The Way He Tells It

Legendary movie producer Robert Evans, dressed smartly in a camel’s hair overcoat and beige turtleneck, saunters into a Main Street restaurant for a round of media interviews for a new film about his remarkable life in Hollywood called “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” which was to premiere here Friday night at the Sundance Film Festival.

He is now 71, four years removed from a paralyzing stroke that struck with typical Evans flair while he was delivering a toast to horror-meister Wes Craven. Evans said the incident nearly scared Craven to death.

He is now all but recovered, but stroke or no stroke, Evans on this day said the trip to Sundance had invigorated him.

A Hollywood rebel throughout his 40-odd years in show business, he has come to this snowy citadel of independent films not only to promote the new movie made by documentary filmmakers Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein but also to show young, up-and-coming filmmakers that if he can make it back, then anything is possible.

“I’ve been knocked down for the count; I was cold as dry ice,” he said in that distinctive baritone voice that Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter once described as sounding like oil rolling in a barrel. “I couldn’t get a job anywhere. If I can do it at my age, they can do it at their age. Don’t be afraid of getting knocked down.

“This is exciting for me,” he said of Sundance. “In a way, for better or worse, I have more in kin with the independent films. I don’t call them independent. I call them people making movies on their own.”

As chief of production at Paramount Pictures in the Hollywood glory days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, before multinational conglomerates absorbed the studios and “event” movies became the norm, Evans went almost overnight from being an actor to becoming a studio chief, greenlighting such memorable movies as “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Love Story,” “Harold and Maude,” “True Grit,” “Serpico” and the Academy Award-winning film “The Godfather” and its electrifying sequel “The Godfather Part II.”

Later, as a producer, he would go on to make “Chinatown,” “Marathon Man” and “Urban Cowboy,” to name a few. And then the bottom dropped out.

He became a Hollywood pariah when he was busted for cocaine possession and later was linked, but never indicted, with the “Cotton Club” murder case.

It is all vividly captured in “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” which itself is based on Evans’ cathartic 1994 autobiography of the same name.

As he sits down for an interview, sipping a ginger ale, Evans still retains the look of an aging movie star: the carefully coiffed but now graying hair; the unnaturally tanned skin; the distinctive eyewear that harks back to his studio reign when he wore the then-mod-looking, oversize frames a la Michael Caine.

Evans acknowledges that he owns about 100 pairs of eyeglasses, including several pairs he removes from his pockets. He then introduces Alan Selka, “my right-hand man,” a tall, slender man with a British accent who fishes around in his own pockets and comes up with several more pairs.

Evans said he did not initially want to participate in the documentary about his life. The book was a success, and its audio version, featuring Evans with his signature voice, became an instant cult classic in Hollywood. So, he thought, why press his luck?

“I’ve rolled two sevens so far, and I hope I don’t crap out,” he said of the film.

The 90-minute documentary features Evans narrating off screen, appearing only briefly on camera as he is today. Much of the film consists of photographs and films that he burrowed away like a pack rat over the years.

Morgen and Burstein say no one in Hollywood today is the equal of Evans at the height of his powers.

“Bob was a link between the studio system and today’s corporate conglomerates,” Morgen said. “That specific time in Hollywood was the Wild West.”

The filmmakers said they went into the project trying hard to avoid being seduced by Evans’ enormous charm and personality. But seduce them he did, nonetheless. “We saw it, we knew it, and we loved it,” Morgen said, describing their film as not so much documentary as “cinema mythologica.”

The filmmakers said they were helped in their efforts because of Evans’ enormous archive of materials. He had a camera to record his activities wherever he went.

“Every time he would go to any set of any movie at Paramount, he had a still photographer go with him,” Burstein said.

Does that mean he is vain?

“You know what it is?” Burstein said. “Bob is a master at presenting himself to the press and to the world.... Bob understands the power of his image.”

But one who lives by publicity can also be destroyed by publicity, and when it became known in the 1980s that he was linked through a business partner to the notorious “Cotton Club” murder case, the press had a field day. (The case involved the 1983 slaying of New York impresario Roy Radin, who was involved in the filming of “The Cotton Club.”) Evans would escape indictment, but the media would link him to the case for years.

“So, it worked for him,” Morgen said, “and then it turned on him.”

The film includes some never-before-seen footage Evans has kept to himself over the years. It includes actor Dustin Hoffman doing a biting impersonation of Evans on the set of “The Marathon Man” and a film, shot by a young Mike Nichols, in which Evans personally addresses the board of directors of Gulf & Western, which then owned Paramount, and persuaded them not to deep-six the studio because he had a slate of good films coming up, including one called “The Godfather.”

Evans said he turned over “my whole life” to Morgen and Burstein. “They know more about me than my family ever knew, for certain,” he said. “They have things I didn’t want them to find.”

The filmmakers said that the movie almost didn’t get made. They recalled that just before going to the Academy Awards, where they were nominated for their 1999 documentary “On the Ropes,” they learned that Evans had years earlier given all film rights to his book to Vanity Fair’s Carter. The parties eventually worked things out, and Carter became a producer on the movie.

USA Films plans to release the film either in late spring or early summer.

One could hardly think of a more colorful subject for a documentary than Evans. His life reads like part fairy tale and part tabloid expose.

Born Robert J. Shapera in New York City, his father was a dentist who ran the first racially integrated dental clinic in America, according to the film. When he was 12, his father changed the family surname to Evans as a tribute to his dying mother, whose maiden name was Evan. Robert caught the acting bug and did radio work in World War II, becoming the youngest disc jockey in the nation. Older brother Charles co-founded a clothing line that would become Evan-Picone, making him a millionaire before his 25th birthday.

Evans was discovered by actress Norma Shearer in the mid-1950s when he jumped into a swimming pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She picked the handsome young man to play her late husband, studio mogul Irving Thalberg, in the 1957 movie “Man of a Thousand Faces,” about the life of Lon Chaney Sr.

Four months later in a totally unrelated incident, Evans happened to be dancing the tango at the El Morocco in New York when he was told that 20th Century Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck was sitting in the corner of the nightclub and wanted to meet him.

“I thought it was a joke,” Evans said. “I walk over to him and he says, ‘Are you an actor, kid?’ I said, ‘No, but I just finished making a picture.’ He said, ‘I want you to play opposite Ava Gardner [as a young bullfighter] in ‘The Sun Also Rises.’”

With his chiseled good looks, Evans romanced a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood leading ladies over the ensuing years, including Gardner, Lana Turner, Grace Kelly, Ali MacGraw, Raquel Welch and Margaux Hemingway.

Evans keeps busy. This March, he has a movie going into production called “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days,” starring Kate Hudson. He also has a project that does a twist on the Dorian Gray story featuring a woman in the title role. “The highest point in my life, maybe, is now,” Evans said. “Here I am at my age being up here with all these young filmmakers, talking to them, hearing their aspirations, what they are trying to accomplish, and I don’t feel like an old man sitting here. The things I’ve done maybe I can spread around to others. There is no higher feeling than that.”