In 1967, when the lumbering old Hollywood studios were about to be shaken up by independent, visionary filmmakers, Peter Bart left his job as a New York Times reporter to become Paramount Pictures’ No. 2 production executive. “Infamous Players,” Bart’s breezy, anecdotal account of his eight years at the studio, casts him as the level-headed Sancho Panza to his pal, the production head Robert Evans, who comes across as a risk-taking, eventually cocaine-fueled Don Quixote. Together they led Paramount out of the dark ages of big-budget disasters like “Darling Lili” into the glorious, cutting-edge era of “The Godfather,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown.”

Those achievements were so remarkable, in fact, that they have been heavily chronicled already, most colorfully in Evans’s memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” most thoroughly in Peter Biskind’s “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” Bart’s stories are hardly infamous anymore, his version of familiar events too sketchy and unreliable to add much to the record.

His memoir is technically true to its subtitle. The heavy in Bart’s scathing portrait of corporate corruption is Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf & Western. According to Bart, Bluhdorn allowed European gangsters to invest in the studio; his instinct for movies was even worse.

Bart had better taste, though he knew when to listen to his business judgment instead. Among the films he championed: the treacly “Love Story,” whose success made him “smile and wince” because the film was “as bogus as it was effective.”

That kind of lucidity and wit is what you want from a modern-day Sancho, but Bart’s scattershot tales rarely deliver such clarity. He recalls telling Woody Allen’s “very protective handlers” that their client would not direct his screenplay of “Play It Again, Sam.” That job would be handled by — and Bart writes this very earnestly — “Herb Ross, the esteemed director of ‘Funny Girl,’ ” whose work Bart and Evans agreed was “more accessible.” I wouldn’t brag about that decision.

Bart’s crisp, authoritative tone will be recognizable to anyone who read his columns as editor of Variety, a position he held for two decades. In this memoir he is sure of himself even when he is dead wrong: he announces that Clint Eastwood insisted on having his friend Don Siegel direct “Dirty Harry” because Eastwood “wanted the assurance” after the commercial failure of his first movie as a director, “Play Misty for Me.” But “Dirty Harry” started filming months before “Misty” was released.

And then there’s the kerfuffle over “Don’t Look Now.” In what sounds like a genuine insider’s revelation — at last! — Bart claims he was there when Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland shot their steamy bedroom scene, which led to undying rumors they had really had sex on camera. Bart says he happened to be visiting the set that day and was standing by the director Nicolas Roeg’s side; as the actors rolled around, Bart whispered in Roeg’s ear that maybe it was time to say “cut.”

Bart’s earlier account of how far the actors went has been tamed down in the finished book, but that version surfaced in the press weeks ago, provoking Sutherland to release a statement saying that Bart wasn’t a witness at all, that only the actors, the director and the cinematographer were in the room. A sex scene would ordinarily have been shot as Sutherland describes it, without gawkers. Crazy things happen — like an executive telling a director when to cut — but plausibility is not on Bart’s side here, which makes you doubt even his more innocuous memories.

That’s too bad, because he has a few thoughtful things to say about how ’70s filmmakers flamed out, victims of “the instant celebrity, the unimaginable financial rewards” that defined their rebellious era. Bart was part of that Hollywood revolution, but “Infamous Players” is a shaky footnote to his career.

Source: New York Times

The late, great director Billy Wilder liked to say that movies often undergo a “soufflé effect” when shooting and editing are finished: For no apparent reason, they either rise or sink. The film industry itself was plenty whipped up in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when the demise of the old studio system and the rise of the directing auteur created wholesale changes in cinema. Former Variety editor Peter Bart was a vice president at Paramount Pictures during those heady days, when the flagging old studio reinvented itself with such films as Rosemary’s Baby and The Godfather. In Infamous Players: A Tale Of Movies, The Mob (And Sex), Bart offers his evenhanded version of the Hollywood backlot depicted by his old colleague Robert Evans in The Kid Stays In The Picture.

Bart, a onetime New York Times reporter, brought a uniquely balanced perspective to the movie business. Unlike “hard-core movie brats” such as Peter Bogdanovich, he writes, “I did not know where Cecil B. DeMille’s old office was located, nor on which soundstage Elvis Presley had just finished shooting.” Bart wasn’t typically starstruck, which helped him make sober suggestions about casting and directorial hires. Yet most people read books about the movie business looking for famous names, and Bart throws out plenty of them. His recollections of the team-building that resulted in classics such as Harold And Maude and his capsule assessments of the ambitions of Warren Beatty, Robert Redford, and Clint Eastwood add up to a solid companion to the definitive books about the era, like Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Mark Harris’ Pictures At A Revolution.

Bart plays fast and loose with his chronology. Recalling his doubts about the hiring of Paddy Chayefsky as a script doctor on the unlikely 1969 musical Paint Your Wagon (which starred a singing Clint Eastwood), he remembers arguing that Chayefsky was better suited to satires like Network—which came out in 1976.

As if to vault over the celebrity muck of the times, or maybe to distance himself from Variety’s relentlessly chirpy industry slang, Bart’s writing sometimes veers toward the absurdly overblown. In pointing out that Evans was a world-class womanizer, for instance, he observes that “there was an understanding within Evans’s pulchritudinous inventory that these were to be one-night stands and that all emotions expressed therein were perforce evanescent.”

But success in the movies is also perforce evanescent, and Bart conveys this nicely, acknowledging that drug abuse and “rampant egomania” played a part in the downfall of many of Hollywood players. “But the hit movies of the sixties and seventies were themselves narcotics,” Bart writes. The industry might still have the hangover.

Source: A.V. Club

Film executive Peter Bart reveals stories behind the making of films including The Great Gatsby, The Godfather and Don't Look Now, as detailed in his memoirs, Infamous Players.

Click here to listen now. Source: BBC

Peter Bart’s latest Hollywood book includes a 1976 picture of its author as a bare-chested, longish-haired guy in jeans, taken at a Hawaiian location for the Hemingway adaptation “Islands in the Stream.” Despite this extremely business-casual look, Mr. Bart’s “Infamous Players” is about his stint at Paramount Pictures as what was then known, and is still known, as “a suit.” He was a Paramount vice president from 1967 to 1975. And he served as a kind of literary aide to the studio’s larger- and noisier-than-life head of production, Robert Evans.

In Mr. Evans’s riotous, over-the-top 1994 memoir, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” Mr. Bart plays a small but pivotal role. He was a reporter for The New York Times when he wrote an influential profile of Mr. Evans. That article was so attention-getting that it catapulted Mr. Evans, a clothing company scion and pretty-boy bit player, into a hugely flamboyant movie-business role.

“Who would have thought a journalist would change the entire course of my life and career?” Mr. Evans’s book asks about Mr. Bart (who is otherwise barely mentioned in its star-studded cavalcade). “On reflection, I don’t know whether I should love him or hate him.” On the evidence of Mr. Bart’s own account of his years with Mr. Evans, he has his ambivalence, too.

Consider them longtime frenemies. And think of Mr. Bart (also the author of “Boffo!” and “The Gross”) as the one now trying to have the last laugh. In “Infamous Players,” he offers his own, more incisive versions of Mr. Evans’s most hyperbolic stories, and his perspective can be sharp.

Much has been written about the self-immolating Paramount of the 1970s, a time of stupendous glory and equally outsize folly. But Mr. Bart seems usually to have witnessed these goings-on as (to use a title of one of Nora Ephron’s books) the wallflower at the orgy — and at extremely close range.

“Infamous Players” picks up more or less where Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution” leaves off. (If you could take only one film book to a desert island, that would be the one to pack.) Mr. Harris wrote about the wild cultural confusion of Hollywood’s 1967 output and about the early 1968 Oscar race.

Mr. Bart writes about how during that same period, “at age 35, being of sound mind and body,” he managed to (as a Times colleague put it) “go to the dark side.”

The first indication of this book’s spark lies in its account of his timorousness at leaving journalism behind. (He would eventually return as a longtime editor-in-chief of Variety.) The Times’s stellar David Halberstam, encountering Mr. Bart in a Times men’s room in New York, delivers the first of this book’s many borderline-unprintable, very funny lines.

Evans and his corporate bosses are even better sources of rude humor. Mr. Bart depicts the oft-described Evans French Regency lair in Beverly Hills in typically cutting detail. He notes that after Mr. Evans bought the place, he quickly repositioned its driveway so that visitors would have to see more of its perimeter when they arrived. He describes the hospitality chez Evans in ways that make its fun-loving owner sound like both power broker and pimp. And he winds up making Mr. Evans sound like a latter-day Norma Desmond, living amid worn furniture, overgrown trees and poignant memorabilia. In this case hindsight is the best revenge.

Mr. Bart recalls himself as having been the coolest head at a studio full of show-offs and screamers. In no particular order, he relives the making of “The Godfather,” “Chinatown,” “Love Story,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and, less happily, Peter Bogdanovich’s “Daisy Miller” (“smugly onanistic”), “The Great Gatsby” (“an astonishingly sexless movie” for the ’70s) and “Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York.” If that last one fails to ring a bell, that’s because its main raison d’etre, according to Mr. Bart, was that its producer, Harry Korshak, was the son of the extremely well-connected lawyer Sidney Korshak. Mr. Bart was the person who had to tell Mr. Evans, “I know you’re friendly with Sidney, but we’re talking about a guy who once represented Al Capone.”

Mr. Evans’s book carried a subtitle trumpeting its attention to success, scandal, sex, tragedy and infamy. That sets the bar high. So the subtitle of “Infamous Players” is “A Tale of Movies, the Mob (and Sex),” which is what’s known in the film business as cutting to the chase.

In the interests of delivering its quota of stories about sex, “Infamous Players” provides Mr. Bart’s bird’s-eye view of the most talked-about sequence in Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 movie “Don’t Look Now” (he was on the set the day Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland intensively acted the scene — and at a Movieola with Warren Beatty, toning down explicit shots of Ms. Christie); of the use of Paramount’s soundstages to film quickie pornographic movies; of the “sexually repressed” Francis Coppola’s early career of editing his friends’ soft-core efforts; of the brutality of some Paramount chieftains with women; and even of overtures directed at himself. “You know Bob,” said a good-looking woman who had draped herself over Mr. Bart’s car in the Paramount parking lot, referring to his boss. “He’s a honey, but he doesn’t read. That’s why I thought you and I should get to know one another.”

Hollywood books about the ’70s (most notably Peter Biskind’s) are full of such lore. They’re also full of anecdotes about the same films that Mr. Bart remembers best. So his book can be redundant — but it’s a fast, funny, no-nonsense and graphic account of Paramount’s most dizzyingly high times. He may have been a studio executive, but he started out reporting. He’s a sharp-eyed reporter still.

Source: New York Times

As part of the Tribeca Film Festival's Tribeca Talks: Pen to Paper series, Variety's Peter Bart spoke with TFF's Geoffrey Gilmore Easter Sunday about his just-published memoir, "Infamous Players, A Tale of Movies, the Mob (and Sex)" at Union Square's Barnes & Noble.

The story of Bart's seven years as a production exec at Paramount Pictures with Bob Evans, "Infamous Players" is a candid look at the people and the pictures of the late 1960s, early 1970s. The tome has been a long time coming.

"Harvey Weinstein asked me to write it 21 years ago," Bart said.

The scribe says he's "offended" by the way the era "is being sentimentalized," and so he offers an insider's take on pics like "Rosemary's Baby," "The Godfather," "Harold and Maude," "Love Story" and "True Grit."

Among his observations:

• Those movies were made because "someone in the studio had a personal passion. What's depressing about studios today is I asked (current production heads), 'Are you looking forward to the pictures on your slate?' and you get, 'No, not really.'"

• "One thing took place that doesn't happen now: I fired 12 directors in seven years. Directors don't get fired today."

• "A lot of filmmakers were discovering themselves and discovering drugs - and self-destructed," he said, citing Hal Ashby and Dennis Hopper.

• "The presence of the underworld was very apparent in that day ... Unless you were suicidal, you went along with it."

• "Sex was an important part of the 1970s - maybe the nicest part -- and it would be an impediment not to have a chapter about it."

• "The multinationals that own film companies today try to impose rationality. Evans and I understood it was an irrational business."

As for differences of opinion over his version of events, Bart isn't worried, "I'm used to getting ferocious feedback. It comes with the territory."

Source: Variety

Former Paramount v-p and Variety editor-in-chief Bart (Shoot Out) takes readers on a wild ride through the years he spent at the struggling film studio from 1967 to 1975. He came aboard at the behest of Paramount's new chief of production, Robert "the kid stays in the picture" Evans, leaving behind a promising journalism career and moving to Los Angeles. Paramount had recently been acquired by an eccentric man named Charles Bluhdorn, whose taste in films was questionable and whose temper was legendary. But Bluhdorn had the finances necessary to save Paramount from ruin, so Bart and Evans were forced to push through projects that had no hope of commercial success--such as Darling Lili, a musical that romantically paired Julie Andrews and the not-so-secretly gay Rock Hudson--and pass on others if they weren't to Bluhdorn's liking, such as Funny Girl. But Bart also recounts some of the studio's triumphs, particularly Love Story (1970), the original True Grit (1969)--which Bart found for John Wayne--and the cult classic Harold and Maude (1971), another personal project. With anecdotes about well-known stars mixed with the ins and outs of trying to keep a film studio afloat, this memoir is perfect for cinephiles yearning for a behind-the-scenes view. (May)

Source: Publishers Weekly

“In 1967 at age 35, being of sound mind and body, I accepted a job as an executive of a film studio. At that moment I believed my new position at Paramount Pictures would be a great adventure. If indeed it turned out to be a nightmare rather than an adventure, my tenure at the very least would provide the basis for a first-person account of my trip to the dark side.”

So opens Peter Bart’s version of his own motion picture history. The longtime editor of Variety and former New York Times reporter is one of those rare men. He can look back dispassionately; he refuses to take creative credit for his work on great films like “The Godfather” — he always calls a spade a spade — and he is modest and savvy to an unusual degree.

With everybody and his dog now wanting to make movies or become a movie star, this book titled Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies, the Mob, (and Sex) is a cautionary tale. The big studio control moment was still very much extant in the Sixties, but the dangers, romance and gossip of making films hasn’t changed all that much.

Bart acknowledges the encouragement of producer Harvey Weinstein and the loyalty and friendship of Robert Evans in making this book possible. I can’t recommend it enough because it is so unusually truthful about La La Land and its many gifted and crazy inhabitants. Just a few of the “stars” of Infamous Players are Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Rock Hudson, Julie Andrews, Henry Kissinger, Sue Mengers, Barbra Streisand, Charlie Bludorn, Alan Jay Lerner, Francis Coppola, Frank Sinatra, Ali McGraw, Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and the book follows the high level studio head Charlie Bludorn in all his machinations of mis-step and control. (Bludorn is the man who groomed Barry Diller to follow him and the rest is history.)

It is silly to keep listing important stars and dynamic producers because the book barely misses any of them. It tells how film hits got made and how wrong everybody was about various properties at various times. Money flows, the Mob sticks its oar in, stars and directors change their minds, people get hired and fired and writer Bart was evidently noting it all down for posterity.

Now posterity is here! If you have ever wondered how Hollywood really worked in the era after MGM’s 1940’s “more stars than are in the heavens” era, then this book about Paramount’s rise and fall and influence and lack of it, is for you.

Reading this book, one has to remember that those “good old, bad old days” happened before independents entered the picture and before Sundance had any but geographical intent. So maybe making movies today is entirely different and there is no big studio to yell “yea” or “nay” and to spend millions of dollars on nothing or withhold on some executive’s whim. It well may be that the studio system is dead and good riddance.

But I don’t think so. If one had infinite money, I think it would be great to see a big studio entity come back and exert control, groom and make stars, and exert as much influence as possible over entertainment. But these are different times and the verities of the past don’t count.

Still, this is one — perhaps the only — rare truthful accounts of movie-making in the Sixties and it is so frank and full of detail and history as gossip, I just couldn’t resist it.

Yes, and Harvey Weinstein’s publishing house is putting it out. Next? The truthful history of the Weinstein brothers rise, fall and rise again? Surely Peter Bart won’t have the strength for that.

* * *

ONE of my favorite anecdotes in Infamous Players is of the mis-making of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Many people tried and failed to produce a screenplay.

Among them was my late friend, Truman Capote.

He was famous for pronouncing the writing of others as “that’s typing, not writing.” But when it came time for Capote to produce his version of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece novel, he came up with sheer gibberish.

Bart writes: “The script that Capote delivered…was both tragic and bizarre….It was about 11 at night when I phoned the news to (Bob) Evans. ‘You won’t believe this, Bob, but the material Truman turned in – I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a screenplay.…All he did was type. He typed the dialogue from the book, typed Fitzgerald’s descriptions and made them look like stage directions. He didn’t contribute one original line or idea.’

“’What the hell are we going to do?’ Evans demanded.

“We should get Swifty (agent Lazar) to return the money, for one thing,’ I blurted.”

* * *

OH, hi ho – the good old days when press agents sent in lists of famous, rich and confused people out at dinner in their restaurants. Lo and behold, here is one of those.

At the first three tables in Primola on 2nd Avenue there were wealthy New Yorkers chowing down. Philip J. Smith, chair & CEO of the Shubert theater organization (and one of my own favorite guys)…then real estate tycoon Mickey Palin and Houston’s beautiful Podi Constantiner, Daryl and Steve Roth of the real estate empire (he just joined the board of J. C. Penny…His wife Daryl is the Broadway dynamo who did the Ephron sisters’ hit “Love, Loss, and What I Wore.” Next, Barbara Broccoli who owns most of the James Bond franchise and is one of the 100 most powerful persons in Great Britain. She was with movie producer Frederick Zollo who happens to be her husband.

I suppose poor people were also out in the snow eating somewhere.

I do miss the good old days when we all knew who everybody was and what they had done to become well-known.

Source: WOWOWOW.com