The Kid Stays in the Picture

Tim Hodgson (tkwh@hotmail.com) wrote on IMDB:

Admit it. You're only interested in seeing this film because you think it's an A-list answer to an E! Hollywood True Story episode. Stars. Sleaze. Sex. Who could ask for anything more? The gossip quotient notwithstanding (and there's an awful lot of it), this turns out to be a thoughtful and intelligent profile of a man who is among the most thoughtful and intelligent producers ever to have helmed a major Hollywood studio. His biography reads like the synopsis of a Harold Robbins potboiler - former garment industry executive is cast in a movie when Irving Thalberg's widow spots him at a swimming pool, launching him on a life of success and excess in the film industry. But, as KID makes abundantly clear, Evans' spectacular if unlikely career path owes far more to the well-established link between the manic depressive temperament and creativity than CARPETBAGGERS-type pulp fiction. His seemingly boundless reserves of energy, when constructively channelled, can create works of cinematic art; when employed in less salubrious ways, the self-destructive results usually end up in the National Enquirer. Evans comes across as an admirable albeit eccentric character who, despite devastating illnesses and a slew of professional and personal setbacks, still retains the wit, charm and high-octane enthusiasm that once propelled him to the top of the greased pole that is Hollywood. Evans is probably better known today for his cocaine conviction, blink-and-you-missed-it marriage to Catherine Oxenberg and the tell-all bestselling autobiography this documentary is loosely based on. While he would be the first to admit that his epically scaled lapses have been grist for the tabloid mill, Evans also deserves to be remembered as the man who midwived such classics as ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE GODFATHER and that definitive Chandlerian dissection of Los Angeles, CHINATOWN. Evans is direct and honest about the creative tensions that helped to shape all of these films, acknowledging that he played the grain of sand to Polanski and Coppola's oysters - trying to irritate those directors into producing pearls. His reminiscences about the hot-and-cold wars that were waged behind the scenes on these and other pictures underscore the collaborative nature of filmmaking - and expose as the nonsense that it is the widely accepted fiction of director-as-author. You'll get gossip aplenty but you'll also get insight in this is a warts-and-all portrait of a unique Hollywood personality, a kid who, deservedly, still remains in the picture.

Roland E. Zwick (magneteach@aol.com) wrote on IMDB:

`The Kid Stays in the Picture,' a documentary about famed movie producer and studio head Robert Evans, begins like `The Great Gatsby,' a film Evans produced in 1974. To the wistful strains of `What'll I Do?' playing in the background, the camera glides lovingly over the furnishings, pictures and memorabilia that adorn Evans' Bel Air mansion and estate. The comparison is an apt one, for, like Gatsby, Evans was a wunderkind, a handsome young go-getter who knew early on the kind of life he wanted to lead and who willed himself to attain it. With a combination of good looks, charm, ambition and just a bit of plain old-fashioned good luck, he managed to go from being a mediocre movie actor to becoming the head of Paramount Studios in the course of a mere decade. And what a decade it was! Evans had a major hand in not only lifting Paramount from ninth to first place among Hollywood's major studios, but in bringing such films as `Rosemary's Baby,' `True Grit,' `Love Story,' `Chinatown' and, of course, `The Godfather' to movie screens everywhere.   [ show more ]

`The Kid Stays in the Picture' is a dream-come-true for hardcore cinephiles, providing a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into one of the true Golden Ages of Hollywood filmmaking. Evans' story is, in fact, the story of that time, for truly he hobnobbed with virtually every one of the key players responsible for that era. Evans' tale follows a fairly conventional arc for men of his type: the ambitious kid with dreams of larger-than-life glory achieves meteoric success in the entertainment business only to have his ambitions dashed on the shores of rampant egotism, overconfidence and drug addiction. In fact, Evans' life would make perfect fodder for a film of its own, as this documentary and the positive response to it demonstrates. Evans himself narrates the film, and although he tends to be a bit easier on himself than an outsider might have been, he is still willing to chastise himself when he feels it's called for and to render some rather startlingly unflattering assessments of certain major players on the Hollywood scene. He is, also, however, utterly devoted to those he feels have stuck by him through good times and bad, and he is not averse to lavishing praise on others when it is due. One objection to Evans' narration is that he doesn't always speak with the utmost clarity, sometimes making what he says come out garbled and incomprehensible.

As a piece of filmmaking, `The Kid Stays in the Picture' offers a kaleidoscopic array of stills, film clips and reenactments that reflect the temper and mood of the time. Directors Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein obviously pored through a wealth of material on the subject, culling from it a comprehensive, streamlined and fast-moving narrative that grips the audience with its humor, its sadness and its tribute to the indomitableness of the human spirit. For if Evans' story is about anything, it is about how important it is for each individual to achieve his dreams and how equally vital it is for that same person, once he has fallen down, to pick himself up off the floor so that he can continue pursuing that dream.

`The Kid Stays in the Picture' is a wonderful time capsule for those who love movies. No true film fan should miss it.

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Aluísio Parondi (nem.freud.explica@gmail.com) wrote on IMDB:

"The Kid Stays in the Picture" is a must-see for any person who's interested in movies and their making. This funny and exciting documentary tells the larger than life story of Robert Evans, "discovered" by Norma Shearer swimming in a hotel pool in 1956, who went to become a ham actor and soon afterwards, an extremely successful producer, who took Paramount studios from 9th to first in Hollywood in less than a decade. The man behind legendary films such as "The Godfather", "Chinatown", "Harold and Maude", "Love Story", "Marathon Man" and "Rosemary's Baby", Evans dated beautiful women (he was once married to "Love Story" star Ali MacGraw) and was obsessed with his goals (and he often succeeded, being responsible for some of the biggest hits of his time), what turned him Hollywood royalty and voted the world's most eligible bachelor. With one scandal involving his name, drugs and a murder, though, his career was ruined and he lost almost everything he had. But he came back, and "The Kid Stays in the Picture" explores his fascinating saga with the witty, cynical narration of Evans himself, never being too self-indulgent. Evans himself admits he was no angel. But then again, who is? Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" deserved to win the Best Documentary Oscar back in 2002, but the absence of "The Kid Stays in the Picture" among the nominees is more outrageous than Evans' story itself. 9.5 out of 10.