THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 20 OCTOBER 30, 2019
Photographed by Daniel Hennessy
KID: COURTESY OF HARPERCOLLINS. FRIEDKIN: KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES. VINTAGE: NIK WHEELER/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES. MCGOWAN: DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES. ESZTERHAS: RON GALELLA COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES. NOYCE: DANIELE VENTURELLI/ GETTY IMAGES.Tribute
B
ob had the most undistinguished
career as an actor you could possibly
imagine. He was not a good actor.
His origin story — that he ran into Norma
Shearer at a swimming pool and she wanted
him to play her husband in a movie — left a
lot of room for doubt. But he had an amaz-
ing instinct about storytelling. He brought
the Paramount studio back to life. He raised
it from the dead with titles like Chinatown
and The Godfather and Rosemary’s Baby that
nobody else would have done at the time. He
had unique, contemporary tastes.
He was very mellow and sweet, but he had
extraordinary prejudices. He was always say-
ing this person was a “bum” and that person
was a “bum.” He once called me a bum. But
we were friends for many years. After I won
an Oscar for [1972’s] The French Connection,
he sought me out. We would see each other
socially. I went to a lot of those legendary
Saturday night screenings at his house. Jack
Nicholson was always there. One time Steve
McQueen was there and introduced me to the
crowd as the director of the second best chase
scene ever made. That was before Ali MacGraw
left Bob for McQueen. After that, you never
saw McQueen there again.
Bob and I talked for years about making a
film about Sidney Korshak, a lawyer who rep-
resented the Chicago mob and the Teamsters
and who controlled Hollywood [in the 1960s].
We never got around to making it, but we did
finally make a film together [in 1995]. Bob
gave me the script for Jade, and it had tremen-
dous potential. It got lambasted by the critics,
but I’m very happy with it. It’s got the best
chase scene I’ve shot, among other things.
Bob had flaws. Who doesn’t? But you never
thought about his flaws when you were in his
company. At one point, he had a serious nar-
cotics problem, though I never saw a grain of
narcotics at any of the screenings. And he had
other problems [like the Cotton Club scandal
in the ’80s]. A guy who raised a lot of money
for the film was murdered, and Bob was
questioned. It was a tough period for him. He
was down at the D.A.’s office every day, in the
newspapers as a suspect. But I can’t believe he
had anything to do with somebody’s murder.
He was one of the most knowledgeable guys
about film that I knew. I loved the guy. He was
extraordinary. — AS TOLD TO BENJAMIN SVETKEYRobert Evans
1930-2019
William Friedkin (director, Jade)
‘An Instinct
for Storytelling’
From left: Evans with Friedkin and Linda Blair in 2003.Everybody has a story about the onetime Paramount chief, who died Oct. 26 at age 89
and saved the studio with classics like The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.
‘You never thought about his flaws when you were in his company’Robert Evans was
photographed by
THR in 2012 on
the tennis court
at his Beverly Hills
home, Woodland.
Patton Oswalt once
said that Evans’
narration of the
books-on-tape
version of his 1994
best-seller, The Kid
Stays in the Picture,
was like “listening
to Lucifer dictate
his memoirs on a
Sunday afternoon.”