The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (131 page)

By the late seventies, he was doing screenplays:
F.I.S.T
. (78, Norman Jewison) was his debut, and it shows a valiant attempt to handle difficult material. But as time went by and Eszterhas became more successful, so his “working class” awareness became bowdlerized—especially in
Flashdance
(83, Adrian Lyne)—and he fell into a pattern of implausibility, self-repetition, and an almost unconscious interest in forms of betrayal:
Jagged Edge
(85, Richard Marquand), an effective thriller;
Hearts of Fire
(87, Marquand);
Pals
(87, Lou Antonio);
Big Shots
(87, Robert Mandel); the singularly unbelievable
Betrayed
(88, Costa-Gavras);
Checking Out
(89, David Leland); and the touching if predictable
Music Box
(89, Costa-Gavras).

Eszterhas is a useful combination of old-fashioned technique and modern shock value, as witness
Basic Instinct
(92, Paul Verhoeven). Nothing in that film is as shocking as the writer’s $3 million fee, but
Basic Instinct
, in title, marketing, and spurious sensation is a very characteristic American film of its moment, at the same time nasty and irrelevant. As the film was shot, Eszterhas made something of a spectacle of himself by discovering that his script might be hostile to the gay community. He asked the producers to be allowed to do rewrites, and they couldn’t believe he was serious.

I do. Eszterhas has a dangerous rhinolike sincerity allied to the guile of a fox. All of this was evident in his most enjoyable paperwork: the widely distributed fax copies of letters between himself and Michael Ovitz when Eszterhas elected to leave CAA. Joe’s account of how Ovitz had responded is as concise a portrait of idealism and betrayal in Hollywood as one will find—but the reader has to decide which is which.

He also wrote the script for
Sliver
(93, Phillip Noyce);
Showgirls
(95, Verhoeven);
Jade
(95, William Friedkin);
Telling Lies in America
(97, Guy Ferland);
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
(99, Arthur Hiller). And you can’t make five films so bad without hearing the air go out of your balloon—and worrying whether it smells. In addition, Joe divorced one wife and married another on the way to stagnation. It was enough to encourage the thought that his brief notoriety had been just a spasm in midlife crisis. It also urged him toward Art, and his first, defining novel,
American Rhapsody
(00).

Jean Eustache
(1938–81), b. Pessac, France
1967:
Les Mauvaises Fréquentations/Bad Company
. 1973:
La Maman et la Putain/The Mother and the Whore
. 1975:
Mes Petites Amoureuses
.

I have seen only one Eustache film,
The Mother and the Whore
, but it is enough to put him in any film book. There are so many films that reckon they are dealing with love and sex that we take the steam for granted. Just every now and then, a film rises up as abrupt, elemental, and wounding as rocks.
The Mother and the Whore
is 219 minutes; it relies on naked performances—Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont, Françoise Lebrun, and Isabelle Weingarten; and it is more shocking than
Last Tango
, or nearly any other “sexy” film you can think of. On seeing Eustache’s masterpiece, one feels like someone trapped into confrontation with a pit of wild creatures. It is a film that deserves to be in perpetual repertory—yet, I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather hold it back, in secrecy and threat, and then show it occasionally, without warning, when another film has failed to arrive.
The Mother and the Whore
should be rumored rather than known. It is a dark, vaguely perceived beast on the edge of polite society. Beware.

Robert Evans
(Robert Shapera), b. New York, 1930
For a moment, Evans was bathed in the media wash of being the perfect new producer. His smile had the unshy self-love of a man seeing his own dazzle in the mirror. But moments pass. After seven years in charge of production at Paramount (1967–73), he moved into the independence he reckoned he deserved. His first venture was
Chinatown
(74, Roman Polanski), a producer’s coup in terms of holding together warring elements long enough for high rentals and good reviews.

After that, the magic touch deserted him and left two boxoffice toads:
Marathon Man
(76, John Schlesinger) and
Black Sunday
(77, John Frankenheimer). They were no worse nor more foolish than pictures that had flourished a few years before. But producers live by the invisible and scarcely predictable rule of what the public will swallow. All the hard work, faith, and ruthlessness his survivors attribute to a producer are empty air if his horse medicine does not sell. Evans has charm and no fear of exhausting schedules: four marriages and four divorces have not deterred him from the company of pretty women, and he has the boyish love of pictures still that has guarded all long-lived producers.

He has a youthful face, as if being starstruck came out in his ardent expression. As a child in New York, he worked as a radio actor by night. The strain caught up with him: a lung collapsed, leaving the febrile intensity of a restored invalid. He convalesced for a year and then bounced back to be sales director of a sportswear firm his brother had helped found.

Selling sneakers and jock straps taught him trade and made him wealthy. Then, in 1956, in Beverly Hills he met Norma Shearer, and she was so taken with him that she got him the cameo part of her husband, Irving Thalberg, in
Man of a Thousand Faces
(57, Joseph Pevney). He was pretty, but not an actor. Still, he had several other parts: the matador in
The Sun Also Rises
(57, Henry King); the odious killer in
The Fiend Who Walked the West
(58, Gordon Douglas); and
The Best of Everything
(59, Jean Negulesco).

He never made it as a star, and he went back to peddling sportswear. When the company sold out to Revlon, Evans’s cut left him a millionaire. He then went back to Hollywood with the wish to produce and the means to buy in. Fox took him on and he set up one picture there
—The Detective
(68, Douglas)—before accepting Paramount’s invitation.

It speaks for Evans’s glamour and the shortage of distinguished production executives that Paramount gave him power with so little track record. His time at Paramount started uncertainly, but he soon reached a plateau of success that helped to revitalize the company.
The Godfather
may look cast-iron now, but it was hedged with early doubts, against which Evans gave the director’s job to the still problematic Coppola. Other films he produced include:
The Molly Maguires
(68, Martin Ritt);
Rosemary’s Baby
(68, Polanski);
Romeo and Juliet
(68, Franco Zeffirelli);
Paint Your Wagon
(69, Joshua Logan);
Goodbye, Columbus
(69, Larry Pierce);
Darling Lily
(70, Blake Edwards);
Catch-22
(70, Mike Nichols); and
Love Story
(70, Arthur Hiller). This last and
Goodbye, Columbus
had starred Ali MacGraw, Evans’s third wife (others have been Sharon Huegeny, Camilla Sparv, and Phyllis George).
Love Story
was a major hit, unexpected to all the people who doubted a cynical, permissive society’s readiness for sappy romance. Evans guessed that hidden softness and also backed the far greater harshness of
The Godfather
. Such versatility promised that he would be back with other things we could not resist.

I wish—he wishes. After
Marathon Man
and
Black Sunday
Evans has had disaster, under the influence of drugs and also under suspicion in various scandals as well as being linked to one notable murder case. He was a producer on
Players
(79, Anthony Harvey),
Popeye
(80, Robert Altman), and
The Cotton Club
(84, Coppola), and his own disarray cannot have helped that disappointing picture. He was intended not just as producer on
The Two Jakes
, but as the actor playing Jake Berman. His insecurities stopped Robert Towne’s first attempt to film his script in 1985, and Evans was a producer in name only when the film was finally done, in 1990, under Jack Nicholson’s direction.

So Evans is a very notable casualty. But in all his stages of chaos and distress, he has remained a would-be actor, putting on a grand show. For example, as late as 1982, Robert Towne wrote of him: “Bob Evans remains, in memory and in life, a standard for every kind of human generosity, and one I have yet to see matched in this town.”

Of course, that was said before Evans took producer’s credit and backed one old pal against another on
The Two Jakes
(90, Jack Nicholson). Since then, Evans has had his name attached to a few more films—
Sliver
(93, Phillip Noyce);
Jade
(95, William Friedkin);
The Phantom
(96, Simon Wincer);
The Saint
(97, Noyce);
The Out-of-Towners
(99, Sam Weisman). That all have been bad is just a signal of Evans’s general relaxation—which is good for him. As is amply borne out in his all-too-short memoir,
The Kid Stays in the Picture
. So long as he stays a kid!

Rupert Everett
, b. Norfolk, England, 1959
In another age, Rupert Everett might have been mistaken for Flashman, the cruel bully in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, or regarded as a scion of that wonderfully languid English character actor James Villiers. Everett exudes class, even if he is more plausible as the black sheep of some lofty family. He is an authentic beauty, and one of the few leading actors who has admitted to and relished his gayness. It has been a remarkably brave and enterprising career, and I think it’s possible that Everett could take on great roles in an age that might begin to admit gender confusion—and enjoy it.

He dropped out of school (Ampleforth) to go to the Central School of Speech and Drama, and he made a splashy debut in the London stage production of
Another Country
. In turn, that led to his start in movies: on TV in
Princess Daisy
(83, Waris Hussein);
Another Country
(84, Marek Kanievska); as Lancelot in
Arthur the King
(85, Clive Donner); excellent as the sports-car cad in
Dance with a Stranger
(85, Mike Newell);
Duet for One
(86, Andrei Konchalovsky); to Australia for
The Right Hand Man
(87, Di Drew);
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
(87, Francesco Rosi);
Gli Occhiali d’Oro
(87, Giuliano Montaldo);
Hearts of Fire
(87, Richard Marquand);
Tolerance
(89, Pierre-Henry Salfati).

He was perfect as the effete Englishman overwhelmed by Christopher Walken in
The Comfort of Strangers
(91, Paul Schrader);
Inside Monkey Zetterland
(92, Jefery Levy);
Cemetery Man
(93, Michele Soavi); as the Prince of Wales in
The Madness of George III
(94, Nicholas Hytner);
Ready to Wear
(94, Robert Altman);
Dunston Checks In
(96, Ken Kwapis); clearly helpful to Julia Roberts in
My Best Friend’s Wedding
(97, P. J. Hogan);
B. Monkey
(98, Michael Radford); as Kit Marlowe, uncredited, in
Shakespeare in Love
(98, John Madden);
An Ideal Husband
(99, Oliver Parker); as Oberon in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(99, Michael Hoffman); narrating the documentary on Nazi treatment of gays,
Paragraph 175
(99, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman);
Inspector Gadget
(99, David Kellogg);
The Next Best Thing
(00, John Schlesinger); as Algernon in
The Importance of Being Earnest
(02, Parker).

He made
South Kensington
(01, Carlo Vanzina);
Unconditional Love
(02, Hogan); a voice in
The Wild Thornberrys Movie
(02, Cathy Malkasian and Jeff McGrath); as Charles I in
To Kill a King
(03, Mike Barker); as Valmont in French in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
(03, Josée Dayan); Kim Philby in
A Different Loyalty
(04, Kanievska); as King Charles II in
Stage Beauty
(04, Richard Eyre);
Separate Lies
(05, Julian Fellowes);
Stardust
(07, Matthew Vaughn); the headmistress in
St. Trinian’s
(07, Parker and Barnaby Thompson);
Wild Target
(09, Jonathan Lynn);
St. Trinian’s II
(09, Parker and Thompson).

Sir Richard Eyre
, b. Barnstaple, Devon, England, 1943
1979:
Comedians
(TV). 1981:
Country
(TV). 1983:
The Ploughman’s Lunch; Loose Connections
. 1984:
Laughterhouse
. 1985:
Past Caring
(TV). 1986:
The Insurance Man
(TV). 1989:
Tumbledown
(TV). 1993:
Suddenly, Last Summer
(TV). 1995:
The Absence of War
(TV). 1997:
King Lear
(TV). 2000:
Rockaby
(TV) (s). 2001:
Iris
. 2004:
Compleat Female Stage Beauty
. 2006:
Notes on a Scandal
. 2009:
The Other Man
.

Eyre’s knighthood derives from the theatre, of course, and in particular from his directorship of the National Theatre (1987–97).

So it comes as a surprise to see how many “movies” he had made for television, even if they were presented as “plays.” And in a lot of those movies, Eyre was a director rather as he had been for the stage, at the service of the play and the writer, and as a great encourager to the actors. He is naturally a modest man (it’s significant that he comes from a country town), and his published diaries admit to a degree of depressiveness. All of which, I suspect, has dampened his creative ego a little—and, for good and ill, that ego is more vital in movies, where the thrust and purpose of the work depend on the director. So it may come as a gradual shock, to Eyre and to us, to note a real movie director here, the proof of which is
Iris
—a rare kind of literary biography beautifully rendered in a range of wintry whites and with the threat or promise of water always at hand.