The movie’s triumph, though, was its wit, concentrating on the dynamic contrast of characters: Newman’s Butch is the thinker, fast and calculating; Redford’s Sundance the traditional, silent westerner. They don’t take their lives seriously, but now and then they show moments of perception that hint at the inevitability of a tragic demise (they die in Bolivia). “Damn it, why is everything we’re good at illegal?” Butch asks. Such self-referential irony both softens and enriches, and even the most casual, throwaway exchanges are joyfully charged: During the chase, Butch says to Sundance, “I think we lost ’em. Do you think we lost ’em?” Sundance says no, to which Butch replies, “Neither do I.”
Hill credited “the magic” between Newman and Redford with the movie’s success; Redford says it was Hill who made it tick. “None of us felt we were making the landmark western of the late sixties. But the ground did move. It wasn’t like Willie Boy, where there was a feeling of emotional disengagement between actors and director. George kept us tight. On Butch Cassidy, I remember laughing a lot and thinking, This is just too much fun, which means it’s either shit or gold.”
Mike Frankfurt and Stephanie Phillips had collaborated on Redford’s Fox contract, which was for a flat fee of $150,000, considerably less than a quarter of Newman’s fee with percentage, but still the best of his career. They had hoped for a back-end percentage—a cut of the profits—but Redford was happy. “He had other fish to fry,” says Phillips.
At Thanksgiving, while Redford was dubbing in Los Angeles, Lola and Ilene Goldman discussed establishing a health and consumer activist group. Their talk arose from a chance comment by Suzanna, the Goldmans’ five-year-old daughter, about “the bad air” in Manhattan. On the phone, Redford supported the decision to set up a biweekly roundtable discussion forum at their Seventy-ninth Street apartment. Businesswoman Cynthia Burke and Carlin Masterson, the actress wife of theater actor and director Pete Masterson, joined to formulate the first team, whose task it would be to research health and consumer issues. Twenty other friends, mostly women, also joined, and the group named itself Consumer Action Now (CAN) and pledged to establish a portfolio to tie in with the first Earth Day, scheduled for April 22, 1970, by activist Dennis Hayes. The initial action, partially funded by Redford, was to compile a research paper on food additives that would be published in a widely circulated ecology newsletter, edited by Lola.
Redford supported CAN but concentrated on different group activism. With Stephanie Phillips’s husband, Richard Friedberg, Mike Frankfurt, producer Gene Stavis and businessmen Charles Saltzman and Marty Keltz, he helped fund a new organization called Education, Youth, and Recreation (EYR). Its purpose was to promote “alternative film” through the university campuses of North America. Redford says, “Stavis was the organizer, Friedberg the theoretician, Keltz the salesman. But the impulse was mine. I loved the nouvelle vague. I loved what was happening in Europe, not so much Swinging Britain, which was just consuming itself in self-parody, but with directors like Fellini, Truffaut and of course Bergman who were giving us another view of the human experience. I wanted to encourage a comparable independent artistry in American film and started it there with EYR.”
The idea was profound. For many, 1967 and 1968 represented a pivotal era in American cinema, as in American life. The Oscar successes of radical works such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate marked a fundamental change in the institutional view of filmmaking, and Sidney Poitier’s achievement in hits like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and in becoming 1967’s top box office star signified the progress of civil rights. This seemed to be the fruition of a decade of liberal theorizing that had taken hold among educated youth on the campuses and soaked into mainstream culture. For Redford, the change was an inevitable and desirable social evolution. “I thought we, as a people, were insular and hyperconservative. I thought what Kennedy and those other liberal mold breakers were about was the essential therapy of self-reevaluation. We needed to broaden our knowledge and outlook. We needed social inclusion and attention to the poor, the blacks, the dispossessed. And in our movies we needed the lateral view. It was no good regurgitating Dean Martin comedy action movies forever. We had to have the marginal voices on-screen, so that we could understand how the other half lives. My feeling was that we must explore diversity in our culture and we must find an audience willing to listen.”
The university campus, Redford believed, was a good place to begin. Here were the kids who became the staffers and fund-raisers for Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, and they were now under fire as President Nixon took office. Redford hit the road with EYR. “When I swung a free weekend or two from postproduction on Butch Cassidy, I went out to Berkeley, or wherever I was invited, and pushed the concept. Keltz covered the other bases. The notion was to grab the neglected movies, movies like Billy Friedkin’s The Birthday Party, and offer screening packages from Wednesday night to Sunday night for $450. We had two guiding principles: to promote a different type of cinema and also, as a sideline, to locate and sponsor new talent. I wanted to offer polemic in film in the most democratic, accessible way. What Peter Fonda and Nicholson and Hopper were doing was one way of changing the zeitgeist. I wanted another tack.”
Through Stavis’s efforts, a handful of fledgling filmmakers were funded from EYR’s finance pool, among them Martin Scorsese and Sam Shepard. Scorsese’s NYU short The Big Shave was acquired and distributed, and Shepard, whose play The Unseen Hand Redford had admired at the Yale School of Drama, was personally handed $10,000 to develop a new short. “That wasn’t the best investment I ever made,” says Redford, “because he disappeared to Paris and blew the cash living the émigré life. I didn’t see him for a long time, but he eventually apologized and sent the money back.”
New ground was crossed. Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Gai Savoir was acquired, along with the notable shorts King, Murray and Lions Love and Bob Crawford’s fly-on-the-wall documentary about the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“But in the end it didn’t work,” says Redford. “We misread the campus spirit and got no further than the package we distributed to the University of Pennsylvania. At face value, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and those Chicago Seven guys were winning the war against Vietnam and right-wingism. What we saw was the weeklong takeover of the Columbia campus, and the antiwar rallies. But Nixon was smart and he was lucky. He fought back, and the triumphalism that came with America winning the space race and putting a man on the moon helped him no end. The pendulum was swinging and the appetite for counterculture was uncertain. It surprised me, but the students didn’t want radical film. They wanted to see Doctor Zhivago like everyone else. They were conditioned to want Doctor Zhivago. EYR lasted seven months and lost $250,000. Mike Frankfurt had told me, ‘Don’t worry, at least it’s a good tax-deductible investment.’ It wasn’t even that. But it started something rolling.”
PART THREE
Life on the Mountain
To get to art, one leaves experience—the simple living of life, the following of one’s nature.… Art […] is a journey into thin air, a walk into whiteness, where you lose everything but yourself.
Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism
12
Fame
In January, while Butch Cassidy was in postproduction, Downhill Racer started shooting. Briefly, it felt cursed. Redford was tired, after twelve weeks in the saddle on Butch, and unfocused. While attempting a shortcut at the resort, riding over a ridge on a snowmobile, he crashed. His knee went into the motor and was sliced up. He was hospitalized, and it suddenly looked like he wouldn’t be able to do the ski sequences in Switzerland. “In the movie I look uncomfortable in those early scenes because I was in agony,” he recalls. “But I had no time for recovery. It had come to a point where there was no turning back.”
Michael Ritchie, who felt he was just getting to know Redford, carefully watched him work. Ritchie, Harvard ed
ucated and a magpie for literature, found a friend in Redford. “But the intellectual rationalizations peter out,” said Ritchie. “We were at the point where I had to step up with the proverbial bullhorn and say, ‘Act!’ And when that happened, I was surprised. I’d seen Bob’s work on TV and film. I felt I knew his technique. But I saw that he had changed post–Butch Cassidy. He was a different actor.”
It was true. Prior to Willie Boy, a rhythmic theatricality informed Redford’s performances; playing Coop he introduced laconic understatement, and playing Sundance refined it. “Bob rolled that on into Downhill Racer,” said Ritchie. “He found something in the spatial power of silence, and that became his reference point for Chappellet. I’d take something Salter had written and say, ‘Hey, Bob, you know what we could do here?’ And Bob would say, ‘We do nothing.’ I’d say, ‘Maybe we could use some effects or music,’ and he’d say, ‘No, nothing.’ The end result, with Chappellet as with the Sundance Kid, was that audiences had to reach out to find Bob.”
Redford’s theory about Chappellet, honed with Salter, was that he was a team skier in name only; in fact, dazed by the hunger for personal victory, Chappellet is disconnected from the world, from his father, his coach, his life. Ritchie thought this brave, that Redford was disdainfully anatomizing the sacred place of the jock in society. Redford felt impelled: “I’d been sold on the wondrous jock since childhood. Sports was the glory business. But in my lifetime it changed. The way the old guys conducted themselves—Jack Dempsey, Joe DiMaggio—was a whole lot different from the guys of the sixties. The outspokenness started with Muhammad Ali. And by the seventies, the bad behavior of guys like [Olympic swimming gold medalist] Mark Spitz became de rigueur. It was cool to be a jerk. Winning was everything, bad behavior now excused. That was what I wanted to plumb: Chappellet the asshole. He isn’t nice to the coach because he doesn’t have to be. That’s the privilege of the sportsman now, good or bad: he can conduct himself however he feels. I thought, This is not a good role model marker for the way we, as a society, are going.”
Frankfurt, Gregson, Lola and the kids moved to Wengen for the duration of the shoot, which lent it a pleasant air of a family vacation. Redford continued to work the script. “But we were under the gun,” said Ritchie. “Time was always the enemy. When I’d first met with Gregson and Bob at the Hotel Bel-Air, I was offered the deal of $30,000 in hand, no perks, which I accepted. But that meeting was it in terms of planning. There was hard work from Bob and Salter on the script, but the rest—the structuring of a production—was left to me.” Gregson’s preparation, said Ritchie, left something to be desired. The main race scenes were scheduled to be shot around the Lauberhorn, but no one mentioned that a James Bond extravaganza, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, was being filmed on the Schilthorn, the mountain opposite. Ritchie now realized getting a first-rate crew would be impossible. “The Bond people paid better; they were a big boom-time production,” said Ritchie. “So we got the leftovers.” Moreover, Redford had assumed the availability of Willy Bogner Jr., the Olympic contender turned cameraman and the only accomplished ski photographer working in film; his 1965 documentary, Fascination with Skiing, had won prizes and he knew the European slopes intimately. But Bogner had signed for the Bond picture. At the last minute, Joe Jay Jalbert, a skier from Washington University who worked on the Olympic B team contenders, signed up to shoot the ski action. “We had to train him to use the camera real fast,” said Ritchie. “It sounds simple, but this wasn’t vacation snaps. Joe Jay had to learn to handle a fifteen-pound Arriflex while skiing downhill at full speed. It took forever to get a single, steady, usable shot.”
Gene Hackman and Camilla Sparv were cast in the prominent roles of the team coach and the object of Redford’s affection. “That casting was critical,” said Ritchie, “because, firstly, Gene has no star ego and doesn’t care how you photograph him. And Camilla, like Bob, has classic beauty that you simply couldn’t shoot badly. It was so important because, with the budget we had and the style I wanted, there would be no time for complicated lighting setups. My attitude was, We are making a documentary; we are cutting for reality. There were no read-throughs, and what we were doing every day was a kind of cinema verité.”
The film followed Olympic downhill races over three seasons, as America closes in on its first big ski medals. Chappellet is seeded eighty-eighth at the start, progresses to twentieth and finally, in the third season, wins. But he is undisciplined. “Bob’s way of playing Chappellet was to push up his own nature,” said Ritchie. “Everything he’d been as a kid, the uncompromising flunk out, the reluctant jock—all of it went into Chappellet. Dialogue disappeared all over the place. Several times I asked him, ‘Where’s the goddamn line?’ And his answer was a shrug. His constant nervous mannerism of chewing gum drove me insane. I’d call a cut just to get him to spit out the gum. And then I understood this was Chappellet being Bob. This was Chappellet telling Hackman the coach to fuck off.”
Despite a directive from Paramount’s legal department to the contrary, Redford insisted on doing most of his own skiing, to Hackman’s dismay. “Gene liked Redford,” said Ritchie. “But he was appalled by the skiing. He said, ‘Does that idiot know about insurance liabilities? If he falls, we’re all on our way home.’ ” Walter Coblenz, Ritchie’s production manager, was given the unenviable task of monitoring Redford’s excesses, a nightmare task, says Coblenz, “because you really don’t tell Bob what to do. You politely request, and then hope.”
By the summer, everyone was optimistic. Side by side in separate studios, Butch Cassidy and Downhill Racer were in editing and progressing well. “From Bob’s point of view,” said Ritchie, “it was a fantastic prospect. There was a lot of buzz and expectation about George’s picture, and a lot of curiosity, more than anything, about ours. So Bob, as an actor dependent on the limelight, was well placed. Nervous, but well placed.”
In September, Downhill Racer previewed first. Redford and Ritchie were horrified. Paramount’s marketing people had promised Gregson that the unheralded movie would not be shown after a major feature. They reneged, screening the movie after Midnight Cowboy at a Santa Barbara cinema. “How wrong can you get?” says Redford. “Santa Barbara is a sunshine retirement haven for easterners and the U.S. military. People come to get away from snow. In ten minutes I saw the audience wanted out. People began leaving.” Ali MacGraw, who was attending with her husband, Robert Evans, comforted Ritchie: “She told me it was a great movie, an innovative movie, so fuck ’em all. I took heart from her, because she was a lady of discernment.” Evans, representing Paramount, slapped Redford’s shoulder and told him, “I thought it played very well.” Redford found no comfort in this, since three-quarters of the audience had already bolted the theater. A half hour later, in the restaurant next door, Evans brought in the audience response cards. He was frowning.
“All right. They’re bad.”
“How bad?” Redford asked.
“You can take a look if you want, but they’re all bad.”
Ritchie and Redford set about reediting the film from scratch, taking out the music track and liberally reinstating a “wild track” of natural ambient sounds to enhance the documentary atmosphere. The movie was, says Redford, vastly improved, but the distribution delay suggested a failure from which, receiptswise, the film would never recover.
Meanwhile, the journey to completing Butch Cassidy had been bumpy. The back injury at the end of filming had laid Hill low, and he was forced to edit lying down. But he persevered, delivering a quirky, original movie, laced with sepia-tinged stop frames and stand-apart pop music. The music, all twelve minutes of it, which seemed to amplify the humor, had been an afterthought. At the first rough cut screening in April, the music was a utility sound track, borrowed from existing movies. John Foreman, Paul Newman’s producing partner, had suggested the pop song interlude that accompanies the bicycle montage in which Butch befriends Sundance’s girl, Etta. In April, Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th Street
Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” decorated the scene. After the rough cut, Burt Bacharach was summoned and he came up with “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which bewildered Redford: “I did not know what it was doing there. I knew George wanted to beef up the relationship between Butch and Etta but … a song like that? First of all, it wasn’t raining in the scene. And then, what had any of it to do with their relationship?” Zanuck suggested the song be dropped. Hill refused. The whole editing phase, said Hill, was a firefight.
A pre-premiere screening was held under the auspices of the film society at Yale, Hill and Newman’s alma mater. Redford attended with low expectations. “I wasn’t focused on it. George was, because it was his baby. Bill Goldman was the most excited, because he was obsessed with all the promotional aspects of the business as much as filmmaking itself.” Among the guests was Barbra Streisand, meeting Redford for the first time. “We drove up in a limo with George and there was this milling crowd,” says Redford. “I assumed they were students doing the studenty thing. But when we got out, it was terrifying. Pushing, shoving, screaming. The bleachers were overturned. Joanne [Woodward] was knocked to the ground, and Paul was seriously pissed. Barbra’s dress was almost torn off her body, and I had the feeling we could have been hurt. It was the first time I’d been scared by a crowd. But I also thought it might be a good omen.”
The “star power” of the opening night, with Newman, especially, in attendance, was the intoxicant. But after the screening, when the students voiced their response, the enthusiasm was even wilder. Hill, the veteran, was shocked. “I got to thinking that maybe it was remarkable,” he said, “so I began to look forward to the reviews.”
Robert Redford Page 21
