When you look at the list of winners of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the highest honor Hollywood can bestow to a creative producer, why is Robert Evans’ name not there? Evans, while Head of Production at Paramount Pictures in the late-60’s and early-70’s, helped developed such classic movies as Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather and Love Story.
His résumé of films while at Paramount ushered in what film historians like to call the “golden age of cinema” where movies became grittier and catered to a younger generation. Great directors of that era like Hal Ashby, Roman Polanski and Francis Ford Coppola did their breakthrough work under Evans’ tutelage.
In any era, when you’re in a movie theatre and the lights go down and you’re maybe lucky enough to have a pretty girl or handsome guy on your arm, all you can hope for is some smidgen of quality on screen. Evans work as Head of Production and as an independent producer was quality with a capital Q.
His talent, unlike his older peers at other studios, was that he knew the script was the foundation of any great movie. What was on the written page was what made audiences stay captivated by iconic characters like Rosemary Woodhouse, private investigator J.J. “Jake” Gittes and Michael Corleone.
Chinatown is the quintessential private eye film and The Godfather is the quintessential mafia film. What other Hollywood producers can say two films that they found and nurtured into development are the standard bearers of there respected genres, almost forty years after there release?
It’s almost a crime that Evans hasn’t won the prestigious award years ago. I know that Hollywood can be more political than Washington, but the list of incredible films that Evans played a hand in green lighting is unmatched by any standard.
Anyone reading this who thinks he doesn’t deserve the Thalberg, name me another producer in Hollywood who accomplished more in the span of his eight glorious years behind the gates of Paramount. Some may say Steven Spielberg or Saul Zaentz. Maybe… and they both have been awarded the Thalberg respectively; Zaentz in 1997 and Spielberg in 1986.
When ever The Conversation or Serpico is on cable, I always find myself stopping and watching a little. And most of the time, before I realize it, I’ve watched the entire picture, joyfully.
Is there some weird reason he hasn’t won it because he played Thalberg in the 1957 film Man of a Thousand Faces? His casting in the role is the stuff of Hollywood legend. While lounging around the pool of The Beverly Hills Hotel, Norma Shearer, who was Thalbergs widow, asked Evans if he was an actor and she touted him for the part of her late husband.
Of course I’ve seen the 2003 documentary about his life The Kid Stays in the Picture; I know all the dark stuff, but the lasting power of his films transcends all of his personal drama.
Someone with his astonishing movie touch deserves a rise of the phoenix moment at the often lackluster Oscar telecast. Just don’t have the orchestra cut him off if he goes to long.
All the Academy has to do is show a montage of clips from Love Story, The Godfather, True Grit, Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, The Conversation, Marathon Man, the underrated The Two Jakes, Serpico, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple; people in the industry and anyone who’s a fan of movies watching around the world would acknowledge he deserves the much overdue award.