The Kid Stays in the Picture

The kid is Robert Evans, a minor actor who somehow talked his way into heading Paramount Pictures, where he presided over a golden period stretching from Rosemary's Baby, through Love Story and The Godfather I and II, up to Chinatown. Then his marriage to Ali MacGraw fell apart, he took to cocaine, and fell into a publicity nightmare over his comeback picture, The Cotton Club. Evans' tough guy drawl is good company, but the film is like an illustrated audio book: a voice-over with stills and a few movie clips. We don't get to see what he looks like now. Nor do we get any other opinions, which is pretty rich when you stop to think about it. Does he really deserve all this credit for those movies? It's certainly hard to imagine him greenlighting a project as solipsistic and uncinematic as this.