Film

True Hollywood Story

Robert Evans' Charmed Life

by Adam Hart

Robert Evans devoted the first two decades of his life to show business. After a stint as a moderately successful radio actor, he jumped into business with his wildly successful brother, a dressmaker. As young Evans sat wheeling and dealing over a poolside telephone in a Beverly Hills hotel, aging actress Norma Shearer spotted him and saw something in Evans that reminded her of her late husband, legendary independent producer Irving Thalberg. And in that moment, Robert Evans experienced something that starstruck teenagers wandering the streets of L.A. can only fantasize about: He was discovered.

The Kid Stays in the Picture is the kind of True Hollywood Story that E! network executives have filthy dreams about. The maverick producer extraordinaire started out the son of a Harlem dentist, and fought his way to the top of the Hollywood food chain as an actor (sort of), and then again as a producer, without ever really giving in to the soul-crushing Tinseltown system. His enchanted rise was followed by failed marriages with glamorous movie stars (Evans' notorious Don Juanism rivals that of Warren Beatty, his close friend and competitor in matters of the groin), and an abrupt downfall that included drug abuse and murder. You couldn't make this stuff up.

Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen's screen adaptation of Evans' autobiography is a thing of beauty. The story is so wonderfully trashy, packed with juicy insider gossip and behind-the-scenes accounts, that the focus and commentary brought to the film by the two visual magicians make for a movie that's absolutely mesmerizing. Burstein and Morgen temper the braggadocio cocksmanry that gives the source material a somewhat pathetic, self-serving feeling, and stick with what made the book such a treasured cult object among Hollywoodphiles. Most of all, the directors preserve Evans' overly feisty, straight-talk attitude: Evans narrates his own filmed biography (always off-screen--an unseen, overwhelming presence) with gusto and a biting, self-deprecating humor that's missing from the print version. It stays away from additional interviews, throws out Evans' nasty name-dropping habit, and gets to the core of his improbable success story.

From his days as a lousy pretty-boy actor to his shaky climb up Paramount's ladder--where he basically brought about New Hollywood (or at least made it possible)--and cocaine-laden fall from grace, Evans is the mutated, monstrous victim of all sorts of American dreams in all their cynical, sadistic splendor. This is trash that isn't afraid to be trash--trash at its most glorious and mythic. It's the kind of vicarious entertainment that stays with an audience because it's so damn smart. Inventive as hell, the documentary is a collage of old film and photographs; the unobtrusive visual play and pitch-perfect rhythm are what made me fall in love with this lucky bastard's cyclical success story.

Evans, thanks to the film, is now all over the New York Times and other high-profile publications. He's been making a bit of a comeback, although instead of producing classics like The Godfather (it was he who persuaded Coppola to transform it into an epic, the first and only account on record of a producer asking a director to make a film longer by an hour) and Chinatown (along with my own favorites, Harold and Maude and Don't Look Now), he's fighting his way back with bland crap like The Saint and The Out-of-Towners. And instead of re-- maining a notorious ladies' man, he's become another leathery old fart with nubile plastic beauties on each arm.

All the same, after years of wallowing in legal, personal, and professional hell, there is a bit of an up-note to end on--but it's tough not to squirm at the obligatory topple in these stories. Rooting for the underdog sucks me in. There's plenty of that, but Evans seems to enjoy the whole roller-coaster experience that has been his life, and that comes through onscreen. The desperate big-winner/big-loser philosophy might not always beat the house, but the game is still thrilling to play, or to watch, for that matter.