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The Kid Stays in the Picture
New doc techniques help bring the legend of Robert Evans to life in Morgen and Burstein's The Kid Stays in the Picture
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The life of Robert Evans is capable of making even the most ardent overachiever feel positively barren and unproductive in comparison. Best known for his 1966 to 1974 tenure as Paramount Pictures’ head of production—a position he took at the age of 34 with no prior producing credits to his name—Evans’ contribution to the “New Hollywood” movement of the era cannot be overstated. During this period, Evans was responsible for bringing such landmark films as Rosemary’s Baby, The Conformist, Harold and Maude, The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, Serpico, Don’t Look Now and The Parallax View to the screen. Combined with the successes of hits like Love Story, The Odd Couple and Death Wish, he took the studio from the bottom rung of the Hollywood ladder to the number one position.
Yet Evans is almost as famous for the company he kept (friends include Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Henry Kissinger; romantic relationships with Ali MacGraw, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Lana Turner, Cheryl Tiegs and Raquel Welch) and the circumstances surrounding his employment at Paramount.
A former child actor, Evans was co-managing the lucrative Evan Picone clothing firm when, in 1956, he was spotted poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Norma Shearer, who selected him to play her late husband, movie mogul Irving Thalberg, in Man of a Thousand Faces. Evans must have liked the role, for he soon opted to play it in real life. Late in his Paramount tenure, Evans would indeed produce films himself, including such hits as Chinatown and Marathon Man, but in the ’80s, his charmed life was shattered by a cocaine bust, dismissal from Paramount and rumored (though ultimately disproved) involvement in The Cotton Club murder scandal.
Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein bring the life of Robert Evans to the screen in The Kid Stays in the Picture. |
After a period of near-obscurity, Evans returned to the public eye in 1994 with the publication of his autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture, a vividly flamboyant chronicle of his loves and losses which acquired instant cult status (even more so when published several years later as an audio book, recited by Evans himself in his inimitable, seductive style). His memoirs have now been adapted into a new documentary film of the same name—a giddy and almost sinfully engrossing real-life Hollywood melodrama that unwinds like addictive non-fiction cinematic candy. While moviemakers Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein have articulated their desire to make documentaries which primarily entertain, The Kid is still a sizeable stylistic leap from their previous feature, the gritty, Oscar-nominated boxing study On the Ropes. Morgen and Burstein have constructed The Kid as a rapid-fire visual funhouse of lush archival footage, eye-catching three-dimensional graphic effects and baroque, sensuous Steadicam tours through Evans’ famous Woodland estate, all in the attempt to create an aesthetic vocabulary capable of mirroring the colorful details of Evans’ own life, and his prose.
The visual approach of The Kid isn’t the only element that distinguishes it from most other documentaries, as the film’s structure is also unusual. Devoid of standard issue “talking heads” interview footage, the film is constructed entirely through archival footage and Evans’ own narration, taken largely from his book (no other parties are interviewed). As a result, the film is largely beholden to Evans’ own subjective and flamboyant perspective on his life, but this is only appropriate for a film which begins with the quote (from Evans): “There are three sides to every story: my side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently.” As Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein reveal in this interview, the trick with adapting The Kid Stays in the Picture was in balancing these three sides.
Travis Crawford (MM): You had intended to make a film about Robert Evans, but not as an adaptation of his The Kid Stays in the Picture book. What was the original concept of the film?
Brett Morgen (BM): Originally, we were approached by a woman named Pam Brady, who was the writer of the South Park movie and one of the producers of Just Shoot Me, and she wanted to talk to us about doing a documentary. Pam was a big fan of the book, and of Bob’s, and she wanted to write a screenplay that would resuscitate his career. Bob invited her to move into his Beverly Hills mansion and write for three months, and Pam contacted us to ask what we thought. We said “It’s fantastic—it’s Sunset Boulevard as a documentary!” We were all set to shoot that, when we ran into the Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who wanted to do a Bob Evans film as well, but one that dealt more with his past. So we decided to join forces with Graydon and make The Kid Stays in the Picture. We didn’t—and will not ever—make the film we wanted to make.
| “Bob was great... but there were times
where we wanted to kill him...” |
MM: Evans was reluctant to be filmed extensively in the present day, correct?
BM: Yeah, that’s right. Ultimately, we were able to get whatever we wanted from Bob, but we turned that reluctance into a positive, and it works for the film in that it created more of a mystique about him.
Nanette Burstein (NB): We found the larger-than-life character of Bob even more fascinating than the Bob you would meet on an everyday level. We embraced that and made him much more symbolic than a “real” person. And Bob saved every single moment of his life on film or tape or stills, so when we looked around for sources to bring the past to life, it was an amazing treasure for a filmmaker.
BM: The day we started work on this film, the final sequence from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was ringing through our heads; when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. We knew we were creating “cinema mythological,” and that the film would have to be as large as the man himself. Bob is a wonderful seducer and we wanted there to be that seductive quality, filmically. We intended it to be roller-coaster fantasia of non-fiction.
MM: The structure of the documentary is unique in that there are no interviews and it’s told entirely through Evans’ narration. When did you decide to adopt this approach and did it present any problems?
BM: From day one we decided that we were going to do the film with a disembodied voice, and that we were going to find a new way to present archival material. The obstacles came about in scripting and the early stages of editing, when we found that there were certain stories we would’ve liked to have included in the film, but we didn’t have the visual material to support them. And we wanted there to never be a moment in the film where the issues/47/images were simply “holding” shots that you were looking at because we had nothing else to show you—we wanted the issues/47/images to always be proactive.
NB: Our limitations forced us to make something original that we probably wouldn’t have done if we had an assignment to go out and do a more traditional film. We wrote a script on paper and assembled the voiceover that way, and looked at a screen that was all black, and we looked at each other and said, “What the fuck are we going to see?”
MM: How did you approach adapting the book, with respect to knowing what stories could be omitted and what had to be included?
Evans and actress |
BM: The book is laid out very anecdotally, with a number of stories laid out chronologically, though not necessarily feeding into the next. But our strength as filmmakers is traditional narrative storytelling, so we decided to approach it as a three-act linear narrative. So we had to find stories that we liked, but that also furthered the narrative. The Ali MacGraw-Bob Evans relationship furthers the narrative personally and professionally. And we didn’t want to be in a situation where we would tell this great story and then just end up at a brick wall. And we had arguments with Bob, because what works well in a book may not necessarily work well on film. We had to choose stories that would work well filmically, and make it as fast and furious as we could. We knew we were making kitsch, a sublime experience—so we wanted this film to be like a Bob Evans ride at Disneyland!
MM: Was Evans cooperative as a subject? Were there events in his life that he wanted to avoid discussing?
NB: Bob wanted to avoid everything after 1980, the second half of his life. You’d go to record voiceover with him and we’d get into these ferocious fights. Up until very late in the film, Brett’s voice was going to be narrating a good half of the movie because Bob just wouldn’t talk about it. Finally, he agreed to do the voiceover, but it was a very difficult battle.
BM: Bob was great... but there were times where we wanted to kill [him], and I’m sure he wanted to kill us. Bob had omitted the drug bust stuff from his book-on-tape and he kept saying to us, “Well, the book-on-tape was successful, why do we have to put it in the movie?” and we were saying “Bob, it’s not even an issue. Either you’re going to narrate it or we’re going to find a device to deal with it.” He thought it was his ass on the line, but we thought more so that it was our ass on the line as filmmakers—we knew we would get killed if we left that stuff out. We were respectful of his legend, but not intimidated by it.
| “We were respectful of his legend, but not intimidated by it.” |
NB: Plus it would just ruin the story. The whole thing is about the rise, fall, and rise again of a Hollywood producer, and without the fall, you have no narrative. And at the end of the day, Bob now appreciates that part of the movie more than anything else—he likes the scandal and he sees that it works within a whole perspective of his life.
MM: As you were locked into advancing the narrative through Evans’ own narration, did that ever create a conflict between your own perception of these events and Evans’ personal take? There’s a moment in the film where Evans is discussing the “Get High on Yourself” ’80s TV special that he produced following his drug bust. He refers to the event as the “Woodstock of the ’80s”…
BM: …Which I thought was hilarious!
MM: Exactly, because you then immediately cut to footage from the TV special, which doesn’t exactly validate Evans’ statement.
BM: Bob is so over-the-top and melodramatic, and we weren’t going to contest that. That bravado is the reason why the book was so successful. And we co-wrote the film with Bob—it wasn’t always his words, it was our words. When Bob calls it the “Woodstock of the ’80s,” it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek.
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| Perhaps more legendary than his career was the company Robert Evans kept, which included friends Roman Polanski and Henry Kissinger. | |
I think as documentary filmmakers, the greatest thing we can do is create a film that is truly objective. When you use “he said, she said” material, you create a faux objectivity and you lead the audience to believe that if you give them this point of view and that point of view, then you’re getting the whole picture. But we believe that the intensive immersion into a subjective reality is really the only honest filmmaking. So for us to come out in the first frame of the movie and say that there are three sides to every story—we’re being about as honest as every non-fiction filmmaker has ever been. When I hear criticism that the film is too “inside Bob,” I just feel like that’s the only form of objectivity one can achieve.
NB: And being honest about that subjectivity from the very beginning allows you to explore certain subtexts that you wouldn’t be able to do if you were struggling to create objectivity. Embracing the imagery of the film, you’re acknowledging that this is a man who got everything in his life because of image and lost everything in life because of image—you capture the real truth about Hollywood.
MM: Why do you think Evans remains such a fascinating and important figure?
NB: Evans came about in the 1970s when Hollywood was not the corporate Hollywood of today. It was like the wild west, where people like Evans—who had never produced a movie before—could come in and be huge risk takers and make these radical movies.
BM: Bob was a gambler, and
a blind gambler. He only had to answer to Charlie Bludhorn, and
Bob essentially had the ability to greenlight a film.
What makes Bob such an endearing character
transcends his contributions to Hollywood. He approaches life as
art; life is a stage for Evans. I once asked him “Why did
you save everything?” (photos, film, etc.), and he said, “Because
when I was 14 years old I realized I was living an extraordinary
life.” And he wasn’t bragging. It’s true! Bob
was involved in some of the greatest productions in the history
of Hollywood, but his greatest production has been his own life.
MM
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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Sohbet siteleri on 9/19/10 at 7:20 pm
tr cet
- Comment by Utah Drug Rehabs on 12/06/10 at 3:11 pm
I wonder what did a successful man like him had to do with drugs? I can’t possibly understand, he had everything and he got involved with drugs and that was it. It’s beyond logic and ethic, what was his motivation to get involved with cocaine?
- Comment by شات الحب on 3/21/11 at 5:10 am
- Comment by DaTa LiFe AnImE on 5/04/11 at 8:29 am
thank you a lots
انمي
مشاهد للمسن- Comment by حلا السعودية on 11/23/11 at 10:05 pm
-
dwq,,
This story was published in the Summer 2002 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
We Printed the Legend / New doc techniques help bring the legend of Robert Evans to life in Morgen and Burstein's The Kid Stays in the Picture
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