Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

  Hoping to mollify the gathering, Clayton meekly said, “Can we move on to the part of Jordan? I’d like to go with Lois Chiles.”

  Chiles was a former girlfriend of Evans’s and this proved too much for Yablans. “We keep talking about Evans’s wives, now his girlfriends. Are we running a lonely-hearts club or a movie company?”

  Evans tried to protest that he had not proposed Chiles, but Bluhdorn was quickly on his feet again, demanding an apology from Yablans. Instead the president of Paramount simply walked out of the room.

  Lois Chiles won the part. Gatsby would be a Mia-Redford movie, lavishly stylized but frugally budgeted. Every actor in the cast dutifully agreed to cut his price. Despite the gorgeous sets, elaborate party scenes, and period wardrobes, the final production cost of the film was an austere $6.4 million.

  As a dissenter to the basic scheme, I decided to distance myself from the production. I rarely watched dailies and left the usual crisis meetings to Evans.

  When I finally saw the first cut I felt a profound disappointment. The movie seemed inert. There was no chemistry between Redford and Mia Farrow. Jack Clayton had delivered what the studio demanded: a big, glamorous star vehicle that could be promoted as a symbol of Old Hollywood.

  Of all Paramount releases of the decade, few, if any, would be accorded the promotional push of Gatsby. Its opening was more a celebration than a premiere—a celebration of style (the chic wardrobe), of glamour (the star cast), and of opulence (a chance to revisit the glories of wealth). By two weeks before opening, the movie, which cost $6.4 million to produce, had brought in advances of $18.6 million from exhibitors. “It’s the most talked about movie since Gone with the Wind, Evans proclaimed in Time magazine.

  By the moment of opening, so many brands had jumped on the Gatsby bandwagon that the spectacle became comical. Women’s Wear Daily proclaimed the emergence of a new “Gatsby look.” Tie-ins were orchestrated with Ballantine scotch, Robert Bruce sportswear, Kenzo tennis sweaters and white flannel pants—even a chain of hairdressers. Inevitably, rebellion set in. Redford refused to model suits for Vogue. Scottie Lanahan Smith told reporters that Paramount “was turning Gatsby into pots and pans.”

  With Gatsby awaiting release, the tensions between Yablans and Evans provided a vivid sideshow. A sixteen-page advertising flyer was put out by Yablans listing upcoming productions, but there was no mention of Evans. All interview requests with Evans were rejected by studio publicists unless Yablans was included in the session. “I don’t want any confusion about who is running Paramount,” Yablans told Time magazine. “His name is Yablans.” Yablans acknowledged to Time that he wanted ultimately to run for elective office, adding, “Yes, I’d like to be president of the United States.”

  Evans told me his response to all this. “Call it ‘the sounds of silence,’” he said.

  Gatsby’s release seemed almost anticlimactic. As a commercial vehicle, most industry insiders concluded it was an inspired creation. Artistically, however, the movie was a disappointment.

  In reality, this Gatsby represented a clumsy coalescing of the Eurocentric art cinema of the seventies with Hollywood values of the thirties. The finished product was at once arty and vulgar. The smooth, silvery dialogue, which flowed so elegantly across the pages of Fitzgerald’s novel, played stilted on the screen.

  When I saw The Great Gatsby thirty years later on DVD I found myself even more impatient with the film, with its lack of narrative drive, the interminable party scenes of random frivolity, and the long stretches of voice-over backstory that told you little about the characters. Robert Redford was utterly miscast as Gatsby—far too young and callow for a man with a complex backstory in war and business. Mia Farrow played Daisy as a semihysteric young woman who would break into tears when Gatsby discarded piles of his Turnbull & Asser custom shirts. For the sexualized seventies, The Great Gatsby stands out as an astonishingly sexless movie.

  Gatsby thus has failed three times as a movie, but filmmakers will still toy with it again, seduced by its graceful prose and tantalized by the tenuousness of its central character.

  From time to time I find myself speculating on what the Coppola-Brando Gatsby film would have been like, had it been made. Would it have worked as a film about a tough, somewhat mysterious gangster who conceals his past and falls in love with a beautiful plaything in the roaring twenties—a movie about social class in America, about the vulgarity of wealth? It might have been dark and sexy. But Coppola possibly would have backed away from the project at the eleventh hour. After completing the script and collecting the badly needed money, he had, I suspected, lost his faith in the project. I cannot produce a document to support my thesis, but after delivering his script, Coppola simply vaporized. He did not want to discuss casting or rewrites or any other issues and certainly never visited the set.

  And while he had delivered a fine, literate script, it had still raised the basic questions: What is The Great Gatsby really about? And why should we care about these characters?

  The Great Gatsby was not a disaster for Paramount—in fact, it made a modest profit. The impact on the studio, however, was a negative one. Paramount had been delivering films of substance, but Gatsby was all glitz—an empty movie that revealed growing emptiness at the studio.

  CHAPTER 14

  Reckoning

  A stunned silence greeted the premiere screening of The Godfather at the Loew’s State Theater in New York on March 14, 1972. It was quickly followed by a wellspring of applause. The expectations of disaster were now drowned out by the shock of success. Even as the audience rose, I could hear virtually everyone ask the question of the night: How could this brilliant, brooding masterpiece of storytelling have emerged from a pop gangster novel?

  The mood of surprise and celebration further intensified at the post-premiere party at the St. Regis Hotel, which instantly became a glittering media circus. In its vortex were Evans and MacGraw, the glitz machine’s perfect couple, holding hands, kissing, embracing, their images aglow. And at their side was the eminence gris Henry Kissinger, who had braved a fierce snowstorm to fly in from President Nixon’s side in Washington so that his aura of power could fleetingly connect with the Evans aura of celebrity and sexual adventure.

  It was the perfect Paramount moment—the quintessential collision of the real and the surreal, with careers being born, marriages ending, myths imploding, all amid a hallucinogenic melee of hubris and self congratulation.

  When Evans and MacGraw rose from their table to dance, every head in the room turned to watch and marvel. It was a magazine cover come to life, two extraordinarily attractive people dancing out their fantasies: He had just presided over a mythic movie; she was costarring in a Steve McQueen romantic action film.

  I took refuge at one side of the ballroom and tried to steal some perspective. Was I the only person in the room who understood the subtext of what seemed like magic moments? Ali MacGraw had just reminded me that she didn’t want to be here: she yearned to fly back to El Paso to be with her new lover, McQueen. And Evans knew their relationship was a lie. Even as he smiled for the camera he was trying to figure out how he could extricate himself without looking like a jilted fool.

  The dance was over. The music stopped. They kissed. The crowd could feel the love.

  By the fall of 1974, Paramount was clearly broken. Frank Yablans was embittered that he had not been accorded the money and attention that he felt he deserved. Charlie Bluhdorn, frazzled by the unrelenting SEC onslaught, was now determined to find a successor to Yablans—someone who would actually run the company. Having completed Chinatown, Bob Evans spent much of his time sulking at home, communicating with only a small circle of allies.

  By the time Chinatown was completed, in mid 1974, the relationships at Paramount had deteriorated to such a degree that hardly anyone was on speaking terms with anyone else. The enthusiastic responses of critics and other opinion leaders did not ameliorate the tension. The night of the premiere, Bluhdorn decided
he would make a final stab at camaraderie, inviting his two warring executives to a late dinner at a New York steak house called Pietro’s. The chairman toasted the movie and the partnership of Yablans and Evans that had made it possible. Yablans interrupted, his voice resonating through the room, “Forget the partnership shit,” he snapped. “The world consists of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and you’re the only ‘have’ at this table.”

  Bluhdorn cast a withering stare at his president; he had fought off the inevitable decision for some time, but he had to accept it now. Frank Yablans was history.

  Bluhdorn later acknowledged to me that he had not been aware that Evans had surrendered to Yablans’s threats and had signed over half his points in Chinatown. Nor was Bluhdorn witness to Yablans’s tantrums about the Time cover.

  What neither Yablans nor Evans knew at the time was that Bluhdorn had begun serious talks with Barry Diller about Diller assuming a top position at Paramount. What they also didn’t know was that Bluhdorn had instructed his financial team to quietly probe Yablans’s expense account to determine if any improprieties had taken place. Did Yablans tell his London office to purchase some first editions of Charles Dickens’s works, which he presented to his wife as a birthday present? The cost of the purchase had appeared on the books as “The Charles Dickens Project,” suggesting that a film was being developed by that name. No one in London could confirm such a project had ever existed.

  While Bluhdorn was doing his detective work, the Diller conversations were picking up in intensity.

  The two had first become acquainted when Diller, as a twenty-three-year-old junior executive at ABC, had started bidding for the TV rights to several Paramount movies. The TV aftermarket had not gained importance at the time and Bluhdorn was surprised and impressed that a network kid would show any interest in his product—films that no one else from the aftermarkets had seemed interested in.

  Bluhdorn liked Diller. He was short and already bald and had no movie experience, but the chairman admired his self-confidence and agility. By 1974, he sat down with Diller and explained that he urgently needed him at Paramount. Gulf & Western had become too big and diverse, he said, and the board of directors felt strongly that Bluhdorn was devoting too much time to the entertainment assets. Given the discordant relationship between Yablans and Evans, the problem had become even more acute. Bluhdorn made his offer over lunch: that Diller assume a senior management job reporting directly to Yablans.

  The response was forthright: “I’d rather be a waiter in this restaurant than work for Frank Yablans,” Diller declared.

  Within days the proposal was importantly modified: Bluhdorn would now agree to have Yablans and Evans both report to Diller.

  The young TV executive was surprised by how quickly the situation had changed, but was still reluctant. “I didn’t really know the movie business,” he told me later.

  Diller took the job, but his apprehensiveness was soon validated. During Diller’s first official trip to the studio, Yablans was twenty minutes late for the first staff meeting, and then regaled the executives with a crude story about a presumed sexual encounter the night before.

  Back in New York the inevitable confrontation quickly took place. Yablans issued instruction to the senior executives that they would continue to report to him. Diller summoned Yablans to his office to clarify the reporting lines: top executives at Paramount would report to Diller, as would Yablans. Yablans flushed and said nothing, but when he exited Diller’s office he slammed the door so loudly that a painting fell from the wall and its frame shattered.

  Within weeks a token production deal for Frank Yablans was announced. Evans, too, would now focus on production and would no longer have responsibility for studio films.

  Paramount’s success story had come to a sour end. And I was (gratefully) out the door.

  The decision-making process had ground to a halt. The studio had become an all-but-deserted battlefield. There were a few casualties strewn here and there, but most of the combatants had simply moved on.

  At the box office, paradoxically, the studio was displaying greater success than ever before. More than twenty films were to be put into release in the following months; an eclectic mix both artistically and commercially. Not only would The Godfather Part II be even more richly acclaimed than its predecessor, but filmgoers also rallied to The Longest Yard, starring Burt Reynolds, Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson, and The Great Gatsby, with Robert Redford. Several smaller-budget films also reaped critical praise, if more modest acceptance commercially—Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross, The Gambler, starring James Caan and directed by Karel Reisz, White Dawn, directed by Philip Kaufman, The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, starring Richard Dreyfuss and directed by Ted Kotcheff, Murder on the Orient Express , starring Sean Connery and Lauren Bacall and directed by Sidney Lumet, and The Conversation, from Francis Coppola.

  In addition, several promising films were about to go into release, such as Friends of Eddie Coyle, starring Robert Mitchum and directed by Peter Yates, Paper Moon, starring Tatum and Ryan O’Neal from Bogdanovich, and Save the Tiger, starring Jack Lemmon and directed by John Avildsen.

  To be sure, the list included some formidable clunkers—most prominently the final offering from Lerner and Loewe, the lifeless musical called The Little Prince. Stanley Donen, an accomplished director, managed to destroy the classic story by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

  On the surface, Paramount had become astonishingly prolific both in terms of quality and commerce. This was a formidable slate of films, even by the prolific standards of the seventies.

  But in Charlie Bluhdorn’s mind, the moment had come to wipe the slate clean. The corporate announcements were crisply formal. Yablans and Evans were stepping down from their respective management positions. Their contracts would be converted into production deals, calling for Paramount to finance and distribute their future films. Final approvals would, of course, reside with the new president of the studio, Barry Diller.

  Both men seemed oddly relieved by the announcements. They knew that they had lost the confidence of their leader. Buoyed by their recent successes, both were supremely confident that success and wealth would continue to favor them—indeed that their fortunes would be enhanced. Their friends and acolytes reinforced this sense of hubris.

  Their forecasts were wrong.

  Few of Paramount’s leading players would ever recapture their glory days. While Evans’s producing career started promisingly with Marathon Man, some of his subsequent films, like Popeye and The Players, were deeply troubled, and his career finally ran aground in 1983 with the catastrophic production of The Cotton Club. The film reunited Evans with Coppola in a nightmare rerun of The Godfather. Both men at the time were strung out on cocaine, which further exacerbated their toxic relationship.

  Coppola acknowledged in later years that he never decided what story he wanted to tell in Cotton Club, suggesting that Evans had somehow dragooned him into the project against his better judgment. Evans, meanwhile, desperate for funds to cover his $25 million overage, fell in with two sleazy hustlers named Roy Radin and Laynie Jacobs, who promised funding but delivered only deceit and danger. When Radin suddenly disappeared, Evans found himself a potential murder suspect. In the end, Jacobs went to prison for Radin’s murder.

  When Cotton Club opened, on December 8, 1984, it was all but hooted off the screen. Evans’s long-standing Paramount relationship was canceled.

  A couple of years later Evans tried to revisit Chinatown with the production of The Two Jakes. The plan was for Bob Towne to direct and for Evans to play the lead, under the coaching of Jack Nicholson. After the project imploded, Evans went into a prolonged period of retreat, re-establishing himself in 1994 with the publication of his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

  Yablans’s career after Paramount was similarly volatile. While The North Dallas Forty was a hit at Paramount, Mommie Dearest, released by Fox, was
a gauche soap opera about Joan Crawford and her daughter that all but ended Yablans’s production credibility. Learning that Kirk Kerkorian, the longtime proprietor of MGM, was planning to pump new capital into his studio, Yablans brashly courted the Las Vegas billionaire, landing the job as president in 1983.

  By the end of 1984, after a series of misfires, the rug was pulled out from under Yablans as Kerkorian put his studio back into play, triggering a series of exotic deals involving Ted Turner and lesser luminaries.

  After the MGM debacle, Yablans returned to production as head of Promenade Pictures, a small firm that focuses on the Christian evangelical market.

  Having miraculously survived crisis after crisis, Charlie Bluhdorn’s decline began with a Godfather-like betrayal. Joel Dolkart, the smart but duplicitous attorney who’d been Gulf & Western’s general counsel for twenty years, was found to be systematically stealing from the company, writing fraudulent checks and banking the proceeds. Only two executives in the company knew about Dolkart’s thievery—Martin Davis, the G & W president, and Art Barron, the chief financial officer. When summoned to a crisis meeting in Bluhdorn’s office, the three disagreed sharply over how to proceed. Davis, who had been jealous of Dolkart’s influence over his boss, advocated throwing the book at Dolkart. “He’s an embezzler,” Davis said. “Let’s fry him.”

  Barron, a stubby man with a stoic temperament, pointed out the dangers of this attack. Facing a certain jail sentence, Dolkart would cooperate with the authorities and bring forth some embarrassing facts. A safer course, he argued, might be to simply fire him and demand repayment. Probably only $2.5 million was at stake.

  Bluhdorn briefly weighed the alternatives. Then, as was often the case in his deliberations, his anger got the best of him. He opted for Davis’s attack mode.

  Dolkart ultimately pleaded guilty to an eighty-nine-count indictment and was sentenced to a jail term of up to three years. Not surprisingly, he started talking.