Easy Reader – “Infamous”, not the movie, the players.

NEVER say never, that, perhaps, is the moral of Peter Bart’s film career.

There he was, a young New York Times reporter, married and a father, happy covering New York. Suddenly he was asked to report from Los Angeles. He had no interest. In the men’s room, he asked David Halberstam what would happen if he declined. “You probably end up holding a very small piece of what you’re currently holding,” Halberstam said. So off to LA went Bart.

Bob Evans was a young man about town. He was not an actor, but he kept getting big parts. Peter Bart wrote him up. Charles Bludhorn, head of Gulf + Western, read that piece and decided - you are sitting down? - that Evans should be head of production at the London office of Paramount Pictures. Six months later, Evans was running Paramount in LA.

This gave Bob Evans an equally bizarre idea: Peter Bart should quit the Times and help him run Paramount. “I wasn’t equipped for this job,” Evans said, “so I want someone at my side that is also unprepared.” That is how, in 1967, a 35-year-old reporter tumbled into the movie business.

Paramount was so feudal that Bart had to threaten a minion to get decent office furniture. Bludhorn interfered at every turn, approving big-budget projects that were clearly destined to die fast and hard. Evans worked hard by day, but at night, no one partied harder.

Ah, the ‘60s…

“Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex)” mostly deals with the revolution that Bart and Evans made at Paramount - getting rid of legacy directors and bringing in new blood like Francis Coppola and Roman Polanski. Bart gives you the top floor view, and he is eloquent at that altitude. However, that is not why we read books about Hollywood, is it? We want the dish. There is plenty, some very controversial, details? read the book.

More dish? “Virtually every party, and they were almost nightly, had their standard offering and lines of cocaine and piles of joints," Bart writes. [I can attest to that.]

“I smoked the joints and welcomed occasional cocaine high after an arduous day, and the hot tubs became habitual as did the subsurface wandering hands." If you know anything about the movie business today, you know it is different now - most notably, that it is run by MBAs and accountants. This is, of course, what we want in our executive class.

Alas, the fact remains, in just seven years, Evans and Bart made "Rosemary's Baby," "Goodbye Columbus," "Catch-22," "Nashville," "The Conversation," "Love Story," "True Grit," "Chinatown" and "The Godfather."

You might ask, you cannot help but ask, what have the new guys made? And, just to close the circle, what are the names of the memoirs they have written?