One of the silliest things F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote was that "There are no second acts in American lives". He's been proven wrong on that time and time again. Robert Evans is a man who's probably on his fourth or fifth act.
Evans is the subject of The Kid Stays In The Picture, a terrific documentary released to theaters last year, which is currently making the rounds on the cable movie channels and will be released on DVD on August 19th. The film is built on the book-on-tape reading that Evans made of his mid-1990s autobiography, which highlights his meteoric-and totally improbable-career, which led from him being a 27-year old actor playing Irving Thalberg, to running Paramount in the late 1960s through the mid-70s.
In it, Evans alternates impersonations of the many celebrities and media titans who have gone in and out of his life, with a Raymond Chandler-esque tone full of dated linguistic clichés, rhetorical questions, and pure bravado. In a town full of characters, Evans may be the pinnacle. But like Muhammad Ali and his bravado, Evans has the career to back them up. He helped turn Paramount and invent the New Hollywood of the 1970s along the way, by hiring Peter Bart of the New York Times as his assistant, and green-lighting such films as Rosemary's Baby, Medium Cool, and The Godfather. Later, as an independent producer, he assembled the team that made Chinatown, one of the great films of the 1970s, and Marathon Man, with its classic paring of Dustin Hoffman and Olivier. Improbably, despite a nasty cocaine addiction in the late 1970s, and the disastrous Cotton Club (which also lead to a murder rap against Evans, which he beat), Evans is still producing today. This is one kid who really did stay in the picture!
Of his impersonations, Evans recreates the conversations he's had with Charles Bludhorn of Gulf & Western, who gave him his start; Ali MacGraw, who married him, only to dump him for Steve McQueen; Francis Ford Coppola, whom Evans hired to direct the Godfather, largely because there were no other Italian directors working in Hollywood at the time; and Henry Kissinger, whom Evans convinced to attend the premiere of the Godfather on the night he was supposed to fly to a meeting in the Soviet Union to negotiate ending the Vietnam the war. (The tables are turned on Evans in the closing credits-but I won't reveal who does the spot-on parody of him.)
Article comments
1 - Captain Spaulding
My assistant tells me I got an email from an Ed Driscoll saying that he quoted me in his blogcritics review. I said "You tell Driscoll that if he wants trouble, well, pal, he's just grabbed the brass ring of trouble."
For the record, I now own the audio version of the book. I wouldn't turn down the DVD though.
And not to toot my horn but here's my version of the Evans-Kissinger story:
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