"There are three sides to every story: my side, your side and the truth," opines legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans before launching into an extremely subjective documentary about himself.

Film producers being what they are, it's got all the makings of a smugly unpleasant homage to a man that was the big studio's representative on earth.

However, the directors have fashioned an eminently likeable documentary about a Paramount power-broker...but one who had an ironic sense of his own ridiculousness.

Plucked from a swimming pool by Norma Shearer in the Fifties, the former underwear salesman was launched into the movies originally as matinee idol-style actor.

However, he found his true vocation as a producer, and a hit string of films included Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and, most famously, The Godfather.

Each film release overflows with a wealth of anecdotes: Ol' Green Eyes, Frank Sinatra, served divorce papers on Mia Farrow when she refused to quit Rosemary's Baby.

Evans even told Francis Ford Coppola to make the first version of The Godfather more like a saga and "less like a trailer".

But soon his life was being lived like someone in the movies and not outside them, and his waning star was in free-fall after a cocaine bust and a tenuous link to a murder trial.

Evans makes a scabrously funny raconteur: relating his over-the-top wooing of Ali McGraw, he allegedly told her he was "just seven digits" away from her night and day.

Archive footage, classic film clips and digitally animated photographs are expertly fashioned into a compelling account of his life.

But it is Evans' own off-screen narration which provides the movie with most of its wonderful moments, related in the gravel tones of a B-movie voiceover.

While suffering a stroke in front of horrormeister Wes Craven he is reputed to have looked up and told him: "There's never a dull moment around here." He was right.

Tim Evans