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January 13, 2004
The Kid Stays in the Picture
Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen's documentary, The Kid Stays in the Picture, about legendary film producer Robert Evans, has been out on video and DVD for several months now, but I've been waiting for the right moment to see it. The documentary is based on Evans' autobiography and makes beautiful use of Evans' gruff storytelling style, with Evans himself narrating his story in voice-over (although Morgen takes a screenwriting credit).
The documentary itself is fascinating, primarily for the narratives about the Hollywood studio system that it invokes, especially the nostalgia for the turbulent "New Hollywood" of the late 1960s and 1970s--also seen in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders Raging Bulls and the Ted Demme/Independent Film Channel documentary A Decade Under the Influence (my review).
As Salon.com reviewer Stephanie Zacharek points out, the Evans documentary clearly plays fast and loose with the facts from the very beginning:
There are times when baloney tells a better story than fact ever could, and "The Kid Stays in the Picture," narrated by Evans himself, is one of them. Evans sells himself to us in exactly the same way you imagine he might have sold one of his hit pictures to the bigwigs at Paramount during his golden years.Unlike Zacharek, who suggests that "getting the absolute, undecorated truth would be too crushing," I don't read this technique of emphasizing Evans' breezy style psychologically. Instead, the approach seems to celebrate the very superficiality of the Hollywood studio system, taking pleasure in Evans' image as a charming, brash golden boy. In this sense, the film seems less about Evans, although his cult of personality dominates the film, and more about a nostalgia for what is increasingly considered to be the golden age of American cinema.
The film builds from the story of Evans' early career as a mediocre actor (Evans describes his acting as "half-assed") who was discovered poolside by Norma Shearer, who cast him in Man of a Thousand Faces and then starred in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises despite the objections of Hemingway and several of the film's stars, who all co-signed a telegram sent to Darryl Zanuck demanding that Evans be fired. According to Evans, the diminutive Zanuck stood up and decreed that "the kid stays in the picture." Evans reflects that he realized after Zanuck made the declaration that he no longer wanted to be an actor but wished to have the power to say "the kid stays in the picture." In short, the power of a studio chief.
The film then relates Evans' rise to power at Paramount, where he essentially saved the studio, in part by supporting some of the best and most profitable films of the 1960s and 70s, including Love Story, Chinatown, The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, and The Godfather. In fact, in one the documentary's key sequences, we see clips of a film (directed by Mike Nichols) in which Evans is pleading with Paramount--then in the midst of a major financial crisis--to keep its studios open long enough to make Love Story and The Godfather (the complete sales film is an extra on the DVD).
Evans' rise to power is punctuated by his purchase of a Bevery Hills mansion he had admired when he was younger, but his classic success story becomes marred by greed and self-destructive behavior, including his divorce from Ali McGraw (after her affair with Steve McQueen), a drug bust in the 1980s and a scandalous trial in which an investor in one of Evans' films was murdered. The decline associated with Evans' personal life seems connected--at least loosely--to a decline in the New Hollywood itself, which became associated with excess in the early 1980s. His final act (and the film's final act, leading to what might be called a "Hollywood ending") is his re-emergence as a player in the 1990s. He recently produced the financially successful film, The Saint, among others, and the film emphasizes his recent marriage (his fifth), while neatly ignoring several of his earlier marriages. The documentary suggests someone bigger than life, a Hollywood hero manufactured in part from his press clippings, from Hollywood gossip, and from his own stories. In a sense, The Kid Stays in the Picture is a film about surface, about the artifice itself. As Evans himself says in the film's epigraph:
There are three sides to every story: My side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.
Posted by chuck at January 13, 2004 4:05 PM
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