Robert Evans

Born in New York on June 29, 1930, Robert J. Shapera in New York –his real name– began his journey in the cinema as an actor, rather mediocre. He first played a soldier, in the adventure film Revolt in Haiti (1952), by Jean Negulesco . After spending a year of convalescence, due to a lung disease, he decided that the Seventh Art was not his thing, and founded with his brother Charles Evan-Picone, a women’s clothing company. While staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he bumped into Norma Shearer, actress and widow of producer Irving G. Thalberg, at the pool. She convinced him to play her husband in The Man with a Thousand Faces , a biopic in which James Cagney played Lon Chaney.

He then gave life to the bullfighter Pedro Romero in Fiesta , an adaptation of the work by Ernest Hemingway . Due to his lack of acting skills, the actors colluded to ask the producer, Darryl Zanuck, to fire him. But for some reason, she had liked Robert Evans , so he sent a telegram with the text: “The boy stays in the film.” That phrase would later serve as the title for Evans’ own autobiography, and for a documentary about his life, renamed in Spain as The Boy Who Conquered Hollywood .

At that time, businessman Charlie Bluhdorn bought Paramount, which despite past successes like The Ten Commandments , was going under. Knowing nothing about cinema, he decided to leave the company in the hands of Evans, naming him production manager in the mid-1960s. Having seen Roman Polanski ‘s European films , he became passionate about his work, and recruited him to put Helming Rosemary’s Baby , which was a huge hit, so he put the filmmaker to work on Chinatown . Legend has it –possibly false– that one day a messenger brought him an envelope, and he noticed his charismatic smile. He told her that he was going to cast her as the lead in the film, and that he would pay her $11,000.

–Could it be 11,500? I’m divorced and I have a daughter.

–Let it be 12,500 then.

And he hired him. It was about Jack Nicholson .

 “Current producers only think about money, about profitability,” he explained in an interview. “For them, cinema is a business. They are capable of producing four or five films a year. It takes me three years to produce a single film, but I am completely dedicated to it.” Under his supervision, and with his direct involvement, mythical titles such as The Godfather , by Francis Ford Coppola , or Love Story (1970) by Arthur Hiller, among others, were created. During the filming of the latter he fell in love with the protagonist, Ali MacGraw , whom he married and would have her only child, but who later changed him to Steve McQueen after filming The Getaway. He became a womanizer, who according to gossip had to ask his housekeeper to write in a note under his coffee cup the name of the girl –usually a model or a prostitute– with whom he had spent the night. the night before, and with whom he was now having breakfast.

When Bluhdorn sold Paramount, Evans founded his own company, signing an unprecedented multi-million dollar deal for the major to distribute to him. His decline began when the courts convicted him of cocaine possession, and for the complicated filming of Cotton Club , again with Coppola, which was a commercial failure. In the ’90s he returned to Paramount, where he spearheaded commercial projects like Sliver . Robert Evans is perhaps the only Hollywood producer to have starred in an animated series, Kid Notorius , from 2003. That year he produced How to Lose a Boy in Ten Days ., which was his last job. During his later years he tried to develop a few more projects for Paramount, but none of them came to fruition.