Robert Evans, former Paramount head

[RayKelly]

Robert Evans, former head of Paramount Pictures and inspiration for The Other Side of the Wind's Max David, died on October 26. He was 89.
The not-always-reliable Charles Higham wrote in a 1976 New York Times article that Evans had refused to distribute Welles' F for Fake, leading to the creation of the Max David character.
Asked how he felt about having an actor impersonate him, Evans reportedly told Higham: “I wish I had him playing me in my office. He could handle some of my problems.”

[RayKelly]

Peter Bogdanovich paid tribute to Evans in Variety:

“He brought a fresh kind of attitude to the movies. He had very good taste and he produced movies of his own that were damn good.

I loved Bob. He was friendly and amiable and charming. He was a movie fan too. It’s rare to have executives that really like movies. Not all executives are like that. He was really enthusiastic, and he encouraged talent. He was good Hollywood, not bad Hollywood.

He made a huge difference in my life. I remember he called me up and said, ‘You ruined my night.’ He put on my first film, ‘Targets,’ and he just meant to look at a couple of reels, and he couldn’t turn it off. So Paramount bought the film from Roger Corman, and it changed my career.

Read more at https://variety.com/2019/film/news/peter-bogdanovich-robert-evans-tribute-1203386432/

[JMcBride]

TARGETS ia a great film that holds up brilliantly. It cost only $130,000. I asked
Roger Corman why he did not put his name on it, and he said
because it was nonunion. I first saw it in a downtown Chicago theater in August 1968 during a break
from being teargassed at the Democratic Convention. The audience was sparse. My college
friend Mark Jacobson (who became an author and screenwriter) told me when
he saw it in New York, there was only one other person in the audience, and
that was Truman Capote. The film was poorly handled and basically dumped
by Paramount because they were worried about the mass shooting theme
in the wake of the King and RFK assassinations. So they put a superfluous and preachy gun-control
message at the start of the film; it reminded me of the censor-ordered preachy
message that was slapped on Hawks's SCARFACE, so I knew Peter Bogdanovich had
not put it on his film. But I was so impressed by it and by Peter's work
as a film critic and interviewer (which I tried to emulate) that I looked
him up when I first went to Hollywood in 1970, and that led to him
recommending me to Welles for a role in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. One
reason TARGETS is so good is that Samuel Fuller did contributed to the
script. Peter offered him credit, but Sam graciously declined. Among his suggestions
is the most powerful scene in the film, that of Karloff advancing on the young killer
and simply slapping him. Sam also suggested that the killer become confused between
Karloff walking on the drive-in screen and the real Karloff advancing toward him. Polly
Platt co-wrote the story with Peter and did the production design and (uncredited)
the costume design. She was a major talent as well.

[tonyw]

Thank you for this information, Joe. TARGETS did get released in England and we ran it at (the now sadly extinct) Manchester University Film Society. We were all impressed with it and the information about Sam's contribution makes it all the more distinctive.