At age 72, the kid is back in the picture.
Legendary studio head and film producer Robert Evans–the maverick who greenlit and nutured many of the most critically lauded films of late 1960s and early 1970s, including Rosemary’s Baby, The Odd Couple, Chinatown, Harold and Maude and the first two Godfather films–had it all, nearly lost it all, and is now taking Hollywood by storm once again, but not as an unseen impresario behind the latest hot film.
No, this time Evans stars in his own life story, a documentary called The Kid Stays in the Picture. Visualized by Academy Award-nominated filmmakers Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein (the acclaimed inner-city boxing documentary On the Ropes) and narrated by Evans himself, The Kid Stays In the Picture is wowing audiences.
Many movie lovers today don’t remember that the flamboyant Evans began his Hollywood career as a successful fashion entrepreneur/wanna-be actor, plucked from obscurity when he was spotted poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel by actress Norma Shearer and immediately tapped to play her late husband, studio head Irving Thalberg, in the 1957 film Man of a Thousand Faces.
Indeed, the movie’s title, borrowed from Evans’ best-selling 1994 biography, refers to a critical moment in his career in 1957 when studio head Darryl F Zanuck, summoned to Spain after Ernest Hemmingway and Ava Gardner objected to Evans’s casting in only his third film, The Sun Also Rises, watched his first take and made a portentous decree: “The kid stays in the picture.”
And stay in the picture he did, but not as much on-screen as off. He left acting after 1960 to start a successful producing career, and at only 34 was named chief of production at then-foundering Paramount Pictures where he presided over a still-unprecedented string of commercial and critical successes. Then, going solo in the 1980s, Evans’ skyrocketing career imploded amid drug charges, financial miscalculations and proximity (now proven inconsequential) to a notorious murder related to his disastrous film The Cotton Club.
Now, after making more headlines with a less-than-successful producing run in the ’90s (The Saint, The Phantom, The Out-of-Towners), an ill-fated, 10-day marriage (his fifth) to much-younger actress Catherine Oxenberg and a debilitating stroke, Evans finds himself once again the toast of Tinseltown. He has become what the Industry crowd loves best–a survivor who’s lived to tell his tales, and tells them deliciously well.
“Let me tell you this: it’s a lot easier to watch it than to live it,” says Evans from his lounge chair in a suite at Century City’s St. Regis hotel, looking as tan and relaxed as ever and dressed in a cream-colored suit that while absolutely modern has the distinct air of a 1970s movieland exec about it.
In one breath he regales you with a yarn about how he escaped from a self-imposed, one day stay in a mental institution back in the ’80s: “Once you go in you stay in. My blood pressure went up to 200, they took everything away from me and the first doctor I see, he never met me before, wants to give me electric shock. It was a very harrowing experience, and I must say I orchestrated [the escape] better than Jesse James could have done it.” Another breath recalls a vicious threat from the 1970s: “I got a call and [was told} if I kept The Godfather in New York, they’d kill my son. He was just born. That ain’t no fun…They didn’t want the picture shot in New York.”
It was those memories, those life experiences, those shocking interludes that fueled his desire to put his life on paper, if only so his son Josh (by actress Ali McGraw) could understand how and why his father flew so high and fell so far. “I wrote [the book] to let my son know who I was, because he went through hell with me between 1980 and 1990…He saw his father go from a king to David Janssen [in The Fugitive]–a man on the run, almost.”
Not only was Evans’ book a major hit, the book-on-tape edition became quite a cult item, passed gleefully among those with a fascination with his Hollywood lifestyle and those who actually had lived it with him–people like director Roman Polanski: “He called me from France,” said Evans, slipping into a frantic imitation of the Chinatown director. “‘Bob, Bob–I just crashed my Mercedes! The car’s ruined!’ I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He says, ‘I was listening to your f—ing audio and I was laughing so hard I crashed into a tree on the Champs Elysee!'”
Co-director Morgen, a thirtyish Southern Californian turned New Yorker, immediately connected with the book’s neo-hipster appeal. “Listening to his book on tape was such an extraordinary experience we wanted to find the filmic equivalent,” he says.
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“Knowing that we were going to have to tell the film predominantly through stills, we said to ourselves, “There’s got to be a way in which we can present still photography in three dimensions, to make it come to life, to make it as fanciful as the man himself.”
Morgen and his partner Burstein learned that Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter had the rights to Evans‘s life story, so the three teamed up to produce a docufilm in which still photos come inventively to life: figures in the foreground pop out from the background, smoke wafts up from cigarettes, and images whiz by as the soundtrack plays. All is filtered through Evans’ intimate, occasionally kitschy, compelling narrative.
“There’s something kind of hallucinogenic about Bob’s life, and we wanted the visuals to be almost like taking an acid trip: ‘Did it really happen like that?'” Burstein says.
“It needs to be a roller-coaster ride for the audience, because that’s what his life was, and still is to this day,” Morgen adds. “If we were doing a film about Henry Ford, we would not have used 3-D animation. But Bob Evans is a man whose whole life has been about creating imagery, and using images to seduce, which is the essence of filmmaking.”
Morgen and Burstein are convinced that The Kid Stays In the Picture is the kind of film that Evans was making in his heyday, one that defies today’s marketing-driven Hollywood corporate creedo. Says Evans himself, “I never star-f—ed, I always writer-f—ed. Writers are my stars, because if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t gonna be on the screen.”
At first, their subject–who had suffered a stroke since recording the audio version–wasn’t exactly willing. “When we met him, he was in the first stages of recovery and rehabilitation,” said Morgen. “Bob said, ‘I only want you to use the stuff from the book on tape, because I’m not the man I was when I recorded it; you’re not going to get the same performance out of me. I don’t have the same sort of bravado that I had at the time.’ And we said to him, ‘Bob, you’re going to have to record voiceover. It’s not a question–We can’t be slaves to whatever exists on the book on tape.'”
Cajoling Evans went down to the wire, all the way to the film’s first planned showing at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. “We literally did not record his final voiceover until the week before,” Burstein affirms, sounding as if she almost can’t believe it herself
“The only reason I did it was because I needed the money for the rights, to pay bills,” admits Evans, who has famously clashed with other filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola. “The first cut I saw, I said I will not continue doing it, and the second cut I saw I said the same thing. I was very difficult to work with.”
The directors, while clearly having developed a deep affection for Evans, don’t sugarcoat their travails, delighting in one-upping each other with war stories. Morgen: “You know the line in the movie where he’s talking about Rosemary’s Baby and he says, ‘If everyone gets along, the work must be mediocre?'” Burstein: “He lives by that.” Morgen: “Our film must be a masterpiece then, because every single word became a battle.” Burstein: “We spent five hours trying to record one line.”
But as Evans saw how the celluloid vision of his life was taking shape, he recognized that something magical was happening. “The directors had an impossible job, to take audio and turn it into a film,” Evans said. “They worked for two and a half years getting archival footage that was impossible to get. It was their imagination and how they told the story that made it work.”
Still, the producer’s jitters continued, all the way up to opening night: “When I went to Sundance I was so worried about it,” he whispers. “I said, I’m not a Sundance guy, they don’t know me up there and they’ll resent me. Because I’m Mr. Hollywood…who lives lushly and everything. These people, the kids who are there, I’m the opposite of who they are…I was really scared, and when it was over–it was the first time this ever happened to me in my life–I got a standing ovation. I cried. Maybe it was the most thrilling moment of my life.”
More thrilling than being nominated for an Oscar for Chinatown in 1975? Evans shrugs. “It was my life.”
Asked if he thought the film version of The Kid… signals the beginning of a glorious third act for his four-decade Hollywood career, he replies, “It’s already started, yeah, and I’m gonna make it the best. There’s a saying: the lower the second act ending, the more magical the third act can be, and it’s magical.”
