‘Chinatown’ producer Robert Evans dies at 89
Production head credited with saving studio
Robert Evans, the producer of the film classic “Chinatown” and a former Paramount Pictures production head who helped save the studio with hits such as “Love Story” and “The Godfather” and whose over-the-top life was as cinematic as the movies he presided over, has died. He was 89.
Evans died Saturday, his publicist Monique Moss said. No further details were provided.
Described by former Times film columnist Patrick Goldstein as “one of the great self-invented characters of our age,” Evans reached meteoric heights during his reign as production chief of Paramount in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
As head of production at Paramount, Evans presided over blockbuster hits that revived the ailing studio’s fortunes, and he became a noted independent producer.
But he fell from grace in the 1980s when he was involved in a drug scandal and later linked to a high-profile murder case — unexpected true-life plot twists that, as Evans put it, turned him from “legend to leper.”
Over the years, he has been characterized as vain and self-destructive, warm and loyal, a romantic rather than a businessman, a legendary ladies’ man, a glamorous gambler, the last of a dying breed and a survivor.
“If Evans were a racehorse,” “Chinatown” screenwriter Robert Towne once said, “they’d have to call him Caution to the Winds.”
Evans’ flamboyant life and style (the perpetually tanned skin, the oversized glasses, the turtlenecks) became fodder for parody — Dustin Hoffman played a big glasses-wearing, tanning bed-using, Evans-like movie producer in the 1997 dark comedy “Wag the Dog” — and selfparody: Evans voiced his own title character in “Kid Notorious,” a 2003 Comedy Central cartoon series that was inspired by his storied life in Hollywood.
He was a master of self-promotion and reinvention, resurfacing in the 1990s after a decade of professional and legal troubles with a candid best-selling autobiography, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” and a revived career as an independent producer, albeit with far less success than during his heyday.
Evans was a Hollywood first: a onetime actor who became the production head of a major movie studio.
“He wasn’t a star as an actor, but he was a star as a producer-studio head,” veteran producer Lawrence Turman, chair of the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, told The Times in 2008.
One of three children, he was born Robert J. Shapera on June 29, 1930, in New York City.
A former teenage radio actor in New York City in the 1940s whose late ’50s fling in the movies included playing Ava Gardner’s bullfighter love-interest in “The Sun Also Rises,” Evans also was a partner in the pants division of EvanPicone, the successful New York women’s sportswear company co-founded by his brother Charles in 1949.
The company, Evans said, made him a millionaire before he was 25. But his heart was in show business, and a couple of years after the company was sold to Revlon, he reinvented himself as an independent Hollywood movie producer.