 1966 to 1974, he presided over such moneymakers as Rosemary’s Baby, The Odd Couple, and Goodbye Columbus. Robert optioned The Godfather before Mario Puzo finished writing it. He supported many directors — Sidney Lumet, Hal Ashby, and Peter Bogdanovich, to name a few.
“`Evans was one of Hollywood’s flamboyant personalities, encapsulating a bygone movie era, when films were green-lit on instinct instead of market research. He was the model for Dustin Hoffman’s Hollywood producer in the 1997 satire Wag the Dog.
“`Robert Evans was eighty-nine.
Until next time> “never forget”
This entry was posted on Monday, October 28th, 2019 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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