The ego has landed
The gospel according to Robert Evans.

By David Fear

'WHEN THE LEGEND becomes fact, print the legend."

This quote comes, coincidentally or not, from a movie: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Robert Evans, the would-be actor, ladykiller, and female-slacks salesperson ("I was always in women's pants!") who became Hollywood's numero-uno golden-boy producer thanks to a string of hits (Rosemary's Baby, The Godfather, Chinatown), only to have his empire's shag carpeting pulled out from under him, understands the movies' power to make or break personal mythology better than anyone. Today he's got a new one to sell you: his own. And oh, it's a doozy.

The bridge between the studio system of old and the anything-goes freak-out of American film's gilded '70s era, Evans was never less than larger-than-life. He embodied the success and the excess of his day, talked a purple-prosed talk and walked a swaggering walk, dated starlets and hung with the era's stars, flew high and fell hard; in essence, he lived a life that seemed straight out of a movie, or one that seemed destined to become one someday.

That day has come with The Kid Stays in the Picture, which charts Evans's three-act rise, fall, and phoenix-like return to the limelight as only an autobiographical testimony can – it's first-personal, skewed, and voyeuristically fascinating beyond belief. Like any good portrait of an artist as a young megalomaniac, the film sets out to paint a picture of the man behind the myth. The main points of Evans's life are present and accounted for – the plucked-from-obscurity poolside "discovery" by Norma Shearer, the last-minute saving of Paramount Studios from being dismantled, the Ali McGraw-inspired heartbreak, the hits, the misses, the drug busts, the scandals, and a redemption of sorts – all intertwined with a host of contexts, from cinematic to social.

But forget, for a moment, that the film is an adaptation of Evans's memoir of the same name. The true inspiration of the documentary is the infamous book-on-tape version of the memoir read by the man himself. Narrated in his velvet mumble of a voice, the audio version turns the Hollywood player into a perfect hedonistic cult figure for a generation weaned on the Me Decade's zeitgeist and an irony-heavy diet. The tapes were passed around like a freshly unearthed talisman among the cultural hip-erati of the '90s, causing epidemics of people with nasal cadences throwing out vintage Evansisms like, "Was I wrong? Boy, I was worse than wrong – I was right!"

Hearing an ego like Evans dictating his life story with such snappy, smarmy verve provides such a sheer guilty pleasure that it's a hard act to follow and even harder, one would think, to capture on celluloid. Luckily, filmmakers Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein (On the Ropes) realize that the normal fly-on-the-wall rules of nonfiction filmmaking or E! True Hollywood Story sensationalism just won't do, and they avoid talking-head interviews and piss-poor re-creations. Instead, they use Evans's comprehensive personal archive of photos and a 3-D animation program called After Effects to construct a visual equivalent to Evans's aural acid-trip down memory lane. Stills move about the foreground and background of the screen, unmoored from their sedentary compositions. Hallucinatory color schemes turn ordinary shots into Pierre et Gilles scrapbooks. A smattering of movie clips serve as Proustian madeleines (don't leave until you see Dustin Hoffman's end-credits gift), and Evans's inimitable, omnipresent honk ties the whole garish affair together. The result is less a documentary than sheer delirium.

And when you're dealing with Uncle Bob's wild ride, only the most outrageously kitschy atmosphere will do; the more unreal it all seems, the closer you feel to a "true" Evans experience. But the film never fudges the fact that it's Bob's subjective, deluded world we're touring, where truth takes a backseat to a good story. The glory of The Kid doesn't rest in the facts per se, or even in the man's moment in his history. Any man who's spent his whole life constructing images, especially his own, is just too outrageous for vérité. At the end, you may not feel as if you know Robert Evans any better than when you walked in. But he'll be damned if you're not entertained watching him print up his own legend.

'The Kid Stays in the Picture' opens Fri/9 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.