A Compelling Lie: The Kid Stays in the Picture

Here’s a question for you: What does a producer do? I’d be willing to bet you don’t have a rock-solid answer. Depending on your familiarity with the ins and outs of film, you might say anything from “produces?” to “manages budgets and timelines” to even “is friends with the writer/director.” Even for people within the film industry, it’s a nebulous job. Even the quote unquote “best” producers don’t necessarily have their work lauded so much as they have the movies they’re associated with praised. Even if it is cinephile inside baseball, the exact nature of producing is a little-known topic that would make for a fascinating documentary.

The Kid Stays in the Picture, a documentary about producer Robert Evans (Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, The Godfather), is definitely not that project. But it has its charms nonetheless. The film begins with a clichéd idiom: “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.” This quote is attributed to Robert Evans, which is almost certainly a lie. Or, to use “his” language, most certainly not the truth. This documentary is entirely Evans’ story. Based on his own autobiography and narrated entirely by Evans himself, it’s about as far from enlightening about what a producer does, or even what Evans himself did, as possible.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, to be fair. There’s plenty of resources available to learn about the changing norms of Hollywood from the 1950s-1990s without this documentary needing to serve as an objective and reliable resource. Evans is a good storyteller in the same way that an interesting stranger at a bar is—they’re probably full of shit and aren’t willing to expand on those obvious moments where they skip over a part in the story that might make them look bad, but maybe you’ll find it compelling enough to let it play out.

Evans believes his own bullshit—besides the quote that opens the film, he says that he and his brother created the fashion movement of women wearing pants; that “Next to winning the Olympics, there isn’t a more difficult thing than a pretty boy actor transforming into producer;" that he was so utterly magnetic as bullfighter Pedro Romero in the film adaptation of The Sun Also Rises that director Henry King declared (against the wishes of Ernest Hemingway and Ava Gardner) “the kid stays in the picture.”

That line, according to Evans, solidified his dream of being a producer. (Why, specifically, he wants to be a producer rather than a director is never expanded on.) He also at turns decries his acting skills as barely passable while emphasizing how much Lon Chaney and Nancy Shearer praised his quasi-debut in Man of a Thousand Faces. It’s very much in the vein of an old gym teacher telling his students that he “could have gone pro in football if it weren’t for my shoulder.”

To be fair, Evans did really become a wunderkind, rising to the top of a then-nascent Paramount Pictures in his 20s and eventually producing some of the most well-regarded films of the 20th century. The how of all of this, and the specific what that he did, is left vague all throughout. He mentions work as the reason behind his divorce and how little he saw his son, but only says that he worked 24 hours a day, eight days a week.

Regarding Rosemary’s Baby, he says he convinced star Mia Farrow to risk her marriage to Frank Sinatra to finish the film by appealing to her ego. As for The Godfather, he says that an early test screening for the film was disastrous because Coppola turned in “a trailer, not an epic” and convinced the director to make it longer. I am, to put it charitably, dubious that a producer had to tell a director like Francis Ford Coppola to make something longer instead of shorter.

Regardless of The Kid’s veracity, the visual style of the film does a lot with a little. Evans’ voice is the only one we hear (although we do hear his impressions of some of the major players in his stories), and, despite the visuals being limited to old pictures, stock images, news reels, and the occasional movie clip, the camera pans across the photos dramatically. Sometimes these photos have been altered in garish ways and color-corrected, which serves to make a relatively restrained visual language feel sufficiently cinematic.

One interesting choice, during a section in Evans’ narrative in which he commits himself to a mental asylum before escaping, showcases quick cuts of clips from Marathon Man, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Chinatown, and more to implicitly connect Evans’ life to the movies he had a hand in making.

Letting Evans dictate the pace and focus has its advantages, but some obvious drawbacks pop up when he’s simply uninterested in providing context or concluding an anecdote that might make him look bad. When discussing Rosemary’s Baby, he proudly mentions that he convinced Henry Kissinger, “the most charming statesperson in the world,” to attend the premiere a day before Kissinger had to go “on a secret mission to Moscow.” Granted, it’s not necessarily the movie’s fault that I don’t have the historical context to know why Kissinger would be such a big get at a film premiere (I only know the man from his war crimes), but it does reveal the fatal flaw in making a documentary wholly driven by one man’s whims.

In another section, Evans notes that a collaboration with Coppola on The Cotton Club led to an acrimonious court battle so public that both men are featured on the news. How that court battle, or the movie itself, turned out, Evans implicitly leaves you to discover on your own.

These gaps of context are, ultimately, part of the form when it comes to creating a film like this. It would require other perspectives to balance the focus of the anecdotes, and that would make this fundamentally a different project. Whatever self-reckoning Evans wants to admit publicly is on the screen, any secrets or shames he holds close, he leaves to the viewers to find elsewhere.

This is not an informative documentary, but it is an illuminating one—of a time in Hollywood, of American mythmaking, of a man whose actual work is eclipsed by his name being attached to the works of some of the 20th century’s greatest filmmakers. Whether that’s enough for a viewer is ultimately more dependent on the watcher than the storyteller.

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