The Kid Stays in the Picture

Movie producer Robert Evans died earlier this month in his palatial Beverly Hills home of as-yet-undisclosed causes. Given the life Evans led, the fact that he made it to age 89 is remarkable. You may not be familiar with his name, but it’s a guarantee you have heard of, seen, and love some of the films that he was responsible for producing in his half-century Hollywood career. His filmography is practically a who’s-who of 1970s New Hollywood filmmaking. As a producer and Paramount Studio executive, Evans was a driving force behind the creation of Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, The Italian Job, True Grit, Love Story, Harold and Maude, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, Serpico, The Conversation, Chinatown, and The Great Gatsby. He had a successful run that is practically unparalleled in Hollywood history. While he hasn’t produced a picture since 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, his influence as a producer and as a Hollywood icon will last well beyond his death.

If you’d like to learn more about Evans and you’d like to hear it from the man himself, I highly recommend the 2002 documentary, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Directed by Nanette Burstein and Bret Morgen, it’s an adaptation of Evan’s autobiography of the same name. Using a combination of rarely seen personal photos and vintage footage, Evans narrates the entire film in his unmistakable voice that sounds as though it is made of whiskey and fine Corinthian leather. He recounts how he was already a successful business executive running a women’s clothing line with his brother in New York when he was discovered while on vacation in Los Angeles. None other than the great Gloria Swanson saw him swimming at a Beverly Hills pool and immediately asked him to play her deceased husband, super-producer Irving Thalberg, in the upcoming production of The Man with a Thousand Faces. Completely unrelated, later that same year, while at a nightclub in New York, Evans was approached by another super producer, Daryl Zanuck, about playing the matador in the film adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. 

Evans’ acting career stalled pretty quickly because, as he points out, he wasn’t very good. But he loved Hollywood and particularly appreciated how producers had the power to make things happen. So he decided that’s what he wanted to do. The beginning of his acting career was unlikely and lucky to be sure, but no one could have predicted that within eight years of starting as a producer, Evans would be named the head of Paramount Pictures. To go from semi-talented pretty boy actor to the head of a major studio in a decade was unheard of, and no one savored it like Evans. While at Paramount, he made strong, original scripts a priority beginning with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and that began his long winning streak that saved the then-sagging Paramount from certain destruction. 

There are plenty of other juicy stories in The Kid Stays in the Picture, including details about how his wife, Ali McGraw, left him for Steve McQueen, and how he was implicated in a murder and arrested for cocaine trafficking. All of the stories have the polish of having been told and retold and perfected by Evans himself for maximum dramatic impact and making him look awesome. It’s clear in this movie about Evans that he has always been the star of his own show. Listening to him narrate his own curated story is a little like listening to your slightly inebriated uncle if your uncle had married models and produced industry-altering films like The Godfather. He’s pompous, dramatic, casually racist at times, and self-aggrandizing, but he is never boring. The Kid Stays in the Picture isn’t a clear-eyed, warts-and-all historical document so much as it is the embodiment of the man himself. Nothing and no one pays tribute to Robert Evans more than Robert Evans.