One of popular culture’s most unlikely transformations, the one that has moved Robert Evans from seedy Hollywood lothario to post-modern folk legend, is now complete.
Evans, looking more chiseled and suave than he ever did in real life, is the black-turtlenecked hero and star (and, of course, producer) of “Kid Notorious,” the new Comedy Central animated series (9:30 p.m. Wednesdays).
It’s about the exploits of producer Robert Evans, portrayed here as a cross between Dean Martin, Burt Reynolds in his prime and James Bond.
And it completes an incredible story arc that took Evans from women’s-wear magnate (Evan-Picone) to actor (“The Sun Also Rises,” as the expressionless bullfighter at the center of things) to super-producer (“Love Story,” “The Godfather”) to cocaine criminal and guy who pretty much could only get arrested in his town.
The 1990s saw something of a comeback, though not so much for the film production (“Sliver”) as for the larger-than-life character Evans wanted to be viewed as.
His 1994 autobiography “The Kid Stays in the Picture” was a name-dropping, self-aggrandizing favorite in the movie business.
A 1998 stroke that almost killed him mellowed people’s feelings toward him. The 2002 movie based on the book burnished the legend even further, producing an image of Evans as the (literally) cocksure underdog, fighting the Hollywood system from within, but suffering the tragic, drug-induced downfall that brought him to the brink of poverty.
And now the cartoon, co-produced by movie co-director Brett Morgen completes the mythmaking.
“You name me another man in the history of Hollywood,” Evans told reporters in July, ” . . . that started running a studio and ended up with his own animated cartoon.”
Hmmm. Was that Bugs Bunny character ever head of a studio? Probably not.
But his blindness to the outside world is part of the charm. He had begun that news conference with characteristic braggadocio: The nurse who came to deliver his testosterone shot that very morning, he said, also invited herself into Evans’ bed in a particularly graphic manner.
True story? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s hard not to love the idea of a Hollywood where celebrities get offered sexual favors even when their pants are down so they can receive a needle that’s supposed to fight old age.
Against the backdrop of Evans the legend, the cartoon being not particularly engaging is disappointing but almost beside the point.
Ex-“King of the Hill” writers Alan Cohen and Alan Freedland, along with Morgen and Evans, translate the life into drawings.
And while they nail the look and idea of Evans — being able to say, “Baby, you take my breath away,” in scores of languages, turning a night in jail into a hit Broadway production, an all-rap “Godfather” sequel — what they put around him gets in the way.
Having his African-American housekeeper, Tollie Mae (Niecy Nash, “Reno 911”), play like a holdover from “Gone with the Wind” is probably supposed to be daring. Maybe it’s even based on truth, like the butler character, English. But in the stark relief of scripted programming, it’s just unpleasant.
Like the first-rate, if only marginally trustworthy biopic, this one has the good sense to star Evans as the voice of Evans. But his boozy verbal swagger loses some of the punch it had in the film when you realize these are lines conceived for him rather than things he actually said or wrote.
And the scripts do not, in a phrase that Evans likes to invoke, “touch greatness.”
Episode One tries about 50 times to make something funny out of Sharon Stone heading to Broadway to do “The Vagina Monologues,” and it fails about 50 times.
There’s a similarly cheap shot at screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, shown (but not named) as a vagrant. But no matter. As Evans himself implied, the idea that there is a Robert Evans cartoon is more important than the cartoon itself, baby. Eat your heart out, Ali McGraw.
