Chutzpuh stretched to its limits

Now that films can fake anything, creative documentaries are back in fashion. They deal in "fact".

Don't, of course, confuse "fact" with "truth." In gravelly tones, as if swilling vintage wine round the glass for a sniff at its period bouquet, Robert Evans narrates his rise, fall and recuperation as a one-time Hollywood studio mogul.

Under his aegis, Paramount produced Love Story, The Godfather, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and other hits of the Seventies. "There's always my side of the story, your side and the truth," he forewarns us. Doesn't really matter which version you choose: all are instructive, entertaining and narrated with a faux tough eloquence that sounds like an audio-book by Mickey Spillane - a nice change to have a film read to you.

Directed by Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein, it's produced with uncritical admiration by Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair magazine's stargazing editor, as an unrepentant apologia by a man who lived not wisely, but to the full.

Power, glamour, risk, extravagance, self-indulgence and near ruin, it's all here: big pictures, big egos, big drug busts. The title comes from the ultimatum bellowed through a bullhorn by Darryl Zanuck at Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner and others in the cast of The Sun Also Rises in 1956.

They'd objected to the presence of Evans, scion of a New York garment firm that made ladies' slacks, presuming to play a leading role alongside stars like them. "The kid stays in the picture,î Zanuck decreed. "Anybody who disagrees can quit."

At that defining moment, Evans saw where real power lay in the movies: not with the actors.

He got his first break playing Irving Thalberg, the legendary MGM wunderkind of the Thirties, when the latter's widow, Norma Shearer, eyeing the smooth-cheeked, patentleatherhaired young idler at the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool, chose him for the role of her husband in a Lon Chaney Snr biopic, Man of a Thousand Faces.

The part stuck. Evans reinvented himself as a "Thalbergî in the last great reign of studio power in Hollywood, before the lawyers and agents took over. By luck, again, he was given charge of a studio by the man who owned Paramount, Charlie Bluhdorn.

The paternal support and occasional chastisement of "the kidî by this Austrian-born tycoon, whose guttural tones Evans mimics so amusingly in his anecdotes, lent him power by proxy - so long as he delivered profit by return.

It's a story worthy of the Caesars. As Evans tells it, even tragedies turn into boastful elegies and triumphs are on an imperial scale. Sinatra tried to pull Mia Farrow out of Rosemary's Baby, to put her into his own production of The Detective. He threatened divorce, unless she came when he called.

Evans, who knew women (or at least women actresses), fought back with guile: he showed Farrow a rough cut of her unfinished film and lo! The lady put stardom before Frank's divorce papers. His account of how he saved Paramount from closure at the end of the week by getting Mike Nichols to star him in a promo film of the studio's future releases that was screened for the "suitsî in the boardroom is Hollywood chutzpah at full stretch.

With some credibility, he argues for the producer (guess who) being the real auteur of movies like The Godfather. After seeing the first cut, he raged at Francis Ford Coppola, its director, "You shot a saga, but you've turned in a trailer", and ordered an extra hour of scenes dropped by Coppola on grounds of running time to be restored. "I'm the first producer who wanted a movie made longer," Evans brags.