Few biographies illustrate the fleeting nature of success in Hollywood as the one of producer Robert Evans. Once the toast of the American film industry, a powerful executive of Paramount Studios, and a key figure of the New Hollywood movement, Evans nearly ruined himself with a series of terrible personal and business decisions in the 1980s. These included massive flops, a cocaine smuggling arrest, and indirect involvement in a murder. Evans tried to rehabilitate his image with the best-selling 1994 autobiographical book The Kid Stays in the Picture, which serves as the basis for the eponymous 2002 documentary film directed by Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgan.
The film's approach towards Evans' life story is simple and unimaginative, but effective. Evans himself provides the narration through a recorded audio edition of his book. His life is presented in chronological order, illustrated through photographs, some documentary footage, and inserts of films in which he was involved. The story begins when Evans is, by accident, discovered by Norma Shearer and cast as her late husband, legendary Classic Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg, in the 1957 biopic The Man with a Thousand Faces. It then continues with his brief acting career, which convinced the young Evans that he should try his hand as a producer. In 1967, Evans became a Paramount executive and, by greenlighting and promoting a number of grand classics and big hits, he did for the New Hollywood what Thalberg had done for the Classic Hollywood. One of those hits was Love Story, which starred his glamorous wife, Ali McGraw. However, the collapse of that marriage, due to McGraw's affair with Steve McQueen, began Evans' downfall, which would culminate in problems with drugs, mental health, and criminal charges.
The film is well-done, relatively informative, and mildly entertaining, but it ultimately doesn't tell anything that most hardcore cinephiles didn't already know about the 1970s or 1980s Hollywood, or that has been covered in other, more critical documentaries. Evans, although at times showing great candor in admitting some of his mistakes, isn't exactly objective, and his feature-length documentary sometimes, due to time constraints, leaves many details of his life out, including his other marriages.
Despite its limitations, The Kid Stays in the Picture nevertheless deserves a recommendation as a valuable screen document and an opportunity to see a grand chapter of Hollywood history through the perspective of one of its most important participants.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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