Sitting on the perimeter fence of the homestead one day, admiring Timpanogos with Frankfurt, Redford said, “I’d like to own it all, Mike.”
Frankfurt smiled. “What? A mountain? You’d like to own the entire canyon?”
“Yep. I’d like to make sure no one screws it up. I mean it. Could we afford it?”
Frankfurt remembers thinking, He doesn’t have the cash to own it, but he’d make the perfect custodian. Redford explained that a few days earlier Stan Collins had informed him that the Stewarts were negotiating a sale to two rival property developers. “Their plan was for tract housing,” says Frankfurt. “Clear the screw pines, dig into the ski slopes, build, build, build.” Frankfurt recalls that Redford was upset by the plan. “He said, ‘Can you imagine why anyone would just ditch this beautiful place for money?’ It was so heartfelt that I was moved. I told him, ‘Okay, you want the whole canyon? The answer is no—you cannot afford it. But let’s give it a shot anyway. There are tax breaks for second properties. We can leverage. We can be inventive. It might work.’ ”
At that moment, says Redford, the notion of an arts sanctuary was not in his thoughts: “I wanted to preserve the land, that was all.” Stephanie Phillips, an agent who had begun working with Redford, recalls it differently: “I know Bob says that, but in my memory he already had more than a hunch about what this property could eventually be used for. We were in the middle of a cultural revolution in America. So much was changing, with the counterculture, with entertainment. Bob was onto it. Even then, at the very start of his expansion in the canyon, the idea was fermenting. Here, he thought, can be a haven for the arts, an experimental place. New York and Los Angeles were the centers, of course, but he was pondering how he could bring this virgin hinterland into the equation.”
Frankfurt turned to a friend, the Los Angeles lawyer Gary Hendler, for advice on acquiring a substantial acreage from the Stewarts. Hendler’s advice was to use the 1966 tax break for second-home purchases to obtain credit. He agreed with Frankfurt that the lands could then be sustained by expanding the recreation facilities, while holding development in check. Accordingly, two separate plots were purchased that defined a large family estate for the Redfords north of the ski area and, on the opposite side of the Alpine Loop road, the nascent resort itself. The family estate amounted to 1,179 acres; the resort, 2,200 acres. The cost, almost entirely leveraged, including the resort’s assets, was $1.6 million.
On August 5, 1968, in a press conference at the Utah Travel Council in Salt Lake City, the deal was announced. Wildwood Developments, a company composed of Redford, Frankfurt, Bob Gottschalk (Frankfurt’s business partner), Boston banker Hans Estin and Stan Collins, would relaunch Timp Haven as a year-round public recreation venue. From the podium, Frankfurt said the business objective was to double current facilities “while still maintaining the present beauty of the area.” To ensure year-round business, there would be a snowmaker installed and a lodge built to draw the vacationers who usually gravitated to Colorado. Eventually, said Frankfurt, a Swiss-type village would be erected, “with architecture strictly controlled to maintain uniformity and harmony with the natural surroundings.” Redford then took center stage, emphasizing that “the new enterprise will be geared toward family recreation,” emphasizing camping, fishing and riding. “As a business plan it looked okay,” Frankfurt remembers. “But there were disadvantages, the biggest being Bob. Yes, he wanted to preserve the canyon and he was prepared to operate a ski resort to fund it all. But truly, he wanted it all for himself. He didn’t want snowmakers and hospitality lodges. He wanted a fiefdom that he would invest himself in. And he wanted to personalize it with a name that was dear to him.”
Frankfurt was about to turn in late one night in New York when Redford called from Utah. “I got the magic name,” he said. “I want to call it Bougainvillea.”
Frankfurt said, “Forget it, Bob. Not only will no one remember the name, they’ll never be able to spell it. Think of something else.”
Ever since Lewis and Clark ventured west, settlers had struggled with the parallel joys and dangers of the New World. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales condensed the experience, introducing Natty Bumppo, the adventurer, and his alter ego, the native Chingachgook, each inhabiting a wilderness of extraordinary contradictions. The dime novels published by Beadle and Adams half a century later brought the scout, the cowboy and the outlaw into American life. Thereafter, actors like William S. Hart and movies like The Great Train Robbery in 1903 rounded off a stratified universe where Indian attacks, cattle rustling and mail robberies defined survival. By 1940, of the 477 movies released that year, 30 percent were westerns. Of the 178 movies produced in 1967, just 11 percent were westerns. What remained of the western fantasy was a bloodbath in the hands of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Choreographed violence dominated; nuance of cultural or historical exploration was rare.
Still, Redford’s interest was historical investigation: “I knew I was ignorant. I had a clear picture of myself as an undereducated American. What I’d learned from Tot was the tradition of the mountain man, of self-sufficiency. What I’d educated myself about was the arrogance of easterners settling the West. As the years went on, I developed a need to understand the Native American dispossession. Curiosity drove me to seek out ethnic projects at that time, and I narrated the Blue Lake documentary about developer exploitation of Navajo resources. But I wasn’t an activist. I felt maybe I could contribute something by trying to find western movies of insight.”
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here was promising. It was based on Harry Lawton’s carefully documented 1960 novel, Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt, the theme of which was the victimization of the Native American, explored in the true story of a Las Vegas Paiute, Willie Boy, who “captures” for marriage a Chemehuevi girl. In 1909 the real-life tribal dispute became a national scandal when Willie Boy shot dead the father of his bride-to-be and went on the run, pursued by Sheriff Wilson, Constable Ben de Crevecoeur and a posse dedicated to the idea, prevalent at the time, that “a good Indian is a dead Indian.” The story’s significance, as Harry Lawton wrote, was “not just in the fact that this was the last great manhunt in the Western tradition, but in the nature of the Paiute, who was the protagonist of the hunt.” The Paiute tribe’s problem, Lawton stated, was its refusal to conform to modern American life.
Writer-director Abe Polonsky, like Carol Rossen’s father, had suffered badly at the hands of McCarthyism. A committed Socialist harassed into exile, he continued to ghostwrite Hollywood scripts, none of which matched his 1947 masterpiece for John Garfield, the boxing story Body and Soul. During the sixties he lived in France, spending almost five years developing Willie Boy. In the mid-sixties a liberal-minded executive at Universal, the former agent Jennings Lang, was intent on green-lighting blacklistees’ projects. Polonsky’s Native American drama accordingly became a personal mission that finally took wing with the Paramount loan-out.
Polonsky’s original plan was to faithfully reenact the 1909 incident with Native Americans. Universal management flatly refused. Later Polonsky said in interviews that he got what he wanted, casting Redford as Coop (a fictionalized composite deputy sheriff, named in tribute to Gary Cooper), Robert Blake as Willie Boy and Katharine Ross as the girl. Redford recalls it differently: “Universal would not support authenticity. In fact, they ignored Abe completely and offered me the role of Willie Boy. I thought that was absurd. Since the studio wouldn’t even entertain the notion of casting honestly, I recommended a friend, Bobby Blake, whom I’d admired in This Property Is Condemned. I said I would play the sheriff.”
Redford liked Polonsky, but he believed the years in the wilderness had ground down his confidence. An article in Variety criticized Polonsky’s approach to movies: “He is not a director who works through his actors. Thesps are simple tools to his vision … their presences more than their abilities are used.” Redford agreed: “There was plenty of interchange of ideas but there was no improv
isation. Connie Hall, who was Katharine Ross’s husband, was a very experienced cinematographer, but he was also an artist with a heavy authorial viewpoint. He saw Abe stumbling and he stole the movie from under him. I loved the script. I loved what the movie aspired to, but it evolved outside [Abe’s] control into something else.”
It was a pity, because so much of the movie was earnest and ambitious. Setting it on the real-life Morongo Indian Reservation, Polonsky clearly portrayed the separate, competing communities ravaged by prejudice. Coop, the law enforcer played by Redford, courts the compliant government superintendent Dr. Elizabeth Arnold, played by Susan Clark. This affair parallels Willie Boy’s forbidden courtship till Willie Boy kills his girl’s father. Coop is then swept into a crazed posse hunt and, in the end, is obliged to go alone after Willie Boy in hopes of saving him.
The similarities to The Chase drove Redford’s enthusiasm. “The last forty minutes were the reason I chose to do the movie,” says Redford. “There were only a few lines of dialogue in that last act, because it was all about the hunt. It had real tension, like [Fred] Zinnemann’s final showdown between Gary Cooper’s marshal and the villain Frank Miller in High Noon. It was totally original. Then Universal panicked: Who would watch forty minutes of mime? So, exactly as happened with Arthur Penn and Spiegel, they took the edit away from Abe and pared down the final act to eight minutes and redid the ending. In the screenplay, the tension resolved in the exhaustion of the protagonist and antagonist: they have hit the wall; they are burned out. Coop finally respects Willie Boy’s tenacity and won’t kill him. Willie Boy fatalistically accepts Coop’s right to kill him. It was a powerful impasse, a brilliant ending, but the studio wanted a Jeff Chandler black-and-white shoot-out, so that’s the way it was done. When I saw it, I was shattered. It was spoiled. I just had to let it go.”
In the run-up to Willie Boy, Redford started preparing his skiing movie, which was now called Downhill Racer. “What I hoped for with Willie Boy and Downhill were movies that illuminated the human condition. For Downhill, the first thing was to get rid of Oakley Hall’s source novel, which was après-ski stuff. I decided I wanted to examine the illusion of greatness in winning at all costs. I like the gray area, the bit where the duality of human nature shows through.” At Wildwood, a series of long, late-night script meetings addressed every aspect of the movie-to-be. Redford deliberated awhile before choosing writer James Salter, whose short fiction he admired, to develop his concept. “It became a grand-scale thing in increments. I decided it would be a social commentary about competitive sports. Then I decided it would be part of a trilogy that looked at American life. After the skiing movie, we would make a movie about political life, and then a movie about big business. All with the same theme: the Pyrrhic victory of winning.”
The trickiest part of getting Downhill going was outmaneuvering Bluhdorn, who was determined to see his golden boy back as a romantic pinup. In February, as Redford prepared to go to France on a $20,000 Paramount budget to secure footage from the 1967 Winter Olympics, Bluhdorn confronted him with the suggestion of a musical remake of the Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn classic, Roman Holiday. “My attitude was, Oh, please! But I couldn’t say a word. I went along with him.” Franco Zeffirelli and Dino De Laurentiis were in partnership for the Roman Holiday remake, so Bluhdorn arranged a first-class ticket to Rome to meet with them. Redford took the ticket, then traded it for economy tickets for the Wildwood team to Grenoble, France. “I thought, It’ll serve the same end: Paramount will get a great movie out of this.”
For background research, Salter moved to Grasse, not far from Grenoble in southern France, where the Olympic teams were based. Redford gave Dick Barrymore, a young ski photographer, the job of shooting the crucially important Olympic footage. Then he asked sportswriter Dan Jenkins, a neighbor in the Redfords’ Manhattan apartment building, for assistance in soliciting the support of the American Olympic skiing team. Jenkins persuaded the national skiing coach, Bob Beattie, to allow inside access at the off-limits areas of the Olympic Village. “This footage was, in reality, ‘test footage,’ to show Bluhdorn we could do it,” says Redford. “So it had to be excellent. We gave $18,000 to Barrymore and $2,000 to Salter.”
It started well. Beattie was a gentleman; the Olympic team was generous with time and advice. But then, three-quarters of the way through filming, Barrymore left for other projects, presenting Redford and Gregson with twenty thousand feet of 16 mm film. “Suddenly it was chaos,” says Redford. “In order to get the movie green-lighted for the fall, we had to present our footage to Bluhdorn urgently.” Redford reorganized his schedule, taking time out from Willie Boy and editing the footage himself. “Then I saw a problem. We had lots of shots of slopes and snow and skiers. But we had no shots of me in this show reel. By now it was high summer in L.A. and suddenly I was obliged to create a winter ski scene. That became the first directorial challenge of my life.”
Redford went to Shelby’s Sporting Goods store in Westwood, where he’d worked briefly in his teens, and borrowed a motorcycle helmet, silver duct tape, a Windbreaker and goggles. A replacement cameraman, John Bailey, was summoned. Bailey was twenty-three, a recent college graduate whose ambition was to make big movies. Together they drove to Mulholland Drive, with a couple of wooden boxes as props. Mulholland is in the hills, with a high skyline that overlooks Los Angeles. Bailey set up his camera while Redford pulled on the phony ski gear. “We’d painted stars and stripes on the helmet, and that was all we needed. John lay down in the grass to shoot skyward, like I was the skier in action. I kept taking drags of a cigarette, the smoke of which replicated my breathing in icy weather. It worked. Cut into the Grenoble stuff, it looked authentic.”
In July, Redford showed Bluhdorn eighteen minutes of tightly edited film. “It was all straightforward after that. He liked it. He trusted me. We had our green light to start shooting after Willie Boy.”
Redford found a newcomer, Michael Ritchie, to direct on the strength of an NBC television pilot, The Outsider. It starred Darren McGavin in a Dashiell Hammett takeoff, full of moody grayness and long silences. “I wanted an iconoclast, so I called him. We met. We had a meeting of minds, and I said, ‘Let’s go!’ ”
Tying down the script became the central focus. Revisions at Wildwood were daily affairs. Everyone contributed, even Natalie Wood, who was now Richard Gregson’s constant companion. The main problem was establishing the nature of the central character, the jock David Chappellet. Redford emphatically did not want an old-style hero. Salter had thought the American ski champion Billy Kidd would be the perfect template. “He was tough—from a poor part of town, I imagined, honed by years on the icy runs of the East,” Salter later explained in his memoirs.
One night over dinner in Grenoble, surrounded by the ski team, Redford pointed across the room. “The racer he was interested in was at another table,” wrote Salter. “I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself—which of course should have marked him from the first—sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times. ‘Him?’ I said. ‘Sabich?’ Yes, said Redford; when he was that age he had been just like him—vain, rough edged, with a bit of arrogance, and a daredevil.”
Salter’s treatment, dated September 1967, proposed the protagonist as a twenty-one-year-old Vermonter, “like the young Dempsey, hard and not as big as one would expect.” The best of it was the acerbic coach-jock relationship, deftly lifted from Oakley Hall’s novel. And, beyond that, Salter’s poetry: “And now over a sequence that is almost entirely close shots, shots like yesterday’s newspapers, last week’s, last year’s shots that are like Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, like the white Madrid infirmaries of Death in the Afternoon, a virtually silent sequence of a badly injured man being carried into x-ray, his clothing cut away.…”
“I thought, If we can blend Salter’s eloquence with Ritchie’s quirkiness, we’re
really onto something,” says Redford. “It seemed a good process: Salter, Ritchie, then me, all contributing differing elements. What we all decided we wanted was something that had a semidocumentary feel, that seemed real.”
Money was a problem. And though foreign location work was more expensive, Redford was adamant that only Europe would do for the location. Gregson flew back to Europe and found the perfect locale at Wengen, alongside the Jungfrau, the highest mountain in Switzerland. The choice was dictated by the Fédération Internationale de Ski races, which were staged on the nearby Lauberhorn and which would form the background of the action. The cost projections soared beyond the allotted $1.6 million.
“On the face of it,” says Mike Frankfurt, “Bob was in clover. It had taken a year, but he had overcome the animosity with Bluhdorn. He had formed his own production company. He had a major movie in Willie Boy. We had even managed to buy the Stewart lands at Timp and set in motion a little recreation industry. But those were the surface realities. In truth, he hadn’t consolidated. The self-produced Paramount picture was potentially an unaffordable juggernaut. Whether he and Ritchie could actually pull off an independent movie—because that’s what it really was—was up in the air. And, also, Universal was not happy with Willie Boy. It was done, but it was languishing on a shelf. He was in clover, but he had a lot to prove.”
Robert Redford Page 19
