David Zaslav's Blown Up Hollywood. Now It's Robert Evans' Home
A look inside the CEO’s work to date inside his own Beverly Hills' Shangri-La, Woodland
Robert Evans was married seven times, but the love of his life may very well have been a parcel of land nestled at the foot of Coldwater Canyon. Shortly after the inexperienced but charismatic producer was tapped to be the new vice president of production at Paramount in 1966, he bought 1033 Woodland Drive — or ‘Woodland’ as it would soon come to be known. Over the next eight years, Evans would become synonymous with one of the most creatively daring periods in Hollywood history. Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story, Harold and Maude, The Godfather and Chinatown were all made on his watch at the studio, turning its fate and its finances around completely.
As for Woodland, it was already set for its close-up. The seemingly magical property included a two-bedroom, three-bathroom house, an oval-shaped pool, a tennis court and a sizable pool house, which was quickly converted into a state-of-the-art screening room (and the future setting for untold hedonism).
The pricetag? $290,000.
Back then, Los Angeles real estate was hardly the obsession that it’s become these days. Not even close. Evans’ purchase didn’t make the local papers.
But during L.A.’s decades-long residential real estate boom, a premium has been placed on certain Hollywood parcels that could evoke the industry’s Golden Era. In 2013, Jerry Bruckheimer bought the home built by Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn. A year later, Taylor Swift landed Samuel Goldwyn’s Beverly Hills estate for $25 million. The billionaire French investor Nicolas Berggruen ponied up $41 million for the Edie Goetz Estate in 2017. And in 2020, Jeff Bezos purchased the Jack Warner Estate in Benedict Canyon from David Geffen for $165 million.
That’s a pretty impressive list of industry rainmakers right there. But there’s one more player who wanted to get his name on that list — the man who would end up purchasing Woodland.
Enter David Zaslav.
The Kid Stays in Woodland
Woodland became one of the most famous filmland residences of its time. Anyone who has read Evans’ first-rate memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, already knows plenty about the 3,800-square-foot home designed in the Hollywood Regency style in 1942 by architect John Woolf. References to Woodland are peppered throughout its pages. Like the time in 1969 when Roman Polanski, mourning the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson family, moved into Evans’ guest house. Or the time in 1987 when Evans and Jack Nicholson, while watching a Marvin Hagler-Sugar Ray Leonard fight, called screenwriter Robert Towne and committed to making the sequel to Chinatown, 1990’s The Two Jakes. Or the fateful evening when Evans, in bed with an unnamed “Hollywood Princess,” is offered cocaine for the first time and accepts, ushering in the darkest period of his life. At one point, when he was on the verge of running out of money, Evans had no choice but to sell his beloved Woodland. When Nicholson got wind of this, he immediately got on a plane to Europe to try to convince the new owner to sell it back to his old friend (Nicholson was ultimately successful in his endeavor).
Before Evans’ death in 2019, he liked to say that more deals were “conceived and consummated” in his screening room than on the Paramount lot. For once, he might not have been exaggerating. "This house has been my second act in life," Evans told Vanity Fair in a 1994 profile. "And it's been one hell of an act . . . . It's had the highest highs and the lowest lows. It's had the most romantic, extraordinary, and desperate moments . . . and you know what the terrible thing is. And I say it somewhat sadly: I'll never have again in the future the times I've had here in the past."
Woodland wasn’t just a setting for high-stakes dealmaking: It was the magic wand Evans relied on to project the Gatsby-esque life that he conjured up for himself. For new guests, there was a ritual: Upon arrival, a butler would escort them into a darkened room where, after a short but noticeable wait, Evans would make his grand entrance — and the charm offensive would start.
Buying Hollywood Cred
Nostalgia has always been a valuable commodity in Tinseltown. Perhaps no one knows that better than Zaslav’s friend Graydon Carter (who was one of the producers on the 2002 documentary version of Evans’ autobiography). Carter assisted the Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president in acquiring Evans’ former home for $16 million in 2020, which he purchased from Evans’ estate.
The purchase of Woodland, the exact spot where both The Godfather and Chinatown were greenlit, has to rank right up there with Zaslav’s ballsiest moves. After he burst into the upper ranks of moguldom in 2021 after helping to orchestrate the $43 billion merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, Zaslav hasn’t exactly shown much flair for subtlety. For the suit who was deemed “The Most Hated Man In Hollywood” by GQ (before the article was mysteriously taken down), the past couple of years have been a roller coaster of highs (Barbie, Succession) and PR lows (layoffs, the shelving of Bat Girl and then Coyote vs. Acme, the Turner Classic Movies about-face, the infamous tan-suit Cannes Film Festival party).
For a man who brought Jack Warner’s desk out of storage and into his own office on the lot at Warner Bros., Zaslav is a contradiction: a lover of old Hollywood, but also a ruthless numbers-cruncher as he tries to financially engineer his conglomerate-studio into success, backlash be damned.
Reseeding Woodland
At Zaslav’s urging, the city of Beverly Hills granted Woodland historic landmark status in 2021. Since then, he’s been pouring a not-insignificant sum into a full restoration of the property.
To the cynical, the Woodland purchase and subsequent facelift could easily be interpreted as Zaslav trying to buy his way into the Hollywood history books — at the exact same time he’s helping to dismantle the industry.
His plans include relocating the tennis court, adding a new guest wing, expanding the garage and building an exact replica of the original pool house, which burned down in 2003. Zaslav has also reportedly pledged to keep Woodland’s longtime house manager, housekeeper and butler on the payroll.
Is the executive doing all of this because when he looks in the mirror he sees the latest in a long line of celluloid potentates staring back? Or is he just a misunderstood lover of showbiz history using his personal money and power to preserve it? Either way, Woodland currently rests in the hands of one of the town’s most unlikely custodians.
For the restoration, Zaslav has hired Michael S. Smith, interior designer at the White House during the Obama years, as well as architect Timothy Bryant, who it turns out has been documenting the behind-the-gates progress of Woodland’s facelift on his Instagram account. While Bryant declined to discuss the project, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that, upon completion, the restored Woodland will get a voluptuous spread in Architectural Digest.
