Bio Noir

By Jeffrey Ressner

The movies, an agent once said during the 1970s, are "a business run by 10 idiots and Bob Evans." Back then Evans headed Paramount, and he could do no wrong: he was responsible for Love Story and The Godfather, among other hits, and later made Chinatown under his own production deal with the studio. During the '70s, Evans was married to Ali MacGraw, his third wife, and that's the decade he became friends with Jack Nicholson and hung out with Henry Kissinger. But the '80s weren't nearly as much fun. Evans was busted for possession of cocaine, and a vicious murder was tied to the production of his ambitious box-office flop The Cotton Club. After contemplating suicide and escaping from a mental hospital, and while producing last year's insipid sex thriller Sliver, Evans did what any well-traveled mogul looking for a comeback would do: he wrote his memoirs.

The Kid Stays in the Picture (Hyperion; 412 pages; $24.95) is an NC-17 tale of mob lawyers, studio reptiles, coke dealers, starlets, domineering directors and the fast-talking operator at the center of it all. Aside from taking a few swipes at Ryan O'Neal, Francis Ford Coppola and Sharon Stone, Evans mostly tells stories on himself, charting his rise, fall and struggle to rebound with a keen staccato style usually found in hard-boiled mysteries.

Despite his candor, Evans leaves out some intriguing material. There's no mention of his friend Heidi Fleiss, for example, and he makes just a throwaway reference to his role in a stock scheme that allegedly scammed millions from investors. Even the Cotton Club murder gets short shrift; it's dispensed with in 14 pages. Still, Evans demonstrates that despite his years in Hollywood, he has the right values: he devotes a mere four pages to his tennis game.