Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  In the weeks that followed, Redford and Pakula divided the background research objectives, with Pakula’s finely detailed political research led by his Harvard graduate assistant Jon Boorstin, and Redford’s taking the form of “character study,” which was achieved by spending long hours driving around with Woodward and Bernstein as they continued their investigation of Chuck Colson, a Watergate conspirator who was not yet charged but in the process of plea-bargaining for his role in smearing Daniel Ellsberg. “This was exactly what I’d wanted Bill Goldman to do,” says Redford. “We needed to get in there with those key figures, to dig into the life. Goldman did it before on other projects, but he wasn’t there for this, which I knew would be one of the most tricky films I’d ever make.”

  The mood of the nation, sated on treachery, soaked fast into Hollywood. By 1974, there were several worthy conspiracy movies, including The Conversation and Chinatown. The monumental industry change of Steven Spielberg’s all-out pop diversion Jaws was months away but, for a moment, a new, different, more discerning age seemed to be dawning. For Pakula, this was a crossroads moment in American cinema. With ten years of producing behind him, ranging from To Kill a Mockingbird to Up the Down Staircase, Pakula had long predicted a maturation of audience appetites. His own directing began in 1969 with The Sterile Cuckoo, a stagy, collegiate psychological study starring Liza Minnelli, and was followed by the thoughtful thriller Klute, for which Jane Fonda won an Academy Award. “My belief, based on my experiences, was that a vast market was not addressed. Audiences were impressed by the foreign imports, but very few American filmmakers experimented. American theater per se was similar. We had a disproportionate interest in diversion therapy and too little interest in discovery. What came upon us in the Watergate era after a decade of assassinations and dirty tricks was a kind of national enlightenment. Collectively we became cynical. I thought it was healthy. I also thought it was bound to affect entertainment culture, and I remember feeling then, more than at any time before or since, that we were onto our own ‘New Wave.’ Great movies were under way—things like Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Network—and we were suddenly looking for social discussion in film, and I thought this was a breakthrough. And this was my attitude in taking on All the President’s Men.”

  For Redford, there were glorious offers abounding—including roles in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and in Superman—but he declined. He was sure he wanted to do something with weight. The meeting point between him and Pakula was their common view that accorded intellect and curiosity to the audience. “I knew Bob wanted Wildwood to gain distinction as a producer of quality films,” said Pakula, “and he wanted signature, personal films. He used all his assets. He had great personal skills with agents. They liked him mostly because he was a money magnet, but also because he was earnest. He was the real deal. No one was going to get him into a Mel Brooks movie.”

  As research on the Watergate movie went on, Redford decided to fit in another acting role. With three strong successes behind them, Pollack was more eager than ever to make another movie with his old friend. The fact that Pollack had acquired a cabin at Sundance, ten minutes across the canyon, kept communication open and easy. “We talked about projects all the time,” said Pollack. “We were on the phone daily, always saying, ‘Maybe.’ Then I saw an opportunity during that summer of 1974. I had a deal with Paramount; he had time. I thought, If we can hone the right one down fast, it’s perfect.”

  For a while, the two men worked evenings on Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To, an epic, Joycean novel Redford loved. But a workable adaptation, it was agreed, would take years. They pledged to continue, but looked elsewhere. One evening in Utah as he was raking through Watergate research documents, Redford turned again to a script that had come to him with Peter Yates’s name appended. It was written by the former Batman writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. and adapted from a slim, melodramatic novel by James Grady, a twenty-four-year-old assistant to Lee Metcalf, the U.S. Senator from Montana.

  “To begin with,” says Redford, “it was nothing I was interested in. It was a potboiler, all set in D.C., and the end had guys parachuting down with Sten guns and big cannons and heroin and the kind of stuff that didn’t excite me personally. But in the middle was a great concept, about a guy struggling to deal with a situation he cannot understand. It was basically about paranoia, and that did grab me.” This, at its heart, was a CIA story. With a simple shift of emphasis, Redford felt, Grady’s book could be moved from potboiler to a postulation of the CIA’s ambiguous morality. Form would then shift from thriller to commentary, the implication of which was a national security system fouled by its own principles, where individual objective and institutional aim were not often, or even necessarily, harmonious. This fit well with the Watergate zeitgeist. Redford pulled on a jacket and crossed the canyon by motorbike to knock on Pollack’s door. “I told him, ‘This one has something. Read it and tell me if you think we can remodel it. I think we can.’ ”

  Semple’s redrafted script transformed the six days of the Condor—the duration of the chase in which the CIA agent code-named Condor attempts to dodge assassination as he unravels an internal coup designed to cover up a heroin-trading cabal—into three. Despite Semple’s verbal dexterity—and his evident artistic growth in his recent adaptation of Papillon, combined with impressive work for Pakula on The Parallax View—he failed to produce the paranoia Redford hoped for. Pollack once again turned to David Rayfiel to layer the script. “Bob’s instincts were spot-on,” said Pollack. “It was a Russian dolls scenario, and it had this tremendous personal story of Joe Turner, the guy who trusts his organization, then wakes up one day to see that everything he believed in has turned on him and everyone’s out to get him. The story then unfolds like a Hitchcock film, with the audience pulling for Joe as he moves through this bewildering world just one step ahead of a bullet in the back. All the time he’s homing in on a criminal cover-up. But it was not an easy adaptation to film, and I saw Lorenzo’s problem very quickly. The action, ironically, slowed it down. There needed to be a lot more humanity, and I saw that in terms of romantic engagement. I have been accused of playing that card too often, but I make no apologies because it engages people. How human beings connect, how they embrace and trust and love, engages people. And once you have that connection, the audience is paying attention and all the rest works.” It was Rayfiel’s ultimate job, said Pollack, to bring “breathing and feeling” into the story. Finally, after ten collaborations with Pollack, Rayfiel was on his way to earning his first formal screen credit. “A lot of the humanizing was in building up the girl role, Kathy Hale,” says Rayfiel. “She’s the innocent bystander, a photographer Turner kidnaps and holes up with and talks to. She becomes his dialogue with us, the audience, and with her we share his tension.”

  At the end of the summer, as they worked at a Connecticut house Redford rented close to Rayfiel’s, important new elements were introduced by Redford, including substituting oil for the heroin cover-up in Grady’s novel, which Redford thought more apt, especially in light of the environmental stance he was taking in Utah. It was also his idea that Turner, having exposed Atwood and Joubert, the CIA villains, should turn his information over in final retribution to The New York Times, a symbolic salute to the best of the Fourth Estate. “I worked hard on Three Days of the Condor,” says Redford, and Rayfiel attests to his “really vivid insights, not just lines of dialogue, but overview. I was impressed by his intuition for drama, for when a scene should start and how vulnerable the hero should seem—just so much, not too much. He had a writer’s eye and ear more than any actor I ever worked with.”

  Redford also collaborated on the casting, approving Max von Sydow for Joubert, Addison Powell for Atwood, Cliff Robertson for Higgins, the CIA’s deputy director, and Faye Dunaway for Kathy Hale. The movie was then relocated from the novel’s Washington to New York, and a tight schedule was honed to facilitate the hoped-for winter st
art of the Woodward-Bernstein movie.

  Redford felt he was focused; Pollack sometimes didn’t. For him, too often, “Bob’s attention was divided. He was into patrolling Washington with Hersh and McGrory a little too much. We started shooting in October, before we lost the light [of the early winter evenings], but it got quite stressed from time to time. I remember complaining to him, ‘Excuse me, can I get five fucking minutes of your time, please?’ I was also uptight because Dino [De Laurentiis, the executive producer] had a tough reputation, and my neck was on the line.”

  Redford feels that Pollack was unfair in his judgment, and also dismisses the crew rumors that he and Dunaway did not get on. He very much liked Dunaway, he says, though he felt at that time she “existed in a bubble emotionally” and seemed intensely distracted, perhaps by events in her personal life. “Those rumors might have originated from one incident, where she had to rail at me with some very rapid lines and she simply could not remember the words. So I left the room and Sydney stepped in and delivered her speeches to her line by line.”

  When Pollack previewed the first cut for De Laurentiis and friends, it proved a major disappointment. “Every part of it was awkward, every beat was off,” he remembered. To fix it, he instructed Don Guidice, his editor, to “cut every scene. Take the heads off every shot. Take the tails off every shot. Take out reaction shots. Take out establishing shots. Reduce everything by half.”

  The effect, says Redford, was stunning. “Sydney had never made a film that moved as fast as a moving train and looked so tense. It was a new style of work for him, and it set the bar for all his later thrillers.”

  Pollack was proud. As contributions to paranoia movies go, he knew he had scored. It was now Pakula’s turn.

  Sundance, meanwhile, had taken a debilitating body blow. In 1973 serious competition arrived with the opening of Park City, a new resort funded by a California businessman, fifteen miles up the road at a higher elevation, with more organized accommodations and services. Redford’s resort manager, Brent Beck, saw Sundance at a turning point. “We were on our knees by the time Park City opened. When the snows came, our business was limitless. In 1973 we had 122,000 day-pass skiers. But the problem was, the snow often didn’t come till late January, sometimes even later. Hendler was goading me on because I was the chief executive with the responsibility of making it all viable, but the only extra revenue I could generate was from leasing acreage for sheep farming. That amounted to nickels and dimes. We charged $6 a head for sheep, and there weren’t many sheep because Bob didn’t want the area overfarmed. So income from farming was just $1,200 a month. As soon as Park City came on the scene, we knew we were going to the wall, that there was no way to survive unless we went a radical new route.”

  Redford had been routinely pumping in a minimum of $300,000 a year from his own pocket. Now it was apparent that not even this annual injection could keep the resort afloat. Compromises had to be made. Stan Collins brought in Bobby Davenport, the Kentucky Chicken King franchise owner, as coexecutive to manage a newly restructured resort. The first priority, with the help of Davenport’s credit line, was to create more accommodations for overnight visitors. Beck went around the canyon to the existing plot holders, like Sydney Pollack, Steve Frankfurt and Jeremiah Johnson set designer Ted Haworth, and persuaded them to put their cabins into a rental pool. “These cabins were second homes for the residents,” says Beck, “so I urged them to join the club. Their silver and tableware and linens weren’t the best. I said, ‘Look, you have to put something in to get something out. If we address this together, we can all make money and we can compete with Park City.’ They went along with it, most of them. We created the rental pool, which Sundance then managed, and we had a chance finally to open year-round business opportunities.”

  Redford’s support for Davenport, like for the business partners forced on him before, was never more than halfhearted. “What I didn’t want to happen was covert sellout,” says Redford. “No one was more sensitive than me to the burden of paying a mortgage in excess of a quarter of a million. But Park City becoming the pacemaker for redevelopment was the wrong way to go. Stan and Brent did well, but truthfully I believed we couldn’t compete in the long term. It was an artificial objective we were chasing.”

  Beck was critical of Redford’s ambivalence. “You could say Bob was part of the trouble. The environmental politics were getting in the way. Two Utah issues dominated his thinking: the state’s on-off plans to expand the road along the Provo River, and Cal Edison’s plan to build a power plant down the road to supply California’s needs. Bob was no longer doing resort business when he came home, which was rare enough anyway. He was organizing town hall meetings, organizing busloads from Washington, organizing student protest bodies. At the same time he refused to let go of his personal fantasy, which was to own a ski haven in the Wasatch Mountains. I used to say to him, or to Lola, who was more practical, ‘You will have a big price to pay for this luxury of owning a mountain.’ The price, in my mind, was a kind of pollution, a price he was already paying. For a start, the mountain itself was permanently scarred by the ski runs he built there. I said to him, ‘Bob, if you want to maintain this Alpine fantasy, you have to yield. The development of the Sundance business is not an option. It’s a necessity.’ When I’d say those things, his eyes would blank out and he’d mumble, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ but he was stubborn, so he was an enemy unto himself.”

  For Beck, the balancing act was harrowing. Committed as he personally was to supporting Redford’s conservation instinct, unavoidable irritants rained down. “For example, our main summer scenic hike was to Stewart Falls, the most beautiful natural waterfall in the Southwest. I managed that trail and made little decorative plaques with all the important information about native flora and fauna. But then, because of the Sundance Kid connection, the Hollywood fans started pouring in and the trail became a souvenir trail. People weren’t coming for the nature. They came to steal the plaques belonging to the Sundance Kid. When Bob was here, it was worse. The fans followed his every move, and when he arrived from L.A. or New York, they were here waiting—the gawkers, autograph hunters and hustlers looking for endorsements. We were caught all the time between the rock and the hard place.”

  Within weeks of Davenport’s arrival, Redford argued with him about conservation and disengaged from the business partnership set up by Collins. “It was all a big mistake,” Redford insists. “Davenport didn’t have the influence or the money he said he had. I went back to where I started. Independence was the way forward. I needed to make the decisions, because no one else had the passion for the canyon. As time went on, my love affair with the place intensified. I wanted to ski there. But I wanted others to share that, too. And I wanted people to have access to the summer trails, as if it were a slice of the Uinta National Park. I changed in the seventies. As a younger man, since my grandfather Tot taught me, I was an enthusiastic hunter. I could ride and I was a good shot. But the canyon changed me. I stopped hunting when I saw a buck die at the A-frame. The canyon was full of deer and moose. At that time, it was open season hunting. Then, one afternoon, I was sitting in my living room and this animal came to the bank outside the window and sat there, badly wounded, dying. I went out to try to help, but it was past saving. There was nothing I could do. I sat there, watching it watching me; many, many minutes, maybe more than an hour. And then it glazed over and sank down dead. I was deeply moved. It was another of those Zen moments. That was, literally, the end of hunting for me. It seemed suddenly absurd to be killing for sport. I felt the same about the land. To be draining its resources simply to compete with Park City was immoral. On the other hand, to let it go to any old flake who wanted to build tract housing was equally wrong. So I had to keep drawing from the finances of my film work to fund it, until I could find a way to help it fund itself.”

  In November, Redford put the wheels in motion of preproduction on All the President’s Men. Both Michael Ritchie and Jeremy Larner had expe
cted involvement in the film and felt let down when that didn’t pan out. Said Ritchie, “I thought All the President’s Men would be number three in our trilogy: first sport, then politics and now the ‘big business’ of journalism. I tried to call Bob, but he was never available.” Larner was philosophical: “Friendship and partnership, I learned with Bob, were variables. By his definition, and only his definition, it worked fine. You were involved if fate allowed. Otherwise …?” But Redford defends his choices with All the President’s Men as a drive for creative newness. “I had done a lot with Mike, and with Sydney Pollack. Jeremy won an Academy Award for The Candidate, which was well deserved. But personally I needed a fresh challenge, and I wanted to test myself, too.”

  Finally happy with their script since, crucially, “it made some affirmative statement and not another negative commentary about Watergate,” Pakula and Redford sat down to cast the movie. Redford had several old friends he wanted to work with, among them Penny Fuller from Barefoot in the Park, Jane Alexander, another theater actress who had made the transition to film and had recently been nominated for an Academy Award, and Hal Holbrook, Carol Rossen’s husband, who would play the role of Deep Throat, the reporters’ White House informer. Redford’s initial concept had been a cinema verité black-and-white film in which he would not perform. But a distribution deal had been done with Warners, and Ted Ashley’s concerns were primarily the commercial realities. “Ted didn’t beat around the bush,” Redford recalls. “He told us he needed to sell my name on the marquee, so the movie he was funding must have me in it.” If he was to act, Redford felt the obvious role for him was that of Woodward. “I thought I could do something with those little nervous mannerisms, like his always shredding paper. I could make up an accurate picture because I’d spent weeks and weeks with him.” For Bernstein, his first choice was Al Pacino, an actor he much admired. “But then I chewed it over, and for some reason Dustin Hoffman seemed more like Carl in my mind’s eye, so I called Dustin and asked him if he was interested. That was a very short phone call.”