The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002)
Ministry of Propaganda Films, Highway Films

Description

Robert Evans became head of production at a major Hollywood studio at age 24. Took a studio from worst to first. And brought to the screen a phenomenal string of hits that includes Chinatown and The Godfather. He lived fast. Lived large. Lost it all. Then rose to prominence again. And now the inside-Hollywood story is revealed by ROBERT EVANS in this dazzling show-all movie that's narrated by Evans in his inimitable showman's style!

Tags

Filmmaking, Hollywood

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

The Kid Stays in the Picture is a candy store for film buffs. It's a kaleidoscopic riff on the life and career of Robert Evans, the fabled Hollywood producer whose story would have the star-packed, glitz-addicted, rise-and-fall-and-crash-and-rise trajectory of a tabloid epic even if it hadn't been laid out in a movie as brash and mesmerizing as this one.
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10 Rolling Stone | Peter Travers

Half-fact, half-fanciful and all riveting, this documentary is based on the memoirs of Robert Evans, the starlet-screwing, enemy-skewering Hollywood player who ran Paramount from 1966 to 1974 when the studio churned out such hits as Rosemary's Baby, Love Story and The Godfather.
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10 DVD Authority | Christopher Bligh

From the red curtain beginning to its gag reel end, The Kid Stays in the Picture had me entertained by it's subject matter and his narration, moved by the chances he had taken all through his life both good and bad, intrigued on how involved he was during some of my favorite movies of the 70s and others, and thrilled by making the impossible truly possible when the chips were way down for the count.
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10 filmcritic.com | Pete Croatto

It’s unlikely that Robert Evans has another Chinatown or even Marathon Man left in him. But this documentary is a dazzling, remarkably unpretentious reminder of what he had, lost, and got back.
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9.5 DVD Verdict | Patrick Naugle

Over the past century Hollywood has been as interested in itself as it has been in the product it promotes. As tabloids and periodicals show, audiences love gossip—and no one was better at perpetuating gossip than sometime actor/producer Robert Evans.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

What puts this cunning compilation of movie clips and digitally manipulated photos over the top is that Evans himself narrates the movie with a riveting mix of narcissistic self-aggrandizement and cool self-assessment. There are no interviews with other people to give any outside perspective on this man's life; for the duration of the movie we are plunged into Evan's own head, and it's funny, sad, and always fascinating.
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9.0 New York Times | Elvis Mitchell

His husky-voiced murmur drunk with self-love and self-loathing has become the basis of one of the funniest, and most telling, films of the year. The filmmakers call ''Kid'' a documentary, but the movie is one of the unusual kind that is firmly lodged inside the subject's perspective. We expect documentaries to expose a kind of truth, but sometimes they don't, and this may be the first one built entirely around delusion.
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9.0 Washington Post | Desson Howe

In case you ever wondered if all those Hollywood stories of back-stabbing, orgy-making, cocaine-snorting and other Babylonian shenanigans were just urban legend, you'll have to check out Robert Evans's wildly amusing life in "The Kid Stays in the Picture."
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8.8 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

It's one of the most honest films ever made about Hollywood; maybe a documentary was needed, since fiction somehow always simplifies things.
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8.3 The Onion A.V. Club | Keith Phipps

A living symbol of Hollywood's past, Evans tells stories brilliantly, albeit in a fashion that repeatedly promotes the unique and wonderful man called Robert Evans.
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8.0 The Guardian | Peter Bradshaw

...this vastly enjoyable and tendentious autobiopic - part film, part magic-lantern show - based on his own book and produced, appropriately, by Vanity Fair editor and number-one Hollywood cheerleader Graydon Carter.
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8.0 Salon.com | Stephanie Zacharek

... there are times when baloney tells a better story than fact ever could, and "The Kid Stays in the Picture," narrated by Evans himself, is one of them. Evans sells himself to us in exactly the same way you imagine he might have sold one of his hit pictures to the bigwigs at Paramount during his golden years.
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8.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Mick LaSalle

Watching "The Kid Stays in the Picture" is a little like being stuck at a fellow's deathbed, listening to him gas and gas about his life -- only in this case, the guy turns out to be fascinating.
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8.0 DVD Times | Mike Sutton

... as a character study of a real 'player' and a man whose manifest flaws are balanced by his exceptional virtues, it's one of the most fascinating documentary films of recent years and a reminder of a time when Hollywood really did take chances on its greatest talents.
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7.5 Austin Chronicle | Marc Savlov

This is classic Hollywood, at its best and worst, sticky rich and scabrous. It may not be the truth, per se, but it sure sounds good.
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5.0 Exclaim! | David Nusair

Based on the autobiography of the same name by legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans, The Kid Stays in the Picture presents all the vital information found in the book in a bland, unappealing format that feels like the film equivalent of a book-on-tape.
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5.0 Eye For Film | Angus Wolfe Murray

Evans comes across as an intellectual thug and an inelegant speaker. Since this is his story and he's telling it, you can't escape that voice, which is mucky, like a lubricated sewage pipe. He may be a charmer with the ladies and a seducer of talent, but you wouldn't guess it from listening to him; he has the vocabulary of a pulp fiction blurb writer.
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