Paramount Pictures

Paramount Pictures enters the account as the studio whose executive Robert Evans recruited Roman Polanski after Repulsion and steered him toward Rosemary’s Baby. Its decisive role was not simply to offer a job: Evans first used a skiing film as the approach, then placed a very different, unsettling novel before the director, helping set in motion a major studio success.

Recruitment and Project Selection

After Roman Polanski’s Repulsion demonstrated his ability to unsettle audiences, Robert Evans, Paramount Pictures’ head honcho, invited him to Hollywood to make a film. Evans drew the expert skier into his office by sending him the script for Downhill Racer, a project about competitive skiing. The script functioned as an entry point: once Roman Polanski was there, Evans handed him Ira Levin’s novel Rosemary’s Baby and told him to read it. The sequence shows the studio executive presenting a director with one proposed project before redirecting his attention toward another.

From Novel to Film

Rosemary’s Baby concerned a young newlywed, Rosemary Woodhouse, whose neighbors are a Satanist couple seeking a vessel for the Antichrist. Roman Polanski, an atheist, was uneasy about making a film that might reinforce religious belief, even as he recognized the material’s potential. He kept the story’s events but introduced a subtle shift in perspective that leaves room to read Rosemary’s experience as acute paranoia as well as a supernatural conspiracy. The account attributes this interpretive approach to the director, not to a studio mandate; Paramount Pictures’ importance here lies in Evans’s decision to put the novel in his hands and bring him onto the project.

Promotion and Consequence

Paramount Pictures’ role extended beyond choosing the material. Evans and his team devised what the book describes as one of the era’s great advertising campaigns and cut a horrific trailer that, in some respects, surpassed the film itself. The result was a massive hit. The decision to give Roman Polanski the novel was later associated with a three-point rise in Paramount Pictures’ stock price, while the film made him one of the business’s hottest directors, a pop-cultural icon mentioned in the lyrics of Hair, and the first genuine rock-star movie director.

Significance

The studio’s intervention links executive judgment, project development, and marketing: Evans recognized the force of Roman Polanski’s disturbing style, brought him to Hollywood, and redirected his attention from Downhill Racer to Rosemary’s Baby. The campaign then helped carry the film to a level of success that elevated both the director’s public stature and the project’s importance to Paramount Pictures. The account presents this as a particularly inspired executive decision, while keeping the film’s distinctive ambiguity and directorial choices with Roman Polanski.