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Grade: B

Verdict: As addictively entertaining as it is shamelessly self-aggrandizing.

Details: Starring, and narrated by, Robert Evans. Directed by Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein. Rated R for language and drug talk. One hour, 33 minutes. Limited release

See it: Showtimes available Friday. The Kid Stays in the Picture

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: The first words we hear in "The Kid Stays in the Picture" are those of the 72-year-old "kid" himself — Robert Evans, studio head, independent producer, playboy pal to Jack and Warren, former husband of Ali MacGraw, has-been Prince of Hollywood, and perpetually tanned "kid."

"There are three sides to every story," he intones in his distinctive late-night-Vegas rasp. "Your side, my side and the truth. And no one's lying."

In this addictively watchable quasi-documentary/vanity production, we get his side. It may not be the truth, but in terms of Evans' own self-inflated mythology, he's not lying. He's just, well, being Bob.

Evans was the quintessential Hollywood golden boy, a transitional figure between the fading studio system of the '50s and early '60s and the inspired maverick moviemaking of the late '60s and early '70s. He knew Cary Grant and Fred Astaire as well as he knew Roman Polanski and Mia Farrow.cqall While he was head of production at Paramount — a job he got without ever producing a movie — the studio released "The Godfather," "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown" and "Love Story," among others. There were also some sizable flops ("The Great Gatsby," anyone?) we don't hear much about, but it's still an astonishing streak.

Evans' story begins in the late '50s, when he dove into a pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel and emerged a star. Well, sort of. He was "discovered" poolside by Norma Shearer, former queen of MGM and the widow of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg,cqboth the model for Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon." Already wealthy as the scion of the Evans-Picone clothing line, Evans was game when Shearer insisted he be cast as Thalberg in the James Cagney movie "Man of a Thousand Faces."

Next came the role of a matador in the film version of Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises." Everyone from Hemingway to Tyrone Power to Ava Gardner wanted him fired, but mogul Darryl F. Zanuck decreed, "The kid stays in the picture," and that was that — for the movie and for Evans. He didn't want to be an actor; he wanted to be "the guy who says stuff like that." Hence, a career and a title for his autobiography (written in 1994), his audio tape, and the movie.

Documentarians Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein (they made the estimable "On the Ropes") use the usual melange of archival footage, movie clips and personal photos, but not in the usual way. The film is jazzed up with inventive editing, different perspectives (including 3-D) and witty juxtapositions. And then there's Evans, narrating with the pashalike self-assurance of a man who may have had his problems but has lived very well.

The problems came in the '80s. He was busted for cocaine. (The requisite public service anti-drug spots he produced as punishment are unintentionally hilarious.) Then came the accusation that he was somehow implicated in a murder linked to his movie "The Cotton Club." Still, as he says, the kid stayed in the picture.

The movie's one-sidedness is so brazen you have to laugh. Evans talks about his true love, Ali MacGraw, insisting "Miss Snot Nose" (as he touchingly called her), fell for Steve McQueen during filming of "The Getaway" because he didn't pay enough attention to her. There's no mention at all of his other four wives or dozens of famous dates.

However, he's at his most brashly outlandish when he claims credit for both "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Godfather." Naturally, neither Polanski nor Francis Ford Coppola is asked to give his version, but I'd love to have seen Coppola's face when he heard Evans recall how he told the director, "You shot a saga, pal, but you turned in a trailer. Now you go back and make me a movie!"

Evans is shameless, but his self-deprecating humor takes the sting out of his "truth." And in these days of colorless execs, with their MBAs and bottled water and wrinkle-free "facial enhancements," he seems like a primordial presence left over from some distant star-sprinkled Hollywood past. Evans may not have known how to run his life, but he sure knew how to run a studio.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution