Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [112]
For the role of Carol, Foster’s short list included Dyan Cannon, Angie Dickinson, and Farrah Fawcett. To play Benyon, he wanted veteran cowboy character actor Ben Johnson. And for the role of the murderous and oversexed assassin out to kill Doc because he double-crossed Benyon, he wanted screen tough Jack Palance.
When Foster and Palance could not agree on price—Palance wanted more than the $65,000 Foster was able to offer—producer Al Ruddy, who was working at the time on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, recommended a little-known nephew of a real-life mobster, a reputed East Coast hit man for the mob who also fancied himself a screenwriter and actor, Al Lettieri (Sollozzo in The Godfather). Foster offered Lettieri the same $65,000 plus three net points in the film, and Lettieri accepted.
Foster then set about to find a director. He first choice was Hollywood newcomer Peter Bogdanovich, whose not-yet-released debut film, The Last Picture Show, had terrific industry buzz. When Foster and Steve saw a screening of it, they both agreed Bogdanovich had to direct The Getaway. They offered him the job and he accepted. Foster then gave him Thompson’s first draft, which Bogdanovich did not like at all, and Foster scrambled for a screenwriter who could better translate Thompson’s grimy novel to the directorial tastes of Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich suggested Walter Hill for the job. As it happened, Hill had worked on both The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt as an uncredited second unit director, and had also written an unproduced screenplay, Hickey and Boggs, intended as a reunion vehicle for Bill Cosby and Robert Culp, who had starred together on TV in the sixties in I Spy. Steve liked Hill and urged Foster to hire him to rewrite the film. With Bogdanovich and Steve in place, and Hill’s much-improved script, Foster knew he would have no trouble getting a deal for the project with Bob Evans at Paramount.
And that’s when the fun really began.
Evans, the vice president and head of production at Paramount, had led a life that sounded like a cross between an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel and the plot of one of Evans’s better movies. Born in New York City, the young and extremely handsome Evans worked with his brother in the city’s garment district, each eventually owning an interest in Evan Picone, a men’s clothing manufacturer. Evans’s head may have been on Seventh Avenue, but his heart was in Beverly Hills, where he frequently vacationed. On Election Day in 1958, while sitting by the fabled Beverly Hills Hotel’s pool, he was spotted by Norma Shearer, the aging widow of MGM’s legendary Irving Thalberg. She decided to mentor his acting career and pushed him for a major role in Joseph Pevney’s upcoming 1959 film bio of Hollywood great Lon Chaney, Man of a Thousand Faces, which starred the equally great James Cagney. Evans got the role and never looked back.
After appearing in several movies, he decided acting didn’t do it for him and declared himself a producer, purchasing the rights to Roderick Thorp’s 1954 novel The Detective. He somehow persuaded Frank Sinatra to star in the title role, originally played by Alec Guinness in Robert Hamer’s 1954 British film adaptation, Father Brown. Evans’s version was a huge hit, one of the biggest box office successes of 1968, and led Charles Bluhdorn, the head of the Gulf + Western conglomerate, which now wholly owned Paramount Pictures, to offer Evans the position of executive head of worldwide production at the floundering studio.
Nobody in the business expected this onetime garmento to reverse the fortunes of Gulf + Western’s newly acquired Paramount Pictures, which currently sat