Last year I took a film history course called American Masterworks. It really turned me on to the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s. I had seen most of the films we watched in class, but I saw them and analyzed them from a academic perspective. I think it was a good class to take. Perhaps I'm going against the grain, but I think the academic study of Cinema has merit. After the class I bought Peter Biskind's book about the New Hollywood and read it pretty thoroughly, maybe I should read it again. The book is great. One story that I latched on to from the book is about the making of the Godfather. I really like the Godfather I and II, the third one is okay, but not as good as the first two. Biskind talks about the relationship between Bob Evans, the subject of the film The Kid Stays in the Picture, and the director of the Godfather Francis Coppola. It was a tumultuous relationship, but in the end it produced, perhaps, the best film of the 1970s. I did some amazon and google searches and started reading more about Coppola and Evans. From reading the Biskind book and with a name like Evans, I thought Bob Evans was some kind of WASP. It turns out though he was an Jewsih from Manhattan. His father was a dentist, one of the first to accept African-American patients. So, I became more interested in Bob Evans.
The film is very well done. From a artistic standpoint it has many creative montage sequences that blend in well with old interviews and clips from movies. Yet it's Evans' story that makes the film a good one. Rising improbably from acting to studio head, he was the biggest film executive of the New Hollywood. Not only did he work on the Godfather, he also had a hand in Love Story, which I haven't seen, and Chinatown which I've seen many times, read the screenplay, and blogged about. He was also the film executive who made Roman Polanski a star. Polanski got his big break in Hollywood with Rosemary's Baby which Evans had a hand in. Evans was also married to Ali McGraw. It was at this point that Evans is on the top of his profession. Leading the New Hollywood movement from Paramount Studios he could do no wrong. He had the magic touch.
Yet after Chinatown and McGraw leaving him, Evans goes into a tailspin of addiction, failure, and depression. He continued to make films, but he was just riding the New Hollywood wave. I don't think he thought that his lucky would ever run out, yet it did. He was busted for drugs, lost his fortune, and stayed at a mental hospital for a while before escaping. Eventually he would return to making films
I'm an aspiring screenwriter and director. I study film in all it's aspects thinking that it will make my work better. Yet as part of that education, I've tasked myself with learning some things about the film business. I think without people like Bob Evans quality films would never get made, or films that are good would not be great. Clearly Evans had a tremendous eye for talent. He picked Roman Polanski, he selected the Godfather to be produced into a film, and, after some hesitation, gave Francis Coppola his big break. As Larry Turman who wrote the book, So You Want to be a Producer, emphasized repeatedly, producers must have taste and tenacity. Bob Evans embodies those qualities as good as any other producer of the New Hollywood. The films he made are almost as legendary as he is.
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