He married a publicist named Dorothy Callman in 1961, and their first daughter, Colby, was born a year later. In 1964 Bart was made a national correspondent in Los Angeles. That’s when he first met a former actor named Robert Evans. In 1966, a few months after Bart’s second daughter, Dilys, was born, he wrote a profile of Evans for the Times that portrayed him as a tireless producer, an elegant operator. The very next day, on the basis of the article, Charles Bluhdorn, who had recently bought Paramount Pictures, hired Evans as a vice president; Evans had yet to make his first picture. In 1967, when Evans rose to become Paramount’s youngest-ever production chief, he hired Bart as his number two. Together they decided what movies would get made.
They were an unlikely pair. Movie-star handsome, Evans was a wheeler-dealer with a passion for filmmaking and a seductive personal style. Bart was college educated, East Coast, intense. He trumped others with his command of the facts. Evans understood actors’ fragile, self-absorbed psyches, but he didn’t like to read. Bart read everything and wasn’t afraid to say what he liked. Each man saw in the other something he did not see in himself.
More than three decades later Bart remains loyal to Evans, who has weathered a cocaine conviction, the murder of a business partner, and persistent money troubles. Although still widely considered an invaluable sounding board — for years Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and Robert Towne have sought his advice — Evans, now 71, hasn’t produced a hit film in more than 20 years. He spends much of his time rattling around his overgrown French Regency estate that was once Greta Garbo’s Beverly Hills hideaway. Bart, though, still believes in him.
“Turn him loose on somebody and, I’ll tell you, it’s amazing,” Bart will say today, admitting that part of him still longs for when he and Evans worked side by side. Alone neither enjoyed the same success. When Evans signed a new production deal with Paramount in 1991, Bart ran a banner headline on Variety’s front page along with a story about Evans’s “comeback.” But the comeback never materialized. Sometimes, Bart says, “I feel a little bit guilty. I feel like if we became a team again, we could get things done.”
Evans says Bart has not changed at all since Paramount. “He was always frank,” he says. “Always combative. He wasn’t a fence straddler. He was a bit sarcastic. Biting. He always had an inner pleasure in ruffling feathers.”
The film industry was in the toilet when the former actor and his journalist sidekick took over at the studio. They faced enormous pressure to turn things around. Bart knew little about movies, but he was well suited to the job. Whether as a child of demanding parents or as a reporter meeting daily deadlines, he had learned how to thrive under stress: Do your homework and stand your ground.
“The head of distribution comes in one day and sees me watching the dailies of Paper Moon. He says, ‘This movie is in black and white?” Bart recalls of the Depression-era story that would pair the father-daughter team of Ryan and Tatum O’Neal. Bart had discovered the book on which the movie was based and had approved its being shot in black and white — not the usual recipe for commercial success. “I said, ‘No, no, it’s in color. I’m just watching dailies in black and white. Don’t worry.’ And we finished the movie. These are the lessons of selective deviousness.”
Then as now, Bart was exacting. “In the go-go days of the ’70s, when everybody was running around smoking a joint or trying to look like they were, Peter was a little more buttoned down,” remembers Irwin Winkler. “He was thoughtful, well read — almost like a boarding school headmaster.”
One day while driving to work with Evans, Bart championed a project so eccentric that it could have cost them their jobs. “We needed to get some hits going, and Peter was telling me about a script he’d read the previous night,” Evans remembers. “He said, ‘It’s about an 18-year-old boy who falls in love with an 80-year, old woman.’ I said, ‘Stop the car. Are you crazy? He says, ‘When you get to your office, lock yourself in the bathroom and read the script. And if you think I’m wrong, I’m wrong.’” The script became the cult film Harold and Maude.
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