the kid is gone
by Douglas Messerli
Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgen (screenplay
and directors, based on the memoir by Robert Evans, with Evens as the narrator)
The Kid Stays in the Picture / 2002
Robert Evans must have been the most likeable
narcissistic bastards in the world. First, he has the looks of a male
movie-star; Norma Shearer spotting him in the
Beverly Hills Hotel’s swimming pool immediately demanded that he play her
husband, Irving Thalberg, against James Cagney in Man with a Thousand Faces.
She was a woman who immediately recognized a handsome man.
And even before that break, he’d been a child actor in pictures,
worked extensively in radio, and helped, with his brother, to develop the
women’s fashion company Evan-Picone, introducing women to pants suits and other
casual wear.
Evans, charming as he might have been, was also a determined newcomer
and not so stupid. He realized even before he was courted by Paramount, that if
you wanted to be a producer, you had to have property instead of actresses and
actors, quite the opposite perspective from most of Hollywood producers at the
time. He’d already acquired the rights, with the help of his journalist friend
(who actually read scripts and the books upon which they were based), to The
Detective, and quickly produced a series of Neil Simon movies for
Paramount, including Barefoot in the Park and Plaza Suite (neither
of which this documentary recalls). These films all resulted in great successes
for the studio, but Evans also clearly had more serious things on his mind with
Rosemary’s Baby (directed by the man he keeps describing as his “little
Pollack,” the great Polish-born director Roman Polanski), whose later
independent Evans-production of Chinatown would make him and his studio
even more famous.
Rosemary’s
Baby would have not survived, given Sinatra’s determination to end his
wife, Mia Farrow’s career, had not Evans taken her aside to show her an early
edited version which he suggested would make her a shoo-in for the Academy
Award (she didn’t win that, but did win The Golden Globe Award for New Star of
the Year, which certainly did help her career).
And, then, of course there was his somewhat contentious connections with
“the intellectual” Francis Ford Coppola, whose The Godfather 1 and 2 sent
the floundering studio off the charts, bringing it from 9 to number 1. Coppola
also credits Evans with making important changes to his masterworks.
Along the way in his rising career were other, often sentimental hits,
such as Love Story—whose central actress, Ali MacGraw, Evans married,
one of seven wives—none of the others even mentioned in this documentary; the
directors claimed that to do so would simply slow down the narrative. Maybe, in
fact, Evans’ high-charged story might have benefited by a slightly slower
telling pace. I feel we never truly get to know the man who cannot, clearly,
ever live with a woman for very long. Why was a truly handsome man, described
throughout his life as a most eligible bachelor, never able to sustain a
relationship? This documentary only hints at some of the problems.
The fact that Evans wanted his friend, Alain Delon, rumored often as
being a closeted gay man (despite his somewhat homophobic comments) to play the
role of Charles "Lucky" Luciano in The Cotton Club, which,
when he couldn’t hire Delon, he replaced him with the former gay porn star,
bi-sexual Joe Dallesandro, is just a peak into a very complex man. Despite his
endless relationships with women, Evans was continuously rumored to have been
bisexual, although there has never been any credible evidence.
Yet despite his obvious bluster, Evans’ sentimental side is
well-revealed, particularly in his love for the flower and fountain-obsessed
home, which he purchased soon after his quick rise to sudden fame, the former
home of Shearer and Thalberg. Those were the days you might buy paradise for
$290,000. And it was a kind of paradise that you could never imagine a
blustering Trump or other studio heads of the day even able to appreciate.
There is something so beautiful and peaceful about that small home that it
truly makes you look at Evans anew. If he can describe his former wife Ali as a
snot-nosed bohemian, if he can stare down some of the most brutally unsmiling
executives in the world, you realize that Evans has heart and a comedic sense
of himself which surely does not define any of the other Hollywood moguls.
Evans, unlike Zanack and so many others, lived for the script, not for
gloriously glamourous figures who populated film history. That is also why one
so loves this documentary. If it is often a kind of gossip sheet, telling us
what we don’t (and sometimes do) want to hear, it is also a tragic tale in
which the golden hero falls because of his own hubris.
The most important thing that brought Evans down was cocaine, which,
apparently nearly every wealthy person on Los Angeles’ Westside, in those days
of the late 1960s and the decade of the 1970s, imbibed. I get no kick from
cocaine (champagne is another issue), but evidently so many of those who could
afford that habit did it to excess. And it brought Robert Evans into a freefall
in a rather tragic way.
Trying to raise money for his film, The Cotton Club, after much
indecision (Evans himself first wanted to direct it), directed by Coppola,
Evans was introduced to the would-be impresario Roy Radin by his cocaine dealer
Karen Greenberger. A deal was worked out, although Radin was probably not
wealthy enough to later sustain Evans’ and Coppola’s ambitions. Greenberger,
paid $50,000 for her connection in the deal, was highly unsatisfied with the
money, and worked with others to kill Radin. The lawyer: Robert Shapiro!
Evans was never charged with any involvement, but his refusal to testify
(he claimed the 5th Amendment) and his very connection with the
murder trial—as well as the failure of the film at the box-office—brought him
his comeuppance. As he, himself, declares: “No one was taking my calls.” He
lost his career and his beloved home. Approaching suicidal feelings, he locked
himself into a clinic, from which he basically needed to escape in order to
survive.
The would-be Thalberg had about $37 in his pocket.
But just as he needed the spotlight, so Paramount still needed him, and
he made a final pact to produce a small number of films for them. A few, Marathon
Man, Black Sunday, Popeye, were successful, but others, including another
Neil Simon re-do, The Out-of-Towners, and even worse fare were failures.
In
watching The Kid Stays in the Picture for the second time the other day,
I was delighted and tearful for this somewhat innovative thinker to Hollywood
producing. I certainly did not like all of this “entertainments,” but many of
them represented the best of late Hollywood filmmaking. Had the strange
business of Los Angeles film gone further in some of the directions that Evans
promoted—an emphasis on the script instead of the stars, a commitment to
challenging psychological and even sometimes experimental cinema as opposed to
the readily accessible standards of movie-making—films might not be in downward
spire, which Martin Scorsese, in a recent The New York Times essay
declared them to be. I’m not sure I agree with Scorsese. Lots of good films are
still being made, and I believe they matter. But Robert Evans, perhaps always
“a kid,” obviously truly loved a world in which narrative and acting came
brilliantly together.
I
don’t think I might have liked the man, too macho for me, but I do love the
attitude and many of his values. And I was disturbed to read of his death, at
the age of 89, on October 26th of this year.
Los Angeles, November 8, 2019
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November
2019).
No comments:
Post a Comment