The Kid Stays in the Picture

Released 2002
Stars Robert Evans
Directed by Nanette Burstein, Brett Morgen

"If you could change one thing about your life," someone in the audience asked Robert Evans, "what would it be?" "The second half," he said. Everyone in the Sundance Film Festival audience knew what he meant. We had just seen "The Kid Stays in the Picture," a new documentary about the life of this producer who put together one of the most remarkable winning streaks in Hollywood history, and followed it with a losing streak that almost destroyed him. It's one of the most honest films ever made about Hollywood; maybe a documentary was needed, since fiction somehow always simplifies things.

Evans made the kinds of movies that would never have played at Sundance; it's poetic justice that he finally got into the festival with a documentary. As the boy wonder head of production at Paramount, he took the studio from last to first in annual ticket sales, dominating the late 1960s and '70s with "The Godfather," "Chinatown," "Love Story," "Rosemary's Baby," "The Odd Couple," "Black Sunday" and "Urban Cowboy." And he married Ali MacGraw, his star in "Love Story."

Then everything that had gone right started to go wrong. MacGraw left him for Steve McQueen. Evans had exited the studio job with a lucrative personal production deal when disaster struck. He was involved in a cocaine-purchasing sting set up by the DEA, rehabilitated himself with a series of public-service broadcasts, tried a comeback by producing a high-visibility flop ("The Cotton Club") and then was linked by innuendo and gossip with the murder of a man obscurely involved in the film's financing.

Summary by Roger Ebert

I had never heard of Robert Evans until I started watching the hilarious, animated series "Kid Notorious" on Comedy Central, where the real Robert Evans parodies himself. The character's personality is pretty much his own, though. He's unflappable and eternally optimistic without being cheery, and he oozes coolness. Evans' openness in this movie caught me off-guard, because his book (and this movie) aren't just excuses for him to brag about his great successes. He also discusses his failures, but not in a self-effacing manner. It's more of a matter-of-fact approach, and I could feel the regret in his voice and his choice of words. Hollywood people aren't known for expressing genuine emotion, but I felt he laid it on the line here. I was taken aback by his feelings about losing his first wife, Ali MacGraw, to Steve McQueen, and then he pulled no punches about his fall to his deepest depths of despair. His is a fascinating story of Hollywood, hubris, and humility. --Bill Alward, December 7, 2003