The Kid Stays in the Picture: movie legend Robert Evans on putting his roller-coaster life on stage
Robert Evans is a bona fide Hollywood legend. On the strength of little more than matinee-idol looks and roguish charisma, he was a minor ham actor who got lucky, and ended up running Paramount Pictures, with no producing experience, through an astonishingly successful run from 1966 to 1975.
A permatanned ladies’ man, he midwifed such classics as Rosemary’s Baby, Love Story and The Godfather, launching the careers of Roman Polanski and Francis Ford Coppola in the process.
Among his shakier productions? Seven failed marriages. He was Mr Ali MacGraw, until she eloped with Steve McQueen, on the aptly named thriller The Getaway. After that there was a notorious cocaine bust. A prolonged Eighties burnout. And a career rescue operation, masterminded by Jack Nicholson, to get people answering Evans’s calls again, and an office back on the Paramount lot.
All this is recounted in Evans’s irresistibly gossipy 1994 autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture. Already the source for a major 2002 documentary, it has now completed an epic journey to arrive, somewhat unexpectedly, on the London stage – premiering this week at the Royal Court.
Evans, now 86, speaks to me over the phone from his LA home, as the finishing touches are being supplied in Sloane Square. The turbulent life of a movie mogul is not an idea that lends itself obviously to theatre, and it needed a very bold sensibility to take charge. Finding the right home and artistic team to do it has taken him and his producers seven years.
“We had five different writers – I mean, esteemed writers,” Evans recalls “– and dumped every one of them. It was like a bad marriage, already.” (Evans is the expert – one of his was annulled after nine days.)
His saviour, riding in with multimedia wizardry up the wazoo, is none other than Complicite maestro Simon McBurney, who caught wind of the project and signed on to adapt and direct. The staging is dizzyingly sophisticated, even by his standards. A huge chunk of the show deploys live cameras, with their footage projected on a rear-stage screen. One minute, cast member Heather Burns is Mia Farrow in her Rosemary’s Baby pixie crop; the next, she has whisked on a long brunette wig to play MacGraw, acting out a take of her famous Love Story line (“Love means never having to say you’re sorry”). Evans is played, young and old, by Christian Camargo and Danny Huston, usually simultaneously.
“I call his work magic,” says Evans of the McBurney style. “It has a mystique about it. It’s singular. It has the flair, the dare and the excitement of the unexpected, like nothing I’ve ever experienced, maybe throughout my entire professional career.”
Two of the show’s producers, Patrick Milling Smith and Barbara Broccoli, collaborated before to bring the Oscar-winning Irish musical Once, beautifully, to the London and Broadway stage. They make the point that getting McBurney involved felt very apt, because of Evans’s history of entrusting scripts to “visionary” directors willing to make go-for-broke decisions for their art.
“Simon is a testament to that legacy,” says Smith. “I don’t think anything quite like this has ever been done before, in terms of the multimedia aspect of it. But also, through Evans’s eyes, he’s telling the American story. The American dream. It’s about frailty and success and Hollywood.”
Having inherited the reins of the James Bond franchise from her father Cubby – whom Evans knew quite well – Broccoli has her own specific take. “Lots of people ask me what it is a producer does,” she says. “They don’t really understand. Well, people who come to see this show will understand what being Robert Evans was all about. He was the ultimate maverick producer – he created so much of our cinema culture. He was also the last one before the corporate takeover of the media industries. So he is a significant figure.”
The boldest ambition of McBurney’s treatment is mapping Evans’s story on to America’s changing times: the script takes in JFK’s assassination, Watergate, and so on.
“Simon auditioned me,” says Evans. “And he did something that shocked me. He wanted to know about me as a young kid. My father was a dentist in Harlem, who had to work seven days a week to get us to school. We used to walk together daily down Lenox Avenue. It was a very important part of my life, and no one ever cared about it. But Simon cared. I gather a lot of the beginning of the show is about me as a kid.”
Famously emotional, Evans wells up at the memories of his father that he’s just conjured. His life, as the show exhilaratingly captures, has been a roller‑coaster like few others in Hollywood.
“I’ve been hit to the floor,” he muses, “and it’s really tough to get out of it and get back up again. It gets more difficult, like it would for an athlete, the older you get.”
In his heyday, he had some exciting nights at the Academy Awards. In 1973, he was able to claim a lot of credit when The Godfather won Best Picture – in part for demanding Coppola re-edit the film and make it longer. “You shot a saga and turned in a trailer,” he’s meant to have griped. In 1975, he narrowly lost an Oscar himself, when Polanski’s Chinatown, which he personally produced, lost Best Picture to The Godfather, Part II. There was consolation, though, in the 39 nominations Paramount scored overall that year, the highest number for a studio in history.
Was he watching this year’s ceremony when the wrong envelope got fatefully opened? You bet. He resisted calling his old buddy Warren Beatty – “my first friend in Hollywood” – the next day. “You know, Warren’s a terrific guy. He’s a perfectionist. It was a freak thing – it wasn’t his fault. He’ll be remembered for other things – he’s a lot bigger than that.
“Warren, he’s as professional as anyone could be. It took him 35 years to get his own new film [next month’s Rules Don’t Apply] made, you know. It was a damn good picture, but it didn’t do business [in America]. It didn’t have an opening day, and he’s worked so hard on it!”
It’s been some while since Evans was actively involved in telling a story other than his own. His last major production – a big hit, in fact – was the Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson romcom How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, back in 2003.
Although he’s desperate to see in person what McBurney has made of his life, flying to London isn’t possible because of his current poor health. (Having suffered three strokes in quick succession in 1998, he’s being extra careful.) Broccoli is certain that both Evans and the show will enjoy a long life, and is hopeful that Kid will transfer to Broadway and elsewhere around the world.
“So they will meet!” she declares. “A large part of this has been about making it for him. He doesn’t make apologies for anything – he just sort of tells it his way. He’s still standing, and still a brilliant, brilliant, man. And this really is a celebration of his life.”
Evans expects “a real trip”, emotionally comparable to when he green-lit Love Story all those years ago. “There were more pregnancies from that than any picture ever made. Really! And when you come out of this, you’ll be closer to the person next to you. Not sexually. Just in feeling.”
The Kid Stays in the Picture is at the Royal Court, London SW1 from Thurs until April 8. Tickets: 020 7565 5000; royalcourttheatre.com
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