Short Biography

Raised on Manhattan`s upper west side (his father was a dentist with a thriving practice in Harlem), Evans began his show-business career as a teenage radio act or. After flopping in his first attempt at movie acting, he took a job promoting sales of ladies` slacks for Evan-Picone, the clothing company founded and run by his brother. Some years later, Norma Shearer spotted him hanging around the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel; she successfully touted him for the role of Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). In a New York nightclub, Evans also caught the eye of Darryl F. Zanuck, who cast him as a bullfighter in The Sun Also Rises (1957). By the end of the fifties, Evans writes, "I was sure of one thing: I was a half-assed actor." He determined to recast himself as a producer. Before launching his first picture, though, he was hired by Charles Bluhdorn, head of the Gulf + Western conglomerate, as part of a shakeup of Paramount Pictures.

Within months Evans was head of production. In the late sixties and early seventies he became the quintessential "new Hollywood" executive: slickly packaged productions like Rosemary`s Baby (1968), Love Story (1970) and The Godfather (1972) revived Paramount. (The latter film and Chinatown (1974) are the artistic highlights of Evans` Param ount career, though the amount of credit he deserves for them has been debated for decades.) Eased out of Paramount, he saw The Cotton Club (1984) turn from a musical "Godfather" into a fiasco of front-page proportions. Evans righted his career with a new Paramount deal in the nineties.

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