Before Robert Evans was discovered at a Hollywood swimming pool by the aging Norma Shearer, he was a garmento from New York with swarthy good looks and the confidence of a lion. Thrust into pictures in his twenties, Evans quickly became the head of production at Paramount, where he played a significant role in generating such classics as “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Godfather,” and “Chinatown.” In the seventies, Evans fell in with the high-rolling hipster élite, including Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, and became famous for both his gutsy, stand-by-the-talent decisions and his outsized appetites for beautiful women and cocaine. The movie is a celebratory narrative of Evans’s life, composed of newsreel footage, stills, and haunting shots of his mansion in various states of glory and disrepair. Evans himself narrates in his gravelly voice: his speech is a cross between hardboiled rhetoric and the traditional crass-but-with-heart bullying of Hollywood power types. He comes off as a preposterously likable man, though the movie is so one-sided that you never get the truth of any situation that it touches on. The team of Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein produced and directed, and the magazine editor Graydon Carter acted as a producer.
The Film File
The Kid Stays in the Picture
(directors: Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein; 2002)
by David Denby August 5, 2002
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