The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans

 The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans

Very entertaining, but alas the author has such a big ego that it interferes with the joy of reading this book

Until near the end, this book has offered an extremely entertaining and informative read, especially for a fan of the movies.
The reader learns so much about various deals, inside jokes, rude and mean characters, but also delightful people.
We are told from the start about the journey of one of the best movies of all time- The Godfather- in which The Kid played a major role.
It opened in a tense atmosphere, wherein it was not at all sure if the film will tank or become a major production, for all the movies that had been filmed previously on the subject had been failures at the box office.
The makers of The Godfather have realized that they know what is needed for a success on such a good book- an Italian director.
But the story of that masterpiece is complicated and it had loads of problems, from distribution to the fights between the director and Robert Evans, who assumes a lot of the huge success of the movie.
Some of the background is funny and sounds incredible, like the fact that Al Pacino was staying in a cellar when The Godfather opened in theaters and when Evans had to arm-twist big shots for the short actor to make it in the distribution, almost nobody knew him and they had to take down his name, spelling included.
There are sad stories, such as when Ali MacGraw is in a critical condition and her partner in the smash hit Love Story proves to have no feelings and acts in an awful way, if we are to believe what the author writes.
This is in fact part of the problem with this book, that some of the paragraphs do not seem truthful, even if I grant that Hollywood is a land where anything is possible.
But Evans ends up giving me such a feeling that he is aggrandizing and the writing appears so insincere that it diminishes the rest of the work.
When he wanted to make Two Jakes with Jack Nicholson, the accompanying retelling of what happened comes out as one-sided and in the end not really interesting, from where I saw it, even if I learned that Jack Nicholson had terrible pain from hemorrhoids.
The discovery of Jack Nicholson is much more arousing- Evans was looking for an actor in a lead role for some movie, when Nicholson came on stage, with the now famous smile and eyebrows, getting the attention of the head of Paramount.
He was unknown and it was not easy to find him again, but it was worth it, even if his friendship with Evans does not make him gain points with me.
We learn about the relationship with Henry Kissinger, who is presented here as the smartest, greatest politician or just about close to that, a man who came to the premiere of the Godfather, where his friend needed him.
Evans claims that he gave Kissinger advise that kept the great state secretary his job, although that sounds again like boasting- which the author does a lot, in the end annoying me in the process and casting a shadow over the book.
I ended up believing at least some of what adversaries claimed about Evans, not what Sharon Stone declared- that Evans had a girlfriend kept as a prisoner in chains, in some dungeon or cellar and that he had people killed.
Robert Evans, who might have saved Paramount from ruin ended up not just kicked out, but off the list of guests for shindigs, which is cruel and really ungrateful to the man who produced a few blockbusters and masterpieces-
Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, Marathon Man, Love Story, The Two Jakes are just a few of the movies where he was involved.
He has stories with Vladimir Nabokov, Roman Polanski, Ryan O’Neal, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando and Grace of Monaco…among many others.
But it is regrettable that with all that to delight the reader there are sides and chapters that feel very wrong…like the very final words
-          ‘Fuck them, fuck them all’

There is a very dark side to this executive that spoils what could have been such an amazing read, but I guess his ego is too large and the effort to be modest and effaced in some chapters is made up for in the parts where to me he is obnoxious

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