The one filmmaker Sharon Stone hated working with: “One of the most bizarre human beings”
Thankfully, attitudes in Hollywood have shifted to a point where a woman speaking her mind doesn’t have the potential to blackball them from the industry. Sharon Stone has always been a straight shooter, which wasn’t always beneficial in the 1980s and 1990s when misogyny was still running rampant to an unchecked degree.
The Academy Award nominee has made her feelings on Paul Verhoeven, Basic Instinct, and the most notorious scene of her career perfectly clear, but that was hardly the first or last time Stone offered an unfiltered and unvarnished assessment of the pitfalls she was forced to navigate in a ruthless industry.
Her agent duped her into starring in 1985’s King Solomon’s Mines, and being forced into a role she didn’t want to play so early on in her career was hardly beneficial. Stone would bounce back by the dawn of the next decade, but she still had to be content with behind-the-scenes politics.
The actor was the driving force behind Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead as the western’s lead and producer, and repeatedly fighting her corner ultimately saw her blacklisted by Sony for eight years. Even in the immediate aftermath of Basic Instinct, Stone was fighting an uphill battle to avoid being permanently pigeonholed as a femme fatale and sex symbol.
Admittedly, signing on for another erotic thriller in Sliver didn’t help, but it still made a fortune at the box office by capitalising on the steamy subgenre’s boom period despite a troubled production that required extensive reshoots to try and whittle down the MPAA’s designated NC-17 rating into a more palatable R.
Phillip Noyce’s potboiler was backed by Robert Evans, a Hollywood heavyweight who’d produced critical darlings and awards season favourites like Chinatown, Urban Cowboy, Marathon Man, and Black Sunday. By all accounts, especially Stone’s, he wasn’t the easiest person to work with.
“Once again, this was the olden days, and there was a lot of men who thought that they knew what they should tell me what to do,” she told The New Yorker. “I can tell you that Bob Evans was one of the most bizarre human beings I ever encountered in the film business and one of the most inappropriate.”
She wasn’t lying about calling him bizarre, either. After a failed acting career, Evans became a producer and helped restore the flagging Paramount to its former glories before refusing to testify in the murder trial tied to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club after the culprits alleged he’d hired them to kill Roy Radin.
Evans was also convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1980, was married seven times, and narrated the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, which was based on his autobiography. It was a colourful existence, to say the least, and he was a person that Stone wanted to stay clear of following her uneasy experience with Sliver.
