Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Redford’s displeasure with Paramount grew. Since the studio had done nothing to push Downhill Racer, he instructed CMA to seek reversion of its nontheatrical rights to Wildwood. The request was received unsympathetically. Paramount had invested in him over the years and seemed offended that he was not keen to return the commitment. During the production of Little Fauss, Paramount learned that Redford was preparing a movie for Warners with Sydney Pollack. Stanley Jaffe, the new vice president working with Robert Evans, was allegedly offended, disappointed, doubtless, that his star was moving away from the studio just as he had hit the big time. In the fall of 1970, Paramount complained formally about Redford’s “contempt” for the legal settlement of 1968. The terms of that agreement had specified the actor’s availability for three movies before September 1971, for a fee of $150,000 per movie. That agreement, said Paramount, had not been honored. Jaffe informed Hendler he was “sick of hearing Redford moan”; that Redford had spurned the offers of substantial scripts like Murphy’s War, to be directed by Peter Yates; that the studio in fact lost $1 million to date on Downhill Racer, which had gone $600,000 over budget; that the studio also lost $5 million on Blue (which was finally made starring Terence Stamp).

  Redford was outraged by the misrepresentations. “I cared about Charlie Bluhdorn because I liked him,” says Redford. “I did not care about Paramount. As far as I was concerned, the onus was on them to come up with the good scripts, and they didn’t, so I moved on. They had no allegiance to me. They paid me a lousy $60,000 for Barefoot and $90,000 for Little Fauss. So I felt as though I owed them nothing at all.”

  The heat of Paramount’s fury reflected Redford’s new importance. He was now a hugely valuable commodity.

  13

  Two and a Half Careers

  As Redford became a star, Sydney Pollack was hitting his stride. Burt Lancaster’s patronage and friendship proved their worth on The Scalphunters, the gritty, mature western that made its money back in six months and served as the movie breakthrough Pollack longed for. Lancaster then offered him Castle Keep, a war movie funded by Columbia, to be shot in Yugoslavia. While Pollack worked on Castle Keep with Columbia’s assigned producer, John Calley, he was also preparing an independent project that Charlie Chaplin’s company had been floating for years, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? a brooding social essay about Depression-era excess starring Jane Fonda that would go on to earn nine Academy Award nominations, including one for Pollack as best director.

  For Redford, his friendship with Pollack was more than ever a haven. They sought out each other’s company, kept in constant touch by phone and solicited advice and jokes. “Bob was never ‘work’ in my mind,” said Pollack. “We were coconspirators, really, trying to make sense of Hollywood together. He would share his woes with me, and I with him. I was there for him with advice on Downhill; he was there for me on my movies.”

  As scripts piled up at Wildwood, Redford singled out two submitted by the agent Joe Wizan, a friend of Gregson’s from his London International agency days who was trying to become a producer and packager. The projects were “Apocalypse Now” and “Liver-Eating Johnson: The Legend of the Crow Killer,” both written by Wizan’s new discovery, John Milius, a Missouri-born film school graduate from the University of Southern California who had won an award for a short film. Wizan told Redford, “Pick which one you’d like. I can set either up, no problem.” Redford read and liked both scripts. Each had a primal starkness that was revelatory of a raw, frontier Americanism that interested Redford. Over a couple of days, he reflected on both submissions and decided “Liver-Eating Johnson,” a western, was exactly what he’d been looking for. He phoned Pollack and suggested they do it together.

  For Pollack, the timing was perfect: “I was in the position to get it moving because I’d made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and there was a great industry buzz about it. I’d also come in on budget with Castle Keep, so John Calley was happy. And then, just by luck, John was appointed head of production at Warners and he and Ted Ashley, Warners’ president, started looking for something original they could call the next big thing.”

  Milius was a lifelong admirer of Teddy Roosevelt’s and a champion of what he calls “the warrior culture.” His early writing had a barbarous intensity, projecting a world where humanity and sanity are constantly assaulted and heroism is ambiguous. Pollack loved Milius’s script, which he described as “a stylish, literary piece about a Paul Bunyan type who ate trees: weird!” But he agreed with Redford that in its present form it was unshootable. Redford turned to Milius’s source novel, Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man, and decided the gold was in the original. “It was the story of an authentic mountain man,” he says, “based on well-documented facts and closer to the real West than anything I’d ever read or seen. I made some simple connections: the Rockies, where I lived, wilderness, authenticity, the men who cracked the frontier, truth. I told Sydney, ‘We can do this the authentic way. There’s no other option. Let’s go.’ ”

  With Wizan as producer and Warners’ backing, work started. Edward Anhalt, who had won several Academy Awards throughout the fifties, was assigned the rewrite, and contracts were signed all around. Redford accepted an up-front $200,000 against his best-yet fee of $500,000. Pollack’s fee was $220,000, a 20 percent improvement on Castle Keep.

  Pollack and Calley decided to shoot the film in southern Spain. Redford was shocked. He had been adamant from the outset: this movie should be made in the best, authentic setting—his own front yard. “I had an acute sense of location. The script was the unsensationalized life of a Rocky Mountain trapper. John Johnson, the original mountain man, lived in these canyons around Sundance 120 years ago. That was one good reason to do it here. There was also a budgetary advantage in the Utah right-to-work law. It made financial sense. There was no way I was going to go along with Sydney if he wished to make this on a Warners’ lot with pickups in Spain.”

  Pollack insisted that the movie could not be made entirely on location for its budget of $4 million. But Redford dug his heels in. “He had a stubborn streak a mile wide,” said Pollack. “I argued. I begged. I reckoned, We’ll go through hell on this one, but he’ll get his way.” Redford did. A month after Little Fauss wrapped, the newly titled Jeremiah Johnson started shooting with autumnal pickups in Sundance’s Alpine Meadows, at Mirror Lake, on the flank of Timpanogos and along the ridges of Provo Canyon. “It turned into a mess,” said Pollack. “We simply were not ready for production. As soon as we started, I knew for sure we could not do it for the $4 million agreed. Bob was a very expensive actor by now. And Calley was worried because the numbers didn’t add up. He said, ‘Bob is too costly, and these locations of his are too awkward. It will never work. You will run out of money.’ But Bob continued to be insistent: ‘We can shoot in Utah,’ he said.”

  According to Pollack, Ted Ashley, backed by Warners’ legal executive Frank Wells, pulled the plug in Utah. Warners then announced that the movie would be shot on the back lot, with the second unit doing some background shooting around Lake Arrowhead.

  Redford would have none of it. He flew to Los Angeles with Hendler, Begelman and Fields for a showdown with Warners. Begelman advised Ashley, Calley and Wells that their star might become unavailable because of “illness.” Threats and counterthreats flew. When things calmed down, it was agreed that Ashley, Calley and Wells would deposit $4 million in Zions Bank in Provo, which would represent their total contribution to the production. If the costs ran over, they would have to be covered by director and actor. A lien would be put on Pollack’s production company as collateral.

  Pollack was not at the meeting and felt this proposal was hardest on him. “It wasn’t an easy decision for me to accept,” he said, “because I was only just establishing myself and my company. I thought about getting out at that point, but I couldn’t because Bob had already spent his $200,000.” And it was true that Redford was financially stretched to the limit that summer. Nevertheless,
Redford insists he was as exposed in the deal as his friend. “It was wrong of me to agree to the $4 million in Sydney’s absence, and I did apologize eventually. But I deferred part of my fee, because of the risk. I was sharing this with Sydney, and I wanted to be fair.”

  For a while Pollack refused to return Redford’s calls. “I was pissed,” says Redford. “It was clear this wasn’t going to be an easy film to make, and he was getting cold feet. But we had made promises to each other. I got him on the phone and told him, ‘Don’t fuck me around, Sydney. You know we have to do this picture.’ It was tense and drawn out, but finally loyalty carried the day.”

  David Rayfiel received a sudden frantic summons from Pollack: “He said, ‘Forget you were born in Brooklyn. We have a story about liver-eating frontier savages. Milius has done some good work, Anhalt has done some work, Redford has done some. But I need you to fix it.’ ”

  Milius’s script had been gutted by Anhalt, Redford and Pollack and now revolved around the clash of value systems on the frontier between the white man and the Indian. Johnson’s battle against the elements—at the forefront in Milius’s script—was now background. In search of personal freedom, Johnson, an ex-soldier, leaves civilization to pit his wits against the Rockies. Along the way he befriends the regional tribes, the Blackfoot, Flathead and Crow, adopts an orphan boy and wins a gift bride from the Flathead, before inadvertently offending the Crow by helping a team of army scouts traverse their sacred lands. His new family is slaughtered in revenge and Johnson’s harmony with the wilderness ends.

  “I never saw movies as theatrical three-acters,” says Rayfiel. “For me, a movie is narrative, like a novel. So what I gave was a clarity of flow and, hopefully, some character-illuminating dialogue that pointed up Johnson’s nature and how he responds to his loss.” As part of his revision, Rayfiel gave Pollack and Redford a five-page essay concerning Johnson’s relationship with his Flathead bride. Pollack found this invaluable. “Some juice in that liberated a lot of the story line for Bob and I,” said Pollack. “That human element was missing in Milius. There was no humanized contact. It was formerly just enmity all the way. But David’s notes turned it around for us. Finally we found a shootable script.”

  Pollack’s screenplay file for Jeremiah Johnson is the fattest and most revealing in his script library. It shows what underlay his and Redford’s teamwork. “I was not a front-row political artist any more than I was a visual stylist,” said Pollack. “But I always believed every speck of research was crucial, and the smallest detail must be finessed. Bob was not like that. He had to have a central reality that he could hold on to, and work from there. He was overview, I was detail.” Starting on January 12, 1970, three weeks after the opening of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Pollack recorded his conceptual notes for creating the character of frontiersman Johnson with Redford. He concluded with a quote from a Newsweek article about Redford: “A new movie hero has emerged, often a surrogate [of] the director himself, outside society, alienated by mainstream American values, searching for his identity as he moves across the face of America. These new heroes are often losers whose heroism is measured not in their ability to triumph, but to survive.”

  Thereafter, over the next twelve months, Pollack recorded page after page of conversations, source references and ideas, all focused on reducing the gap between Redford and Johnson. Carol Rossen, who was a friend of Pollack’s as well, believes that Jeremiah Johnson “was the fusion of Bob and Sydney and the interdependency of their creativity. Many people have remarked that Sydney really wanted to be Bob, that all he lacked was the blond mane. And there’s truth in that, because, after all, he was an actor, with an actor’s training. But it was also a spiritual transference. They made seven movies together because they were mirror images of each other. The bottom line is, they saw life in very similar ways.”

  Uninterrupted filming of Jeremiah Johnson finally began in January 1971. But Pollack and his cinematographer, Duke Callaghan, agonized as the schedule swung with the vagaries of weather: “The snows of St. George in southern Utah were terrible,” said Pollack, “and we were using Cinemobiles [mobile ministudios] as the lifelines. There was no way I was going to let it overrun, and Bob was a superb partner in keeping us tight. In the end it was the greatest way to learn production, because I was playing with my own money. And it worked to my advantage: I beat the clock and brought it in at $3.1 million. The deal I’d made gave me 50 percent of the first $100,000 under budget and 25 percent of the second $100,000 and so forth, so I made an extra $100,000-plus by coming in $900,000 under budget.” Pollack and Redford split the reward fifty-fifty.

  Redford’s satisfaction with the movie was spiritual, but others extrapolated different values. There seemed, many said, a concentration of acting technique. The writer Robert Pirsig has observed that Redford’s appeal to the public, like Gary Cooper’s, is the “inscrutable silence,” as portrayed in the Sundance Kid. This, says Pirsig, reflects a Native American demeanor lost to the culture. In Jeremiah Johnson Pollack observed a finessed focus: “He surprised me. He was running around with me, doing all the production things, riding snowmobiles and digging us out and laboring. But then the shooting started, and he retreated inside himself. So much of it was mime. And to mime, you need some extraordinary composure because if you are going to be self-conscious, this is where it will show. I got the impression he was here in the canyon for all the right reasons, and the relaxation, that honesty, took him to this very, very calm place. Everything became minimalist, very contained. I did not direct that pacing. He did. For me, he became another kind of actor on that picture, a far more internal actor, and I always tried afterward to tap into that place.”

  Much credit, too, is Pollack’s, since it was he who assembled the visual collage surrounding Redford’s inward journey, most striking in the sequence, not long after the movie’s intermission (it was presented as a two-part movie in theaters), when Johnson, having led the soldiers through the Crow lands, returns alone, homeward-bound. Duke Callaghan’s camera, alternating vast panoramas with microscopic close-ups, animates Johnson’s fear of the consequence of his tribal transgression and his smallness against wilderness. “Finally, you don’t ‘act’ a movie like Jeremiah Johnson,” says Redford. “It becomes an experience, into which you fit and flow. It was grueling and I was changed by it, no question. We re-created a way of life that real people lived in these real mountains, the same now as they were then. You learn by immersing yourself in their reality.”

  As postproduction finished, Lola and the kids, with the help of Sundance caretakers Mike Shinderling and Jerry Hill, marked Redford’s thirty-fourth birthday by building him a mud and wood hideaway like Johnson’s on the meadow trail to North Point, high above the A-frame. This retreat—where he could sleep on a mud dais, cook over a hole in the floor and watch the stars beyond the glacial peak of Timpanogos through the loose pine slats—deeply touched him, and it has become a place of reflection and solace over the years.

  On October 22, 1970, a day after the release of Little Fauss and Big Halsy, Lola gave birth to a daughter, Amy, a full ten years after Shauna’s arrival. Redford welcomed the domestic celebration as an invitation to reprioritize his life. Film work had consumed him for five years and, given his new success, looked likely to accelerate. He felt the need to address his other interests, and, he says, “fill out the palette” of his life.

  Activism was the main issue. The Goldmans’ apartment at 815 Madison Avenue became unofficial operational headquarters while the Redfords decorated their new apartment, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street. While Lola, Ilene and the circle of friends campaigned for research into the use of phosphates and detergents, Redford encouraged the picketing of supermarkets. Cynthia Burke, a principal CAN administrator, saw Redford as a major asset—especially given his new celebrity—but expected no long-term involvement from him. “He was really too strikingly individualistic to be absorbed into the CAN team,” she says.
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br />   The direction of Redford’s activism was clarified by Jeremiah Johnson, turning him permanently to wilderness preservation and environmentalism. During Jeremiah, at the behest of the American Museum of Natural History, he had recorded a wildlife conservation album, The Language and Music of the Wolves, which became a national best seller for Columbia Records and inspired wide debate about depleted wilderness species. This satisfied him more than much he had done over the last few years. More and more he found himself absorbed by environmental study. He read Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring, a clarion call against the earth’s degradation, and former interior secretary Stewart Udall’s The Quiet Crisis, which traced the route from Indian stewardship to the technological rape of the land. It intrigued him that, after the first Earth Day, The New Republic had mocked the concept of eco-activism, yet six months later a full issue was devoted to the subject. Shortly after, in December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had come into being. Redford interpreted all these movements as signs of a national willingness to assess neglected, critical issues. He was proud of CAN and Lola’s work but he sought something closer to wilderness for his own focus and found it almost immediately, literally in his own backyard.

  For months he had been observing the buildup of heavy machinery at the mouth of the Provo Canyon Road. There had long been a plan to expand the two-lane highway into a wider cross-state conduit, which he had spoken out against. Now it appeared to be under way. Redford understood that a widened road would deface the landscape, but he only grasped the full extent of the potential impact when the local chapter of Trout Unlimited asked him to become formally involved. The Provo River, one of the great trout rivers of the West, was under threat. Redford researched the proposed road and discovered the extent of the vested interests: elected officials and transport department executives who owned sand quarries and gravel supply companies. On the group’s behalf, Redford visited Utah governor Calvin Rampton. Redford had been good for business in Utah: he had created many jobs and ensured prominent western premieres of Butch Cassidy and Downhill Racer at Provo and Orem. But Rampton gave him the brush-off. “I sat and listened to all the old chestnuts about due process,” says Redford. “What he meant was the vested interests would continue to control the process. I suddenly saw that this was the ancient issue, the old-style abuse of Indian lands all over. What I was dealing with, I quickly learned, was the tip of the iceberg in the West. In the preceding decade, no fewer than six major power plants had been sited in the Four Corners. No one in New York or L.A. minded much. But they were causing the kind of doomsday pollution scenario Rachel Carson prophesied. I decided there and then it was time to get off my ass and do something, even if it meant making an enemy of Rampton.”