[1] Evans's first writing credit was on the 1984 film Starman with his partner Raynold Gideon, with whom he first worked on 1979's A Man, a Woman, and a Bank starring Donald Sutherland.
The pair were given story credit for the 1995 film Cutthroat Island after performing a rewrite of "a completely different version" of the script.
[6] They struggled to have their subsequent scripts produced as each demanded too high a budget for most studios, including what they regarded as a "great World War I love story", until they wrote the 2007 film Mr. Brooks, starring Kevin Costner as the title character.
Their original version was considered "too soft", and their revised story, which was deemed "too dark", was written instead as a film spec script.
[6][4] In a 2020 interview, Evans said that there was "ninety-nine percent not a chance" the sequels would be made, but discussed the storylines that had been planned for them.