Infamous Players

In 1967 at age thirty-five, being of sound mind and body, I accepted a job as an executive of a film studio. At that moment I believed my new position at Paramount Pictures would be a great adventure. If indeed it turned out to be a nightmare rather than an adventure, my tenure at the very least would provide the basis for a first-person account of my trip to the dark side. At the time, I was a staff reporter for the New York Times, so the alternative seemed perfectly practical. A career misstep could at least result in a compelling book. It never occurred to me that the book would finally emerge four decades later.

In fact, the Paramount experience was to last for eight years and prove to be both adventure and nightmare. During my studio odyssey some of the seminal films of the era would emerge from the studio slate—movies that would help define the nation’s pop culture.

Yet I learned to accept the perverse fact that, while the films embodied boldness and vision, the studio culture that fostered them represented a mix of greed and corporate nihilism. The filmmakers who shaped The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, Harold and Maude, and Goodbye, Columbus learned to feed off the studio as a black hole of conflict and corruption. The darkness helped bring forth the light.

The movies of the sixties and seventies have been scrupulously and skillfully analyzed by critics, but my aim in this book is to provide some insight into the players and processes of this robust moment of film history. My purpose is neither to sentimentalize this period nor to expose its confusion and venality, but rather to provide a glimpse of the realities that existed behind the tattered corporate curtain.

While Hollywood has always been buffeted by conflicting forces, the studios of this decade were peopled by a bizarre mix of creators and exploiters, some intent on redefining the aesthetic of cinema, others intent solely on personal enrichment.

The machinery of filmmaking had broken down, the dream factories were impoverished, and shrewd operators realized that where there was desperation there was also great opportunity.

Enterprising young filmmakers had also discovered that, where they were once confronted by closed doors, they were now being courted by studio executives. Similarly, financial players, some with criminal ties, found Hollywood to be suddenly open to funding schemes, no matter how esoteric. Indeed, not since the era of the Great Depression had the underworld so successfully infiltrated mainstream Hollywood or exercised such influence on the films being made and the people making them. Ironically, at the very time that The Godfather was portraying how the mob was embracing capitalism, the Mafia was also embracing Hollywood.

The answer: a lethal mixture of ambition and curiosity, with a good measure of cultural wanderlust thrown in. Plus, my voyage would not be a lonely one. My friend, Bob Evans, was journeying with me, and we shared the foreboding that the odds might be stacked against us.

At the time I embarked on my Paramount journey I was content with the progress of my reporting career. I had worked my way through reporting stints on the Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Sun-Times before scoring my job on the Times, which in my mind represented the zenith of the newspaper business. My metabolism seemed perfectly attuned to the rhythms of newspaper work and to the noise of the newsroom (reporters still yelled “Copy!” in those days as the typewriters hummed).

From the first moment I walked into the Times newsroom, I felt a surge of exhilaration. This was, indeed, my playing field. And I knew instinctively that I could make it work for me.

The Times I joined was a rather genteel, WASPy environment led by men whom I looked on as journalist-statesmen—Turner Catledge, Clifton Daniel, Frank Adams, and Claude Sitton. Daniel, the managing editor, was suave and silver-haired and wore immaculately tailored dark blue suits made for him in London. He addressed me always as “Mr. Bart” and our dialogues were more akin to those of student and headmaster.

For four years my beat on the Times consisted of writing six columns a week that bore the title “Advertising.” The assignment appealed to me because I had the freedom to select my own stories, on topics that extended well beyond the normal intrigues of ad agencies.

The media business is exhaustively covered in today’s Times, but that was not case in the midsixties, which meant that my column was free to explore the foibles of magazines (the Saturday Evening Post was declining into oblivion), network television (CBS under Jim Aubrey and Mike Dann was dominating the ratings with the help of Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball), and other strands of the pop culture. The ad agencies themselves were undergoing a mini-revolution, with the old school agencies like Ted Bates and BBD & O under assault from imaginative new players like Doyle Dane Bernbach and a rejuvenated Young & Rubicam. This was the moment of the brilliant Volkswagen campaign that shouted “Lemon!” and exhorted buyers to “Think small.”

Though a corner of my brain told me that my journalistic aims should focus on Washington or a foreign assignment, I loved both the pace and autonomy of my media beat. I was married, had a young daughter, and had lucked into a small but bright one-bedroom apartment tucked into an elegant town house on East 82nd Street just off Madison Avenue. I was also churning out a steady stream of freelance articles for Harper’s, Esquire, and the old Saturday Review—so many pieces, in fact, that Clifton Daniel admonished me that the New York Times Magazine had first call on my services.

Shortly after the reprimand, Daniel summoned me for a further meeting. While the Times liked my work on the column, the editors had decided I was ready for a new beat, he said. The reporters stationed both in Los Angeles and San Francisco were close to retirement age, Daniel said, and the Times felt that there were compelling stories in California that might be probed by a younger journalist.

As we talked, I became aware of the intriguing subtext to his remarks. The traditional attitude of the Times was that New York was the center of the universe both in terms of economic power and pop culture, but now a new “scene” was emerging on the West Coast. The components of that scene, however, remained opaque to the Times.

In short, the Times was worried that it was losing touch with the crosscurrents of midsixties America, both culturally and politically. Our tastes and proclivities were increasingly difficult to read. Vietnam and the civil rights movement had preempted the political agenda. In entertainment, even as Julie Andrews was winning an Oscar for Mary Poppins, the Jefferson Airplane was making its debut at the Matrix in San Francisco and the Beatles were opening at Shea Stadium. Hollywood was still banking on Elvis Presley movies and chestnuts like Anne of a Thousand Days, but audiences were favoring Bonnie and Clyde and Who’s A fraid of Virginia Woolf?

I replied that I needed to think it over. Though I had covered stories throughout the South for the Wall Street Journal, and had reported on murder and mayhem for the Sun-Times in Chicago, I had never been to California, nor had ever contemplated it. I was a New Yorker; I had grown up a city kid, albeit a rather privileged city kid with a second home on Martha’s Vineyard. My parents had seen to it that I attended private school. My schoolboy friends were expected to go on to top colleges, but also feasted on the energy of the city.

My school days were spent in a 225-year-old structure called Friends Seminary. Amid all the Sturm und Drang of the city, this creaky, brick edifice on Rutherford Place on the Lower East Side seemed to possess its own serenity. Choosing a college to me was a no-brainer: I chose Swarthmore, eager to continue within the Quaker enclave.

My initial instinct was to deliver a polite “no” to my courtly managing editor, mindful that Times editors do not like to hear that word. I described my dilemma one day to another young reporter on the paper, David Halberstam. We were both standing at the urinal in the men’s room when I queried: “What happens when you give Clifton Daniel a ‘no’?” Halberstam, then a droll, if somber-looking, young man, replied, “You probably end up holding a very small piece of what you’re presently holding.”

He was being funny, but he was also right. I realized I would be an idiot not to take the Times up on its offer. I would be writing about the world of surfers and rockers, about Governor Earl Warren and the Beach Boys and a young senator named Richard Nixon. And maybe I’d even sneak in an occasional piece about the radical changes taking place in Hollywood, though my national news editor, Claude Sitton, made it clear that Hollywood would not be a prime target. While the Times had had a full-time Hollywood correspondent for many years, the decision had been made to discontinue that beat. There were more important things to focus on in the fastchanging cauldron of California.

From the moment we unpacked, my wife and I both found ourselves enjoying that cauldron. New Yorkers were expected to complain that they missed the theater and hated the driving. But we liked our new cars (provided by the Times) as well as our rented house nestled near the rolling UCLA campus. We knew we were supposed to resent the smog; instead we basked in the sunshine.

The voice from the national news desk sounded at once confused and a bit panicked: “There’s an early report on the wires that race riots have broken out. They’re setting fires. Do you see anything?”

Within hours I was to learn all about Watts and its riots, which had swept through downtown Los Angeles and were soon headed west. Within the next few days my car was to sustain three bullet holes and I was to be pinned down by gunfire on streets that in no way represented my image of Southern California.

In my initial weeks in Los Angeles I was realizing every young reporter’s dream—big stories on page one. And once the Watts riots showed signs of subsiding, I was on a plane to San Francisco to report on that city’s racial upheaval.

Ultimately a semblance of calm descended once again on California’s major cities, and I found time to explore other sectors of my new beat. I wrote pieces about the impact of the real estate boom, the developing surfer culture, the gay baths in San Francisco, and the fast-rising California university system. I described the increasing problems of coexistence between California’s robotic right-wing constituencies in Orange County and the radical activists of San Francisco. I even managed to sneak in some stories about Hollywood. To me, the big story in the movie business was not about glamour and glitz but rather its economic collapse. Television had simply eviscerated the movie audience—some 30 million filmgoers a week were now buying movie tickets versus 90 million a decade earlier. The studios had run out of money; they had also run out of ideas.

Hollywood’s press agents were exasperated with the Times for no longer posting a full-time correspondent to cover the film scene. It was as though the nation’s most important newspaper was saying “movies don’t matter anymore,” which was partially true. I found time to do an occasional piece about a star. I took a ride with Paul Newman in his Volkswagen bug, which was equipped with a Porsche engine (he loved hurtling past Detroit’s ponderous clunkers on the freeway). Steve McQueen explained to me how he was trying to become “grownup” and shed his bad boy reputation.

One week I decided to do a piece about a fellow New Yorker who had begun to cut a swath in Hollywood. Robert Evans had been introduced to me by a friend, a screenwriter named Abby Mann, and I liked his self-deprecating charm. Evans and his brother, sons of a New York dentist, had built a successful clothing company called Evan Picone, but his life had abruptly changed one day when Norma Shearer saw him lounging by the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As she watched Evans, Shearer had an epiphany: In her eyes, he looked astonishingly like her late husband, Irving Thalberg, the fabled studio chief. A movie called Man of a Thousand Faces was about to shoot at Universal starring Jimmy Cagney, who was to play Lon Chaney, and the studio was looking for an actor to portray Thalberg.

Thalberg had been an attractive, slender, and rather fragile young man. Evans was handsome and more robust, but he fit Shearer’s idealized memory of her husband, who had achieved mythic status as head of MGM.

Within a year, however, Evans was destined to be “discovered” yet again. He was dancing with a girlfriend at a posh New York nightclub called El Morocco, when Darryl F. Zanuck, the feisty studio boss at Twentieth Century-Fox, summoned him to his table. Zanuck was looking for a young actor to play the bullfighter in his movie The Sun Also Rises, based on the Ernest Hemingway novel, and, watching Evans’s dance floor moves, he was convinced that he would be right for the role.

Evans had by then resigned himself to a return to the schmatta trade, as he called it—it paid better than his gig in Hollywood—but Zanuck’s enthusiasm startled him. Here was a chance to play opposite Ava Gardner and Tyrone Power. Zanuck even offered to sign him to a five-year talent contract. Evans stammered a “yes.”

The notion of a clothing executive playing a Spanish bullfighter triggered skepticism in the gossip columns. When pressured to fire his protégé, the studio boss responded with his famous rant, “The kid stays in the picture.” Evans’s performance, though hammered by some critics, was praised by others. And so, having been doubly discovered by age twenty-seven, Evans decided on a sharp change in course. Considering that he had played Thalberg and been adopted by Zanuck, he now decided that he wanted to become a mixture of the two.

He knew he had none of the necessary credentials and that he wasn’t a member of the club that still ran Hollywood. But as Evans and I (and often Abby Mann) hung out together, I began to understand certain qualities about him that ultimately would defy the doubters. He was bonding with those power players of his generation—Richard Zanuck, son of Darryl, who was now the new studio chief at Fox, was one of his friends. Eager to master the dealmaking lexicon, Evans also was analyzing every contract he could get his hands on. He saw every movie that was opening and, over dinners, he would tear apart the performances and story structures.

As I got to know him better, I realized my new friend was smart and funny. He also had an insatiable appetite for beautiful women. He wanted to date them, photograph them, flatter them, and sleep with them, and his attentions were eagerly reciprocated. The girls were amused by him: He had money, he didn’t do drugs (at the time), and there was a disarmingly old Hollywood quality to his romantic pursuit. The women understood that he’d be a one-night stand, and they seemed all right with that.

But Evans’s reputation as an obsessive player further fueled the town’s skepticism about him. It was understood in the community that Evans hungered to be a hot producer and to achieve power beyond that, but no one felt he would get there. Indeed, Abby Mann, who by now had won an Academy Award for his screenplay of Judgment at Nuremberg, took a certain amount of needling because of his friendship with Evans, as did I.

To further his producing ambitions, Evans soon hired a story scout in New York—a professional reader named George Wieser, who, for $175 a week, analyzed material coming into the publishing trade journals and talent agencies. Evans would forage through every novel and screenplay that was recommended to him. Wieser knew that Evans wasn’t looking for great literature: he needed material to bait the studios.

The first book Evans submitted around town was a cheesy women’s novel called “Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann. With a certain naive excitement, Evans neglected to acquire film rights but simply offered the novel to Twentieth Century-Fox as a possible Evans production. The studio covered it and liked it but, when Evans inquired about a deal, he was abruptly told there wouldn’t be any. A studio producer had been assigned to the project. Evans was shut out.

Angry but undaunted, Evans quickly settled on yet another potential property. It was a novel called The Detective, written by a onetime New York police officer named Roderick Thorp. This time Evans put down $5,000 for an option before he went back to Fox. Again, the studio agreed with his taste in material, this time offering him a meager deal as an associate producer. Even as the talks were still going back and forth, Evans assaulted the studio with yet another property—F. Lee Bailey’s vivid account of the murder case involving Dr. Sam Sheppard. Evans persuaded a high-profile attorney named Greg Bautzer to plead his case at the studio, demanding an overall three-picture contract encompassing offices at the studio and a development fund.

This bold foray again met with rejection, but rather than being affronted, Evans seemed genuinely amused by the process. He knew he was earning a reputation as a major pain in the ass at the studios, but he didn’t care.

I decided to write a short piece for the Times about Evans’s relentless campaign to storm the fortress. Evans knew the town already put him down as the fringe actor who once played Thalberg. He was worried that a possible Times story would bring further ridicule down on him and did his best to talk me out of it, but I wrote it anyway.

What neither Evans nor l could know at the time was that the story had been avidly consumed by another outsider who had a yearning for Hollywood glitz. His name was Charles Bluhdorn.

I had never heard of Bluhdorn, nor had Evans. But a few days after my story appeared, a somewhat breathless Evans called to confide that he had received a surprise phone call from his attorney, Greg Bautzer. The gist of the call: Charles Bluhdorn had read about Evans and liked what he read. He wanted Evans to fly to New York for a meeting. And since Bluhdorn had just closed a deal to acquire control of Paramount Pictures, Bautzer thought it would be a damn good meeting. This was Paramount, after all—one of Hollywood’s fabled studios, which had sprung to life some sixty years earlier under the name of Famous Players. The Famous Players had proved to be infamous in some cases, Bautzer reminded his friend, but the opportunity was real.

Some quick checking produced a few skimpy facts about this new player. Born somewhere in Central Europe, he’d come to the U.S. in 1942 and started work as a cotton broker and wannabe entrepreneur. He’d begun stringing together an odd mishmash of companies, starting with an auto parts company called Michigan Bumper, but his ambitions were far more glamorous. His acquisition of Paramount reflected not only a love of movies but also an urgent desire for social acceptance.

The individual that Evans met in New York was a coarse man with a guttural accent, a frenzied energy, and the instincts of a true gambler. He hurled question after question at Evans, starting another even before Evans had finished his response to the previous one. Evans had never met anyone quite like this, but he instinctively felt a chemistry. He was less impressed, however, by the person who hovered at Bluhdorn’s side, a public relations man named Martin Davis, who had helped orchestrate the Paramount acquisition. Davis was like a Doberman, Evans later told me. He hovered, listened, rarely talked.

Evans admitted he was bewildered by the encounter, yet within weeks an astonishing offer came via Davis: Bluhdorn wanted to hire Evans to become his head of production in London. If he did a good job, he would be shifted to Los Angeles within a few months and become the production chief at the Paramount studio.

When Evans and I next sat down to dinner, I picked up on his mix of excitement and abject panic. I also realized there was a curious bond emerging between us. To a degree I had been responsible for this bizarre change in his life. It was my article that triggered the interest from Bluhdorn. This was becoming not only his adventure, but our adventure.

Typically, Evans was quick to acknowledge his own vulnerability. “I don’t know how to be a head of production,” he said. “I wasn’t even convincing playing the part in a movie. I don’t really know London. I think I’ve been there once. What am I getting into?”

I wanted to ask him the obvious question, but could not decide how to phrase it: Why did Charles Bluhdorn offer you this job? Why didn’t he go after a member of “the club”—a Hollywood player with an established reputation?

There was no point asking, I decided, because I could tell Evans didn’t have the remotest clue as to the answer. Indeed, it was months before I myself had any insight into this curious relationship.

Evans, I decided, personified a sort of dream fantasy version of Bluhdorn. He was an attractive, smooth-talking ladies’ man; Bluhdorn was homely and abrasive and sexually repressed. Evans had an ingratiating boyishness and transparency. He wore his heart on his sleeve. Bluhdorn was devious, his appetites opaque. He was a European who had mastered the business mystique of his new country but none of its social subtext. He felt himself the foreigner, the outsider. Evans was the total insider.

And over dinner, he urgently wanted to make a deal with me. He would be leaving for London shortly, and my responsibility as a friend was to watch his back in Los Angeles. More important, he wanted me to agree to read and give my opinion on a few scripts that he would send me.

He said he would arrange to pay me, but I told him emphatically that I would not accept any money. I had a great job at the Times and had no intention of compromising it. Besides, I had no experience as a script analyst. If he wanted to send something to me I would do my best to read it and tell him what I thought. It would be a personal favor, not a business one.

I told myself nothing would emerge from this conversation. I was wrong. Within days the scripts started arriving. I ignored most of them, but if the subject matter seemed interesting, or the author’s name struck a bell, I started reading. Two or three times a week I would get a call from Evans in London asking, “What did you think of The Italian Job?” or some other title.

While I didn’t really have much insight into screenplay writing, neither did Evans. At least I had time to read some of them, and clearly he did not. He was enmeshed in meetings with London movers and shakers and was relishing the experience. Suddenly he was no longer doing the pitching, people were pitching him! Talented young filmmakers were seeking him out. Plus an entirely fresh cast of beautiful women seemed to await him at every corner.

But Evans’s exultant phone calls quickly began to take on a worried tone. The same hustlers who were now pitching Evans had previously found a patsy in Charles Bluhdorn who, in his first six months as owner of the studio, had committed to a bizarre array of what he considered surefire hits.

Bluhdorn had proved to be an easy target. A young performer named Tommy Steele had scored a success in London with a musical called Half a Sixpence, and Bluhdorn had committed to a movie version. The result was daunting: Here was a film, Evans told me, that could find no possible audience in the U.S. Another Bluhdorn acquisition based on the bestseller called Is Paris Burning? had just been screened in Paris—again, a film with no American appeal.

As the weeks went by, it became ever more obvious that London was not going well for Evans. A mini-bureaucracy had remained in place from the pre-Bluhdorn regime, and it was resisting Evans’s efforts to connect with new ideas and new talent. London, too, had its “club,” and Evans was not a welcome member. Before long, it seemed Evans’s Paramount adventure would be over; he would be back in Hollywood putting together his production deals.

And that would certainly be fine by me. While I’d appreciated my basic education in script reading, I was never getting much feedback on my personal assessments. There was no indication that anything that I liked was actually getting attention.

My intuition was wrong again. Five months after Evans disappeared into the London fog, I received another urgent phone call. He was indeed coming back to Hollywood—not as a producer but as Paramount’s chief of production. He would be replacing Howard W. Koch, one of the most respected executives in the movie industry. And he urgently wanted me to become his right-hand man.

Now it was my turn to be genuinely shocked. I had been playing a game, or what I thought was a game, and suddenly it wasn’t a game anymore. It was one thing to chat about scripts with a friend, but now the stakes had been raised.

Much as I liked Evans and respected his native intelligence, I couldn’t believe that Bluhdorn had decreed that he could be molded into a corporate executive. The reaction in the press to the Evans announcement matched my skepticism.

Arriving back in town, Evans made it very clear to me that his new job was real and so was mine, if I decided to take it. He had cleared my deal with Bluhdorn and his subordinates. There had been some resistance, but he’d won his point. “I told them I wasn’t equipped for my new job, so I wanted someone at my side who was also not prepared,” Evans said. That was such an absurd argument that I believed he’d actually made it. “This will be an adventure,” Evans told me with a smile that was at once friendly and fatalistic. “What’s the worst they can do to us? They won’t kill us. What have we got to lose?”

I realized that was both the good and the bad news. Still only thirty-six, Evans had succeeded at everything he had tried. As a sort of playboy prince, he’d made his fuck-you money, earned a measure of celebrity, and had made it all seem like one grand party. Now along came Charles Bluhdorn to make the party even grander.

Pondering this “adventure,” I found myself conflicted on several levels. Journalism was not a casual endeavor for me; I had been consumed with writing and reporting since boyhood. I’d been editor of my high school paper and of my college paper. When I walked into my first newsroom, I literally palpitated with excitement.

And my Times assignment in California had been a rewarding one; I had experienced the best and the worst. I had ducked behind cars in darkened streets as the bullets flew and cops sprawled next to me. I had also hung with the hippies at Haight-Ashbury and shared joints with them. And I had made a point of having lunch with those icons of the movie business who I felt deserved attention from the Times—Walt Disney, Jack Warner, Lew Wasserman, Sam Goldwyn, Alfred Hitchcock.

I appreciated what it was like to live in the Times’ aura. You could ask any question of any dignitary, and they felt compelled to answer. You were neither artisan nor celebrity, but you occupied your own unique space. You had amazing access but also unique responsibility: It was your job to get it right.

But I kept waking up in the middle of the night, realizing that the decision was not that easy. It wasn’t just about the job, it was about the moment. The movie industry was in a state of collapse, studio regimes were tumbling. Paramount represented not so much a studio as a power vacuum. The place had ground to a halt.

And that’s what was haunting me. Movies were either going to become anachronisms or there would be a rebirth, and maybe I could be a small part of it. Even a big part of it.

But the question remained, would our voices be heard over the din? Paramount itself was a maelstrom of competing agendas. We would be the new faces in production, and the old guard would resist the initiatives of newcomers. The writing and directing jobs were being recycled among the familiar faces, and they were not youthful faces.

So would I be able to change that? I solicited the advice of a few friends both in journalism and in the film business, and they all were dubious. I even sought out Howard Koch, the man Evans was replacing. A convivial and unpretentious man, Koch admitted he’d always been uncomfortable in his role as studio chief. As he explained it, “For every time you say ‘yes’ in this job, you say ‘no’ a hundred times, and I hate saying ‘no.’ I don’t like disappointing people. Do you really want to do this job?”

I appreciated his candor. “But what would it be like if that rare ‘yes’ really made a difference?” I asked. “What if some smart, young people were given the chance to make smart pictures?”

I flew back to New York to tell my editors that I was leaving the Times but doing so regretfully. Claude Sitton was incredulous. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I never figured you for the Hollywood type.”

Clifton Daniel, who now held the title of executive editor, stared at me with the disdain of a father whose son had just told him he was dropping out of college. He said he wished me well, but he didn’t really.

Halberstam’s words stung. Roughly a year later, Halberstam was to call me at Paramount to ask for a favor. It seems he was seeing a beautiful young wannabe actress and he wondered whether, in my new post at the studio, I could arrange for a screen test.

It was a wrenching experience to leave the Times, but to my surprise there was not one moment in the coming months when I regretted it. I knew I was now on a theme park ride with freaks and demons, crooks and visionaries popping up all around me. Within weeks I became resigned to the fact that nothing would really make sense, and it was naive of me to expect as much.

Within my first three or four weeks at Paramount, two realities became vividly clear. The first did not surprise me: my presence was not welcome on the lot. The Paramount studio, like every institution, was ruled by its resident bureaucrats, some of them second or even third generation. I was an alien invader and, as such, a threat to the established order. I was certainly not to be trusted and no special favors were to be accorded me.

The studio itself, I learned, had a feudal structure. Each fiefdom had its own leader who presided over his army of serfs. The art director had his constituency as did the head of physical production, the editing staff, and even the commissary. The various units operated with a high degree of autonomy, with everyone guarding their jobs warily.

It wasn’t just about money. The chieftains who presided over the music department or casting or editing had great prestige among their peers because they controlled the budgets and the jobs. The head of music was influential in hiring composers and musicians and thus was accustomed to being fawned over. Even the head of the story department was revered for his influence in recommending scripts and hiring screenwriters for rewrite jobs.

As far as these folks were concerned, I had nothing to bring to this party, and their cool reception did not surprise me. What did surprise me, however, was my own reaction to the studio and its environs.

After a long and argumentative production meeting I took a thirty-minute stroll around the lot and came to terms with my epiphany: I loved the place. I knew I did not belong here. I was not a student of studio lore. Unlike hard-core movie brats like Peter Bogdanovich, I did not know where Cecil B. DeMille’s old office was located, nor on which soundstage Elvis Presley had just finished shooting.

Friends had warned me that I would be seduced by the studio glamour and power, but it was not glamour or power that was grabbing me now. The studio seemed like a wonderful old village that had grown shabby, but was still clinging zealously to its dignity. The paint was peeling from the faux tenements on the New York street; there were shingles missing on the dusty structures lining the Old West town, and it had clearly been a long time since the last scene had been shot there. In the screening rooms, the seats were worn, and a musty smell pervaded.

The studio was a land of shopworn make-believe, but its integrity was oddly intact. Every corridor, every room, bespoke its past. People had worked diligently to craft their scripts, hone their reels of film, or act out their fleeting bits of dialogue. Walking the studio streets, I heard their cumulative noise. And it was a welcome sound.

My office exuded the contradictions of my new environment. It was a big room, downright stately, with handsome paneling. Its furnishings, however, seemed like they’d been recycled from an old rooming house. The oak desk had served many masters, and the faded green sofa sagged morosely.

One day, after a production meeting, the erudite head of the story department, a self-described “failed novelist” named John Boswell, asked for a few private words in my office.

Boswell, it seemed, hadn’t taken a vacation for two years because of his nervousness over the transitions at the studio, and he wanted to go away for a week. “Fine by me,” I told him.

Boswell seemed relieved. “By the way,” he confided, “this sofa I’m sitting on—it was in my office for five years before I asked for a replacement. It doesn’t seem fair that you would end up with it.”

“You are the powers-that-be,” Boswell replied. “I don’t want to give away secrets, but have a look at the building behind Stage Twelve. It’s the studio’s furniture trove. It would satisfy a foreign monarch.”

I thanked him for the tip and decided to take the action that I’d been putting off. As the chief of physical production, Frank Caffey controlled studio facilities and their furnishings. I phoned him and asked if he would drop by my office. “Be right over,” he said.

“I am a journalist by training, so I am going to get right to what we call our lead,” I said. “You and your colleagues are convinced that Evans and I are mere passersby. You are entitled to your opinion, but our attitude is that we are going to be here for a while. Hence, we want to be reasonably comfortable.”

“Let’s just focus on the furniture,” I said. “I don’t want grandeur, but I don’t want Goodwill, either. And I assume this is an issue that can be resolved by tomorrow morning.”

“I know they call you the Mayor,” I said. “If I do not have new furniture by ten tomorrow morning, either your tenure or mine will end abruptly. Thanks for dropping by.”

Frank Caffey nodded and departed. When I arrived at work the next morning my office had undergone a smart makeover—new desk, sofa, matching chairs, even a rather elegant painting to adorn the stark walls. There was a terse note from Caffey. It simply said, “I hope you have a long and successful stay.”

Evans, too, was quickly rewarded with some new pieces, and he, too, was relishing his environs. To the press, however, the casting of Bob Evans as a studio chief was still less than credible. He was too young, too inexperienced, and too good looking. In their eyes, he remained an actor playing the part. Even as new deals were announced—Goodbye, Columbus; The President’s Analyst; The Odd Couple—items also were regularly planted in columns and in Variety that the new Paramount regime was shaky.

I was regularly getting calls from journalist friends asking about my well-being and whether I had made contingency plans. I could detect their skepticism when I assured them that I was enjoying myself thoroughly.

While Evans was unnerved by the fusillade of bad press, I found it downright amusing. My journalistic experience had taught me that reporters habitually write their stories in advance. To them, the making and unmaking of Bob Evans was a hot story—one they were certain would reveal itself imminently. To my mind, they were anticipating it too greedily.

And my fall from grace would provide a delicious nugget too. I was keenly aware that my journalistic colleagues were either contemptuous or envious of my new position. My dismissal would affirm their view that writers should not stray. True to expectations, Variety ran a speculative story six months after my arrival at Paramount suggesting that my departure was expected hourly.

If journalistic friends were cool to my new responsibilities, more and more producers and filmmakers were displaying a sharply contrasting attitude. With each passing week, I was receiving more visitors who were looking for a receptive ear, or rather, for a sympathetic sensibility. The fact that I had been a newspaper reporter with the New York Times intrigued them. And they had interesting stories to tell.

Sure, they were looking for a deal—I was alert to that fact. I was a new buyer, but I was also a different type of buyer, and the folks who were coming in to see me were different types of sellers. They weren’t the standard hustlers with shrewdly crafted packages. They were poets and songwriters and artists and novelists and even an occasional scientist. They were brilliant, creative people who normally would not have invaded the precincts of a Hollywood studio.