BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Robert Evans has long been good theater. Now comes the actual stage play.

Having been involved with pictures as grand as “The Godfather,” as troubled as “The Cotton Club” and as self-referential as the documentary “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” which chronicled his checkered film career, Mr. Evans is becoming the subject of a play. It is currently being written, and producers hope it will make its Broadway debut in the next year.

Jon Robin Baitz, whose credits include “The Substance of Fire” and “Ten Unknowns,” is working on the play. (Mr. Baitz’s newest play, “Love and Mercy,” will make its Broadway debut during the 2010-11 season. Arts, Briefly, Page 2.) The director is Richard Eyre, whose revival of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” opened in England on Wednesday. Among its producers is John N. Hart Jr., a Tony winner for best production, including “Chicago.”

Mr. Evans, for his part, is supplying the drama.

“It begins with me dying,” Mr. Evans said on Tuesday. He was speaking of “The Fat Lady Sang,” his unpublished second memoir that Mr. Baitz is melding with material from Mr. Evans’s previous book, “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” published in 1994, to create a story that Mr. Evans hopes will be inspirational — at least for those who may be inspired by the tale of a movie producer’s ferocious tenacity.

On May 6, 1998, Mr. Evans suffered a stroke, one in a series that left him paralyzed on his right side and unable to speak. Sumner Redstone, the media mogul, sat by his bedside and ordered him to fight. The agent Jeff Berg pushed him to work on his speech “or wind up living in Palm Springs.”

After much therapy Mr. Evans is now tanned, articulate and, at 79, determined to play his assigned role as Hollywood’s glorious survivor.

“I wanted to get back. I got back,” Mr. Evans shouted from a sofa in the memorabilia-filled, Woodland Drive bungalow that, according to Mr. Hart, will be as much a character in the play as the Hollywood gallery that has surrounded its owner.
The first stroke, Mr. Evans said, occurred as he was raising a glass to toast the horror master Wes Craven over dinner in the Woodland Drive house. Days later he would see the dead Frank Sinatra being wheeled from a room just two doors from his own in the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The image triggered memories of a past in which Sinatra surprised Mia Farrow with divorce papers while she was starring in “Rosemary’s Baby” for Mr. Evans, then a Paramount executive.

Mr. Hart said such encounters will be the grist for Mr. Baitz’s play, which will be something broader than a one-man show, for a cast that has not been announced.
“There are a number of actors who have the chops to do it, and have the appetite, having come across Robert Evans in their working lives,” Mr. Eyre said by telephone on Wednesday. He added that Mr. Evans’s tale “has something of Don Quixote about it, Don Quixote and Casanova. It’s very alluring as a project, the story is magnificent, and almost absurd at the same time.”

Mr. Evans, who was discovered a half-century ago by the actress Norma Shearer while poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, had a brief acting career before morphing into one of Hollywood’s more colorful producers. He rose to head of production at Paramount during a golden era at that studio and was a regular in the gossip pages: he was married seven times, including to a former Miss America, Phyllis George, and the actresses Camilla Sparv, Ali MacGraw and Catherine Oxenberg.

The Evans project is among the first from Smuggler Films, which Mr. Hart formed last year with Patrick Milling Smith and Brian Carmody of Smuggler, a company that produces commercials and music videos.

On Tuesday Mr. Milling Smith and Mr. Carmody joined Mr. Hart at Mr. Evans’s home, where Mr. Evans entertained a reporter by peppering the three with questions he had asked — How many films have you made? How much money do you make? — before agreeing to part with stage rights to his story.

“You were rather aggressive about it,” Mr. Milling Smith said.
To be wary of producers, Mr. Evans said, is one of the lessons he has learned in a career that has alternately found him on top, near the bottom and almost dead.
Mr. Evans himself is still a producer, of course, with an office on the Paramount Pictures lot. He currently has a hand in projects like a planned HBO mini-series on Hollywood’s behind-the-scenes kingpin Sidney Korshak, and a planned movie based on the renegade car builder John DeLorean.

But Mr. Evans said he had learned to ply his trade without the usual artifice. “It’s as easy to tell the truth,” he said.

original post done by MICHAEL CIEPLY