‘The Kid Stays in the Picture’

Documentarians Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen profile Robert Evans.   [R]

By: Bob Brown

The life of Robert Evans (above) is the subject of a new documentary, The Kid Stays in the Picture.

   Robert Evans knows from his years as a Hollywood producer what makes a good story. You may have the best actors money can buy, but unless you’ve got a gripping story, all the gold in Fort Knox won’t help.
   Ironically, of all the pictures on Evans’s résumé — including Chinatown and Marathon Man — the one that’s not listed may be among his best. The Kid Stays in the Picture, adapted by documentarians Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen, is based on Evans’s autobiography. Burstein and Morgen are best known for On the Ropes (1999), a film about three aspiring Golden Gloves boxers, which has been compared favorably with Hoop Dreams.
   This film is more challenging. It follows the twisted trail of Evans’s accidental career in movies, from the moment actress Norma Shearer discovered him poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1956, to Evans’s rise and fall as an actor, and his rise, fall and resurrection as a producer.
   A good story deserves a good storyteller, and you couldn’t do better than the guy who lived it. Not only does Evans know the essence of storytelling, but his rich baritone voice and his talent at mimicry help bring to life the events and people who’ve made his heaven and hell for the past 45 years.
   There’s nothing about Evans’s boyhood here, but we do get a glimpse of his first job, partnering with his brother, Charles, in the women’s clothing company Evan-Picone. According to Evans, they were single-handedly responsible for the revolution of women wearing slacks. In his very first job, "I was getting into women’s pants," Evans drolly remarks.
   On assignment for Evan-Picone, Evans wound up in Hollywood, where his Valentino looks drew notice. He’s astonished at his good fortune, being discovered twice. Shearer picked him to play her husband, producer Irving Thalberg, in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), opposite James Cagney as Lon Chaney. Not only did Evans have the young Thalberg’s looks, but he shared the brash self-confidence, too.
   His second "discovery" was when producer Darryl F. Zanuck chose him for the role of handsome bullfighter Pedro Romero in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1957). But Hemingway raised a fuss — Evans had never seen a bull let alone fought one. The author circulated a letter demanding Evans’s dismissal. That steeled Evans’s determination to keep the part. He strode onto the plaza de toros set in his suit of lights with the swagger and dash of a born matador, prompting Zanuck to blurt out, "The kid stays in the picture!"
   The remark turned Evans’s career around. He didn’t want the crumbs left to a lowly actor. He wanted the fruits of those deciding who’s in the picture. He aspired to be a producer. His final role was as the psycho killer in The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958), a movie so truly awful it was banned in Finland in 1958, perhaps so sensible Finns wouldn’t die laughing.
   Evans cast aside acting and took up producing, despite his total inexperience. His life choices always begin with a blank résumé. The higher the mountain, the better. The peak he chose was Paramount Studios. As Evans tells it, Hollywood had eight great studios. Paramount was number nine. He began at the top of this lowermost studio, vowing to make Paramount what its name implied.
   Evans fell into the movies on good looks at a time when many ingenues hung around drugstores on Sunset Boulevard hoping to be discovered. But to survive in that world, to advance in it, one needed an outsize ego and bulldog determination.
   Evans also knew that here above all, one lives and dies by the press. He was great at drawing media but lousy at spinning it. There were battles with studio heads and directors, a divorce from his dream girl, Ali McGraw, women and more women, a drug bust, implication in a murder — the stuff of Hollywood tabloids and gossip columns.
   The film intercuts clips and photomontages of Evans, his friends and headlines, all voiced-over by Evans himself, spinning the yarn in a way that is at once amusing, self-deprecating, boastful, profane, rueful and engrossing. You’ve got to sympathize with a man who at one time or another proved everyone wrong, including himself, one who believed when others didn’t, who stumbled as often as he rose, but who has always loved the business he’s in, accidentally or not.
   It’s an engaging story, told expertly by a man whose business is stories. The filmmakers have matched the oral interest with visuals that enliven even news clippings and press photos in startling ways. If you want one insider’s Hollywood, don’t miss this. And stick around for the credits to see a rare, vintage clip of Dustin Hoffman doing an impromptu Evans imitation that’s to die for.
Rated R. Contains profanity and some brief violent and sexual images.