Bart's Blunders or Layers Of Checks And Balances

I've already blogged about how Peter Bart's book Infamous Players is dedicated to Harvey Weinstein.  But you can't blame Bart for not knowing when he wrote the book that Harvey's name would some day be mud.

However, you can blame him for playing fast and loose with the facts.  The story of his years at Paramount are a fun read, but I question his memory (or honesty).  He always seems to have known what would be a flop or a hit. Admittedly, that's what everyone in Hollywood does after the fact.

But he also reproduces old discussions, using quotation marks.  While I don't expect word-for-word accuracy, he goes too far.  For instance, here he is having a discussion with studio head Robert Evans about who'll adapt the musical Paint Your Wagon into a screenplay for the (disastrous) movie version. 

Evans said defensively [...] "We're hiring the best writer in the business to fix it, Paddy Chayefsky."

"Paddy Chayefsky writes movies like Network or Hospital," I said. "He writes great satire, but this is a period musical--"

This discussion never happened.  Paint Your Wagon was released to general disdain in 1969.  Hospital came out in 1971, Network in 1976.  It's not as if movie fans--you know, the kind who'd read Bart's book--don't know this.  And the weird thing is Chayefsky was already famous in the late 60s for writing Marty--why didn't Bart lie by putting that in his own mouth?  It's not as if kitchen sink realism would make Chayefsky any more fit to adapt a big musical.  In fact, it probably points to more problems than a script like Network.

Bart also mentions other projects Wagon's original scriptwriter Alan Jay Lerner hoped to do at the time.  One was Coco, a show about the life of Coco Chanel, which Katharine Hepburn was allegedly interested in.  Bart later lists Lerner's failures, noting "Coco never opened on Broadway." That would be news to Lerner, since the show was presented on the Great White Way in late 1969, starring Hepburn, running a season and turning a profit.

Bart also claims Erich Segal wrote Love Story--the book and movie both came out in 1970--and "later cowrote" the movie Yellow Submarine, though that film came out in 1968.  He also claims that once Love Story was in production other projects started coming together, including Rosemary's Baby.  That's funny, since Rosemary's Baby came out in 1968, before Love Story was even cast.

He also claims Herbert Ross directed Funny Girl, when it was William Wyler.  I assume he's thinking of Funny Lady, the not-very-good sequel from Ross.  And he writes "By 1973, fortified by the success of the two Godfathers, Bob Evans sensed it was time for a more aggressive strategy" when the second Godfather film came out in 1974.  And so on and so forth.  Does Bart, who used to work for The New York Times, believe in editors?