Fractured Mirror 2.0 #3 The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)
On July 31st, 2019, a press that had been both Robert Evans’ best friend and his worst enemy, the secret to his success and the scourge of his existence, reported that Paramount was ending their famously rocky 45 year relationship with the author of The Kid Stays in the Picture and producer of such films as The Marathon Man and Chinatown, as well as a man who reigned as the King of Paramount during its late 1960s/early 1970s New Hollywood heyday.
Less than three months later, on October 26th, Evans died. Evans was an old lion of Hollywood at that point, an 89-year-old man whose health and career never quite recovered from a stroke he suffered decades earlier. In hindsight it’s remarkable that a legendary hedonist like Evans nearly made it to ninety.
It would undoubtedly be an exaggeration to say that losing his deal with Paramount killed Robert Evans considering his advanced age and faltering health but considering the central place Paramount, or “The Mountain” as he lovingly referred to it, played in Evans’ mythology, life and career, there’s undoubtedly an element of truth to it as well.
In Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen’s wonderful 2002 documentary adaptation of Evans’ 1994 autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture, the lady pants mogul turned actor turned studio executive turned independent producer turned raconteur, author and audio-book king spends an interminable decade in the wilderness of infamy and failure, notoriety and disgrace before he climactically wins back his dignity along with his two homes: Woodland, his personal haven, and his professional home at Paramount.
Evans’ life was a wild melodrama where the personal and the professional were inextricably intertwined; why should his death be any different?
Evans was a fascinating contradiction: an irresistible, seductive figure of Old School Hollywood glamour in a time or rebellion, anger and unrest, a Republican who idolized Henry Kissinger as a sexy rock star of politics at a time when revolutionary fervor was at an all-time high in Hollywood and outside of it.
Evans worked extensively as a voice actor on the radio as a teenager but it was his gorgeous face and not his mellifluous purr of a voice that won him his big break. In one of the many seemingly too-good-to-be-true stories that individually and collectively make up his legend, Evans was spotted by no less a Hollywood luminary than Norma Shearer at a pool in Hollywood.
The actress was so taken with Evans’ good looks that she insisted that he play the plum role of her late husband Irving Thalberg in Man of a Thousand Faces, a hilariously histrionic biography of Lon Chaney starring James Cagney as the famous chameleon. Evans’ time as a movie star was short-lived but characteristically eventful.
Man of a Thousand Faces was followed by the star-studded 1957 Ernest Hemingway adaptation The Sun Also Rises, which is notable primarily for inspiring the title of The Kid Stays in the Picture. Evans was reportedly on the brink of being fired from his hotshot role as fiery bullfighter Pedro Romero but Evans seized victory from agonizing defeat when he put on such a show as an actor and pretend-bullfighter than Daryl Zanuck responded to the film’s entire cast (with the notable exception of Errol Flynn, who perhaps saw some of himself in the insatiable womanizer) angrily demanding Evans’ firing by growling what would become the title of both Evans’ autobiography and its feature film adaptation.
If Shearer and Zanuck’s perhaps delusional belief in the young actor made his career, getting cast as a twitchy killer in the Kiss of Death Western remake The Fiend Who Walked the West killed it.
Evans had a bright future in the motion picture business but not in front of the camera. Evans’ acquired the rights to a novel called The Detective that inspired hustling young journalist Peter Bart to write a flattering article about the sexy Hollywood player with the bedroom eyes, smoky voice and canny instincts for what moviegoers wanted to see.
The glowing article about Evans attracted the attention of a blustery German mogul named Charles Bludhorn, who had recently bought Paramount. Bludhorn hired Evans to run the struggling studio, with Bart as his right-hand man.
From there, The Kid Stays in the Picture leaps deliriously from high to high, or rather, given the nature of its subject’s life and career, from dizzy high to crushing, incapacitating low. Evans lived his life in screaming tabloid headlines.
Evans is very nearly fired by the deeply skeptical board of Paramount until he pulls it all together by filming a short film about the studio’s rosy future and two literary adaptations he’s particularly excited about, a tearjerking romance about a beautiful, terminally ill girl named Love Story and a Mafia epic unlike any other from author Mario Puzo and hotshot auteur Francis Ford Coppola that single-handedly saves Evans’ career as an executive!
Evans wins the most beautiful and desired woman in all of Hollywood, his Love Story breakout star Ali McGraw! Evans then LOSES the most beautiful and desired woman in all of Hollywood to the most handsome and desired MAN in all of Hollywood, Steve McQueen, when he makes the mistake of insisting that she fly to Texas to film The Getaway with the motorcycle-riding icon of rugged masculinity.
Evans leaves the executive suite at Paramount to become a producer cranking out a slew of iconic smashes, zeitgeist-capturing hits like Chinatown, The Marathon Man and Urban Cowboy until lightning strikes — bad lightning — and he makes the mistake of reuniting with Francis Ford Coppola for The Cotton Club, a passion project with all the promise and potential in the world that ends up nearly being Evans’ doom in myriad ways!
First, there is the staggering and complete critical and commercial failure of the film itself, which is, indeed, like The Godfather with music, only bad and boring, but in terms of the havoc it plays on Evans’ psyche, career and reputation, the film’s under-performance pales in comparison to what will become known as “The Cotton Club murders” after Evans is connected, however loosely, to the murder of a wannabe producer named Roy Radin!
Evans dallies with the white lady known as cocaine and ends up getting convicted for trafficking charges when a plan to buy pharmaceutical grade blow goes predictably awry. But the mogul finds professional AND personal redemption when he is ordered to produce a star-studded anti-drug TV special called Get High on Yourself that he claims, “became known as the Woodstock of the 80s.”
It seems safe to assume that the only place Get High on Yourself was known as “the Woodstock of the 80s” was in Evans’ mind and the various iterations of The Kid Stays in the Picture. For starters, Woodstock was all about being on drugs; Get High on Yourself was all about trying to get people off drugs.
Throughout The Kid Stays in the Picture its alternately blessed and cursed subject is on the ropes, convinced there’s no way he’ll be able to finagle his way out of some impossible position. Yet he always comes roaring back through some combination of will, luck and the intervention of famous and powerful friends like legendary fixer and powerbroker Sidney Korshak, close pal and guardian angel Jack Nicholson, and Stanley Jaffe, who earns Evans’ eternal gratitude by ending a long, unhappy stint in a personal and professional wilderness by inviting him back to Paramount.
Directors Burstein and Morgen know what an incredible gift they have in Evans’s voice, in both a literal and literary sense. They eschew talking heads almost entirely so that their subject’s glorious, seductive voice can dominate the proceedings the same way Evans dominated a room during his 70s prime.
The contemporary Evans is glimpsed only briefly in The Kid Stays in the Picture, in silhouette and shadow, the living ghost of the man as much as the man himself. Instead the filmmakers get lost in pictures of Evans at the height of his extraordinary beauty and charm, the producer as gorgeous and charismatic as any of the stars he worked with, if not more so.
Burstein and Morgen, working with ace cinematographer John Bailey (Ordinary People, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Groundhog Day) give still images a sense of momentum and kinetic forward movement; for a movie that consists almost entirely of one man talking over images of the past that come alive through movie magic, The Kid Stays in the Picture feels shockingly cinematic rather than excessively talky.
The Kid Stays in the Picture affords us the opportunity to spend ninety-three marvelous minutes inside the mind, imagination and memories of one of Hollywood’s all-time great raconteurs and personalities, with a Prince of Hollywood whose personal brand combined vulgarity and sincerity in ways that are easy to imitate but impossible to reproduce.
Evans was one of a kind. There will never be another like him and even though he’s gone he lives on forever through his films and his story, including the enduring, eminently re-watchable documentary masterpiece Evans made out of the best damn story he ever encountered: his own.
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