Review of The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002) by Sarah F — 13 Oct 2006

If anyone chronicled the actual events of Robert Evans' life and tried to pass them off as fiction, they'd be laughed out of town. Who could possibly believe that one man could be the focal point of so much drama? Who could possibly be so lucky? And so despondent? So admired, and yet so shunned? Only one man, friends -- the man who would single-handedly save a film empire with his grand vision and unerring business instincts, only to lose everything a decade later, before eventually making one of the greatest third-act career comebacks in history. Eat your heart out, Rocky Balboa.

Already a successful businessman by his late '20s, Robert Evans was "discovered" by a talent scout while sunbathing at a hotel swimming pool. Less than two hours later, Evans, who had never acted before, found himself auditioning opposite James Cagney for a role in the Lon Chaney bio-pic "The Man of a Thousand Faces." Getting the part on the basis of his natural charm and rugged good looks, Evans soon found other movie roles headed his way, including the title character in "The Matador," featuring Errol Flynn and Ava Gardner. But spurred on by even grander ambitions, the unwitting actor turned his back on his lucrative new career to concentrate on film production. In no time at all, he found himself the "boy genius" head of a struggling Paramount Pictures. Variety predicted he wouldn't last six months; instead, Evans worked there for decades, overseeing Paramount's glory years in the '70s, and personally shepherding many of their most successful projects to completion, including "Rosemary's Baby," "Love Story," "The Godfather," "Chinatown," and many more.

So where's the inevitable fall from grace? It's here, as perfectly scripted as any episode of VH1's "Behind the Music." We see the overconfident Evans succumb to a lifestyle of hard drugs, loose women, and poor business decisions, before finding himself tangentially linked to a high-profile murder case... more than enough to end any career, even one as charmed as our subject's. But it's hard to keep a good man down, friends... or at least a lucky one.

Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein's "The Kid Stays in the Picture" is based on Robert Evans' autobiography of the same name, a book I've read and enjoyed. But it's hard to condense one man's life into a few hundred pages, and harder still to squeeze it into a mere 87 minutes of screen time, and this is where the documentary suffers. The movie consists of a (usually) offscreen Evans reading passages of his autobiography over archival studio footage, still photos, and film clips. It's an interesting technique, helping to avoid the dreaded "talking head" syndrome all too common in the documentary medium.

But one never gets the feeling that we're hearing the whole story, at least not comfortably; the events whiz by with such rapidity that they're occasionally difficult to follow. Perhaps a Ken Burns "Civil War"-type epic could cover the full dramatic range of this remarkable life, but what we're given feels more like an outline than a final film. It's not a bad documentary, given its time constraints, but the book's pacing is far more satisfying, and I'd recommend it over the movie version.