Film Studies: The kid is Las Vegas on legs

When you are 72, washed up, married and divorced four times, and when you have managed to affront so many vital parts (your own) with cocaine use, you have no right to look like Bob Evans. Even if you have led a decent life without coming within arm's length of love, litigation or Los Angeles, still there is no excuse for looking like Bob Evans.

He looks like Las Vegas, like a Moroccan leather playboy, dressed in off-white, cream or ivory (it sets off his tobacco tan), with a silk shirt open to the fifth rib, with a voice that is throaty and so knowing it would suit Satan, albeit a Satan who is master of fun on some Flying Dutchman cruise ship. Bob Evans is more dangerous than any 72-year-old has a right to be, let alone one who has done so much damage to himself. His sometime friend and bewildered onlooker, the screenwriter Robert Towne, was once asked to give a comment about Bob, and he replied with absolute justice: "Why? Why bother? Bob says it all himself."

This Robert Evans is about to hit the London Film Festival as the subject and doting patron of the documentary movie, The Kid Stays in the Picture, based on his own best-selling book of the same name. I use the words "documentary" and "book" with caution, for these works tend towards self-promotion. How far? Well, despite the profuse self-portrait of chronic self-abuse and his astonishing survival, the film and the book are not rich in real dirt. You could come away from them prepared to offer thanks for Evans being the head of production at Paramount who green-lighted The Godfather. Technically true. But still you'd need to recall the words of another executive on The Godfather, that on every significant creative decision on the picture, Bob Evans was wrong, wrong, wrong – and articulate about it.

Early on in his life, the pretty New Yorker had wanted to be an actor. But a collapsed lung and a thriving family sportswear business came to the aid of audiences until Norma Shearer (the widow of Irving Thalberg) decreed that Bob was handsome and charming enough to play her husband in Man of a Thousand Faces.

There were some other roles, notably the Spanish matador in the 1957 film of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. That's when nearly everyone on that picture pointed it out to producer Darryl F Zanuck that Evans could not act. Zanuck never bothered to argue that matter, but at one point he picked up a megaphone and silenced all queries with "The Kid Stays in the Picture". To get one's bioipic title while so young makes you believe in gods.

In fact, Evans soon stopped acting but pictures stayed in The Kid. Selling his share of Evan-Picone to Revlon, he got a place at Paramount and became that studio's Thalberg. He had a deep purple patch: Rosemary's Baby (with his chum Roman Polanski), Love Story (with his wife, Ali McGraw), The Godfather, and then a few years later, Chinatown (with Polanski and Towne), Marathon Man and Black Sunday.

In a way, Chinatown was the high point, because this was Evans, Towne, Polanski and Jack Nicholson making their own little poker-table movie, about the town, the business and the legend of power they all adored. Chinatown proved a hit, and a classic. But it was four friends telling a story they reckoned applied to them.

So it was natural enough that a decade later Towne should take the story of Jake Gittes a step further: The Two Jakes would be set in 1947, and it would involve Gittes (Nicholson) in a battle of wits with Jake Berman, a real-estate man, a liar, a charmer, a lovable rogue – a perfect part for Evans. It should have happened. But something went wrong. Some said it was Towne's fault; some said Evans was afraid of having to act. In truth, it was a mess over money and several insecure egos. The film started, in 1985, and then it stopped. Nicholson took Evans' side. The project foundered. It came back five years later, with Nicholson directing, and with Harvey Keitel playing Berman. And as Bob Evans would be the first to tell you, Keitel is no Bob Evans. And The Two Jakes wasn't a worthy sequel to Chinatown.

By then, Evans was his own wreckage. The financial disaster of The Cotton Club (which ended his friendship with Francis Coppola) and his cocaine habit took Evans way down. He'll tell you how far, in loving detail, And now look at me, he says. But looking has always been hard with Bob.

I mean, he's there, all right – but how are you meant to believe your own eyes?

d.thomson@independent.co.uk