Raised on Manhattans upper west side his father was a dentist with a thriving practice in Harlem, Evans began his showbusiness 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 EvanPicone, 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 halfassed 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 Rosemarys 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 frontpage proportions. Evans righted his career with a new Paramount deal in the nineties.

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