[Robert Evans, if you're not a movie buff, is the (self-proclaimed) legendary producer who brought to the screen movies like Chinatown, Marathon Man, The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, and Love Story. (The title of the film and Evans' autobiography comes from his probably apocryphal story about one of his first acting jobs, a matador in The Sun Also Rises -- the other actors and the director hated him and demanded that he be fired, so he practiced his bullfighting and demonstrated it in front of the cast and crew, and producer Darryl Zanuck roared, "The kid stays in the picture!") He was famous for his overweening ego, carousing, drug use, and the "Cotton Club scandal," where a drug dealer who had invested in the film was found dead, and although Evans was never a suspect, he found himself inextricably drawn into the case for his glancing association with the deceased, ruining his reputation and making him persona non grata in Hollywood for at least a decade.]
Evans certainly has a distinctive voice, and sometimes his peculiar mannerisms are funny and sometimes they're just irritating. Does he ask a lot of questions and answer them himself? You bet your ass he does. He tosses off aphorisms left and right (though someone really should tell him "euphemism" isn't a synonym for "aphorism"). He spouts blustering B-movie dialogue as if he thinks it makes him sound tough -- "I'm just seven digits away, baby" -- women are "dames," and you bet your ass he knows how to deal with them. And he's not what you would call politically correct -- in fact, the way he flaunts his anachronistic chauvinism, you come to suspect he does it at least partly for shock value -- there are the "Jews who control Hollywood"; he barks at Francis Ford Coppola, who he claims to have hired for The Godfather only because he was one of the few Italian directors around, "Where'd you leave the emotion of the film, back in the kitchen with your spaghetti?" Roman Polanski is "the Polack." And then there's the whole "dame" thing.
Evans has the promotion skills of a carny barker, and what's he's promoting is Robert Evans. He's canny; he slips a well-timed self-disparaging remark even now and then, right about when you're starting to think, "Yeah, right." But I found myself questioning most of his assertions, like that without him, not only wouldn't The Godfather and Love Story have been made, but the books they were based on wouldn't have been best-sellers without his guidance. His claims about his input into The Godfather have been disputed by Coppola; indeed, hearing his insensitive braggadocio, one has trouble believing he ordered Coppola to put more emotion and heart into the movie.
A lot of the movie is funny, probably unintentionally so, like when Evans says in reference to the Cotton Club scandal that earlier in the decade, he had brought the studio Urban Cowboy and Popeye, and now all he brought to them was embarrassment. I thought, Popeye isn't an embarrassment?
I doubt anyone who's not a movie buff will be able to sit through this movie, but if you are interested in film, The Kid Stays in the Picture is a fascinating (if sometimes grating) account of a seminal personality in American cinema. Even I found it overstaying its welcome after a while; his arrogance and self-absorption get old. The natural comparison is to The Eyes of Tammy Faye, also a flattering portrait told from the viewpoint of its subject, but I enjoyed Tammy Faye a lot more (it had sock puppets!).
Back to homepage
Reviews A to F
Reviews G to L
Reviews M to R
Reviews S to Z
Search