Hollywood kid

With Paramount celebrating its 90th anniversary this year it seems rather fitting that the mind-staggering personal and professional ups and downs of former chief of production Robert Evans is being splashed over theater screens in the form of a self-narrated, blatantly lop-sided, cocky, nonchalant, fascinating and juicily entertaining documentary. The Kid Stays in the Picture, adapted from Evans’ autobiography of the same title, escorts us into a meteoric and notorious crash-and-burn career that kept trade papers and gossip columns constantly buzzing during the creative and commercial convergence of the 1970s known as New Hollywood.

In his trademark gravelly voice, Evans blends anecdotes, struggles in the studio trenches, insider savvy, and glimpses of his womanizing and personal life into a sort of tabloid campfire story. Like all good campfire stories, the tales here are vivid and unencumbered by detractors as filmmakers Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein (On the Ropes) complement Evans’ candid prose with period pop music, film clips, archival behind-the-scenes footage, stills, home movies, and digitally enhanced collages.

“There are three sides,” says Evans, “to every story: my side, your side, and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each different.” Here the failed “pretty face” actor and field marshal of such diverse hits as Love Story and The Godfather tells his side with a relaxed passion for All Things Hollywood. He both feeds his legend and accepts responsibility for his downfall. He snipes at Francis Ford Coppola for initially gutting The Godfather from an epic into a “2-hour trailer.” He talks in detail about his marriage to Ali McGraw while the film ignores his many other wives. He ponders the decisions and compromises made to get a film in the can, barely mentions his association with mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, and waxes philosophically about life (“Luck is when opportunity meets preparation.”).

Evans is a master at both self-promotion and self-destruction who took risks, bluffed when opportune, and was driven by massive ego and insecurity. His expletive-peppered accounts of power plays (for example, Sinatra threatening to pull Mia Farrow from Rosemary’s Baby), rivalries, and backstabbing can be accepted or rejected for accuracy and his confessionals rebuked as hollow atonement, but they nonetheless seem to capture the essence, exhilaration and excesses of a time and place where inmates often appeared to be running the asylum and Evans’ success was alternately fanned and smothered by the press he sought so hard to manipulate.

The film begins in glamorous Tinsel Town fashion with a shot of red curtains that open onto a courtyard of Evans’ Beverly Hills mansion. The camera glides past a grotto-blue fountain and pool into his home, and into Evans’ amazing start in show business, which plays like a work of fiction. As he and his brother parlay a New York sportswear line into a million-dollar business (“I was in women’s pants,” he brags), he is “discovered” twice in six months (once poolside in 1959 Beverly Hills by an aging Norma Shearer and later at a New York dance club by Richard Zanuck) and given a role in two different films. After later playing the title killer in The Fiend Who Walked the West, Evans knows he won’t become the next Paul Newman so he targets producing as a career move, buys the rights to The Detective (which he took to Fox and later starred Sinatra) and is enthroned without experience at Paramount in a bizarre move that left tongues wagging and rumors flying.

Evans then helped propel the White Elephant studio back into contender status. While looking for “the fresh, the unexpected” among hundreds of scripts, he lured the ski-loving Roman Polanski to America with a fake carrot to direct Downhill Racer, convinced him to make 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby, and launched a career as studio and independent producer, which in turn was ruined by cocaine addiction and scandal.

Evans, once the subject of such magazine articles as “The Dangers of Being Too Good Looking,” a DEA drug sting and a murder investigation involving the making of Cotton Club in the 1980s, rehashed his career in a recent special edition of Variety with former NY Times reporter and Paramount VP Peter Bart. “I think it was a unique moment in the history of cinema,” says Bart about the 1970s. “Sure there were troubles, there were fights. But it was all about passion and not just about brands. So sure it was romanticized, but maybe it was worth romanticizing. The reason that everyone in this town loves The Kid Stays in the Picture is that it reminds them of that moment.” It’s a reason that some of us out-of-towners can hang our hats on, too.