Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Hoffman had, in fact, followed every facet of Watergate and knew about Redford’s sessions with the journalists. Hoffman recalls: “While I was shooting Papillon in Jamaica, all the Watergate hysteria was unfolding. I did what Redford did. I kept tabs. My brother worked in the administration in Washington, and we were on the phone every single day, debating it. I always wanted ‘in.’ I only felt pissed that Bob got involved with the project before I did. If he hadn’t gone after it, I would have.”

  Since his experience with Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh, Redford had wanted to work with him again, if only to repay the kindnesses Robards showed him. In 1972, after years of alcohol problems, Robards was almost killed when he crashed his automobile into a roadside wall in California. He was badly disfigured in the accident and needed reconstructive facial surgery, which was carried out by a plastic surgeon who was a Mormon and a friend of fellow Utahan Gary Liddiard, Redford’s makeup artist since The Candidate. Through Liddiard, Redford monitored Robards’s recovery. Discovering he was on the mend, he offered him the role of Ben Bradlee, which was gratefully accepted.

  The most important relationship for the producers was the one with the resident senior staff of The Washington Post. It was common knowledge that a general air of skepticism hung around the executive offices, but Pakula, a naturally sociable person, proved to be the production’s best asset as he created relationships with Ben Bradlee and the paper’s owner, publisher Katharine Graham. In their memoirs, both Bradlee and Graham speak with the glow of Hollywood awe about Redford’s arrival on the scene. Bradlee was amenable, happy to show Redford off to his family and to converse with the production team led by coproducer Walter Coblenz. Graham, on the other hand, agreed to breakfast with the Redfords but wanted no part of the movie. “It’s understandable,” says Redford. “How could she know how we’d end up presenting The Post? She was cautious and protective, which was what you’d expect of a caring proprietor.”

  Redford wanted Geraldine Page to portray Graham in the film. Graham refused the offer, though she later regretted her decision and wrote a note of contrition to Redford. “Contrary to what’s been written,” says Redford, “she did not block us filming at The Post. We filmed for two weeks, but it went haywire.” The reason the Post shoot was abandoned, says Redford, was that “the journalists and secretaries went crazy when Hollywood came in their midst. It was all giggling women and people doing their makeup and a general feeling of disorder. It was as bad for them as for us, and we knew we had to get out of there.” The entire Post newsroom, desk by desk and filing cabinet by filing cabinet—“even down to the selfsame wastepaper baskets”—was built on a soundstage at Warners in Burbank.

  As the cameras rolled on All the President’s Men, late in the spring of 1975, Redford had the comfort of working with a team of top-notch creative technicians molded over several years by Pakula in his various executive and directing functions. Among them were production designer George Jenkins and cinematographer Gordon Willis. Both had worked on Klute and The Parallax View and here, with Pakula and Redford, conceptualized a visually unusual world, where the overlit, all-revealing glare of the newspaper office jars alongside the silent alleys and half-lit underground garages where the secrets unfold. Spatial design, said Pakula, was everything. “I believed this colossal story needed attention to size. We were dealing with something that could alter our view of investigative journalism and political office, so it had to feel big. It was therefore decided to use a lot of panorama shots, and when the journalists leave the cradle of the newsroom and go into municipal buildings, they are dwarfed by their surroundings. Gordon had a very novel approach to his lenses based on the notion that a good cinematographer always surprises the eye, and we were all of one mind that, since the information to be related was often complex, even tedious, we needed a very stylized look and, of course, dynamic performances.”

  For Redford, “finding” Woodward became the fun of the film. “I decided he wasn’t who he said he was. He tried very hard to present himself as the most boring man in the universe, but I didn’t buy it. The outward appearance was that Bernstein was the personality and Woodward the quiet one. That’s how they presented themselves. But in fact Carl was the fuzzy, warm guy who tap-danced with his ego, while Bob was the hard man who went for the throat. The more I listened to them, the more I saw how they operated. Carl was the one who’d get angry and then he’d open the door for Bob, the reassuring good cop. But the secret was that the good guy was as hard—harder—than the other fellow. I was constantly trying to get Woodward to talk candidly, and what I did learn, from a story he told me about his misreading of a test at Yale, was that he was a workaholic. He’d taken a two-day exam and believed he’d studied appropriately, but got it wrong. He then told me, ‘I realized I didn’t know what good work was, and the rest of my life I’ve been redoubling my efforts to try to do good work.’ ” A key discovery for Redford also came in a chat with Woodward’s assistant, Scott Armstrong. “Scott told me, ‘He hides a lot within him, he’s a hard worker, a workaholic, and, oh yes, he has this thing about fires. He’s always poking at fires, always burning stuff.’ Maybe, I reckoned, that had something to do with the nefarious process he’s been through. Here’s a guy, I decided, who is forever covering his tracks because he has to, to keep moving safely.” At one point, Redford suggested adding some fire scenes to the movie. Pakula demurred. “It didn’t matter,” Redford says, “because those little observation handles were all I personally needed.”

  Hoffman, says Redford, had less trouble finding Bernstein: “Carl and Dustin had a lot in common. Both were radicals, uptight and loose at the same time. And, like Carl, Dustin had a very, very healthy ego. He required a lot of hand-holding, which is anathema to me. I don’t need reassurance. But I loved Dustin’s professionalism and the gifts he brought to a film that required committed intellect to steer it away from becoming a Mickey Spillane. Of the two of us, Dustin probably got closer to Alan. They, too, had a lot in common, and they both liked to talk an awful lot.”

  “The difference between Bob and Dustin is summed up in one comment,” said Pakula. “We were dining during the film, and Bob was talking about his mountain in Utah. The more he talked, the more passionate he became. He told Dustin how he’d found that canyon in the fifties and just had to nest there. Dustin’s response was, ‘Gee, I love mountains, too, Bob. But I’m happy to look at them. I don’t need to be in them.’ ”

  But being “in” the movie, in the fullest sense of submersion, was what drove Redford. It was clear to Michael Ritchie that a process of quasi authorship was accelerating him ultimately toward directing. “His habit was to work very methodically, like a miniaturist. Some said he could be self-serving or overpowering. But my experience of him was of forensic detailing, then absolute trust. He was careful, a good team player, but he also had his own personal objective for the movie in sight all the time. In that way I think he was often frustrating for directors to work with.” It was true that Redford and Pakula had a symbiotic closeness in All the President’s Men beyond the usual director-actor relationship. Hal Holbrook and others spoke of an ambidextrous exchange that allowed both to move from one side of the camera to the other. But others speak of Pakula’s chronic overanalysis, which often resulted in long delays as he attempted to make up his mind about a scene. In these instances, said Walter Coblenz, it was not Redford but Gordon Willis who stepped into the breach. Still, Pakula never felt personally challenged. “Bob and I both had a shared visual sense about the picture. I had done a lot of conceptual prep work with Jon [Boorstin]. As I saw it, we were blending templates. I grew up on [Elia] Kazan, really loved him. On the Waterfront was the most impressive movie from a performance point of view that I’d ever seen. Later I learned visual style from Hitchcock. For All the President’s Men I wanted to blend both. Bob was in full agreement. We saw our first objective was atmosphere. We were trying to paint a picture, and so we were relying heavily on Gordon’s camera wo
rk. Gordon was a very moody worker, especially when he had a drink too many. But he was an artist, not a craftsperson, and that was a big turn-on for Bob. So, yes, we did clash, all of us. But we were on the same page in conceptualization of a big, visually gorgeous film.”

  The only regular irritant for Pakula was what he called Redford’s “hurry to be on the next page.” All of the main actors—Hoffman, Holbrook, Robards, Martin Balsam, Jack Warden, Jane Alexander—were good conversationalists. “They were analysts, and they all wanted to debate the historical relevance of what they were doing. All, that is, except Bob. Which wasn’t the best situation, because Dustin would slow down while Bob hotted up. ‘Let’s just get the fucking thing on its feet,’ Bob would whisper, constantly, while Dustin was sitting, head in hands, in the corner.”

  Remembering the Redford he knew on Inside Daisy Clover, Pakula perceived a change in acting style. “My wife and I watched a screening of one of his movies [in the early seventies] and she turned and said to me, ‘Blackglama,’ which was a jolt. A commercial was running at the time for Blackglama furs. The point was, you put on this fur like a layer of glamour, that it was an aura you draped over yourself. She felt Bob’s megastar thing had become a layer. On the set, he remained the perfectionist I’d got to know during Daisy Clover. He had a terrific memory for lines, his and others’, and he was unusual in his overview. Even experienced actors like Harrison Ford will show a blind spot to background action. Redford never did. His peripheral vision was brilliant. But the edge that I remembered wasn’t there. I wondered had something corrosive happened with the specific success of The Way We Were? The Way We Were made him as a romantic hero, which was largely Sydney’s doing. On Gatsby, Bob copied the formula, and it was he who suggested that Clayton extend the Daisy-Gatsby love affair, though it didn’t happen. I wondered if his success with Sydney had taken away the edge. That may have been his personal Faustian trade-off.”

  This gripe, Pakula conceded, was expressed by no one else. Robards, for one, was an ardent fan of Redford’s, and vice versa. Pakula recalled, “Jason kept whispering to me, ‘That kid has class. Dustin acts with his body. But Redford acts with his fingertips.’ ”

  Getting permission to shoot at public buildings was difficult. “They just didn’t want us in Washington, so every permission was a stranglehold,” says Walter Coblenz, who had responsibility for such things. “I made a decision. I wanted to pull the shoot out as soon as possible because they were throwing obstacles at us. We shot at the Library of Congress, for example, and they just didn’t want us. There was anger and denial all around. We were told that the incident portrayed in the book was inaccurate, that the library had never been involved. That drove Woodward mad, because he knew what was true, he was there.” Later, Coblenz had a meeting with Ron Nessen, Gerald Ford’s press secretary, about staging a briefing scene at the White House. Nessen said there’d be no problem, that Ford understood the quality and purpose of the movie. “We scripted it in,” says Coblenz, “but of course we were naïve. There was no way Ford would allow Redford to come to the White House to diss the previous president. We were suddenly told it was all off, that the administration didn’t approve. It felt hugely ironic. It seemed like business as usual.”

  In the end, Pakula shot 300,000 feet of film, which would eventually be cut to 12,300 feet for a 2:18 movie. With a scheduled opening in April, Redford was astonished to get a call from Coblenz during the Christmas holidays. Redford had left the production three months before, assuming all was well. Coblenz told him, “Bob, you better get back to L.A. We’ve got all these rolls, and Alan is paralyzed. He is so immersed in it that he can’t sort it out. We’re screwed. We’ll never make an opening.” Redford knew Pakula’s problem was often overanalysis and indecision. “There was also the fact that he would never work beyond 6:00 p.m. Soon as the clock chimed, he was out of there for his cocktail and his social night.” Redford flew from Utah to L.A. and hunkered down with the editor—the sixth Pakula had employed—to wrap the movie. “And we just labored round the clock. We had the deadline, so it had to be done.”

  The budget, at the start, had been $6.5 million. By January the production was, admitted Pakula, “$2 million over budget and a month over time. On the other hand, we all remained friends, which was no small accomplishment. Kay Graham still had her doubts, but Bernstein and Woodward were okay and that seemed the right order of things.” For Redford, Warners’ support was welcome but equivocal. “We had a new champion there in Frank Wells, who was now president of the company. He didn’t grumble too much about the overruns because he felt it was a noble endeavor. At the same time, Warners believed the movie would make no money. Watergate had been done to death on every TV show, every magazine cover, you name it.”

  Redford and Pakula argued about only one thing in the editing: the finale. Pakula wanted to show TV footage of Nixon’s resignation and the famous defiant farewell wave on the steps of the helicopter on the White House lawn. Redford resisted. “I told Alan again and again, ‘This isn’t about Nixon. It’s about journalism. I want to end with the guys just working away.’ But I was overruled and so we settled on a compromise, which was the image of the teletype announcing Nixon’s resignation. In retrospect, Alan was probably right. The movie was about the power of responsible journalism, but it was also about a historical political terminus. After Nixon’s departure it was no longer un-American to question the morality of the chief executive. That moment of farewell was a big deal.”

  Warners’ worries about poor returns proved groundless. All the President’s Men, which opened with a benefit for the Fund for Investigative Journalism at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Sunday, April 4, 1976, and immediately after for a Natural Resources Defense Council benefit in New York, grossed $51 million, Redford’s best box office since The Sting and considerably better than Three Days of the Condor, which was still playing across the country (grossing $41 million, almost twice the take of either Gatsby or Waldo Pepper). The volume of good reviews was impressive. For Frank Rich in the New York Post the movie was “a rare and classic example of what Hollywood can do when it’s willing to bank on good taste, shrewd intelligence and deep personal conviction.” Of greatest pleasure to Pakula and Redford was Vincent Canby’s verdict in The New York Times. For Canby, the movie was “an unequivocal smash hit, the thinking man’s Jaws.”

  The release of Jaws on June 20, 1975, in the middle of production on All the President’s Men, changed American cinema irreversibly, but not in the way Pakula had imagined. Sidney Sheinberg, then head of Universal, the movie production arm of MCA, had conceived of a new idea for the wide release for movies. Until now, movie distribution was a drawn-out process, where prints were sent to an assortment of towns and cities on a one-by-one basis, then screenings were extended if box office returns indicated audience approval. Sheinberg’s plan was to amortize costs by sending hundreds of prints to all locations, coupled with a nationwide marketing campaign to raise awareness for the new movie. Jaws was the first true wide release, opening in 409 theaters simultaneously. The paradigm was proved by the receipts, which were in excess of $100 million, making it the most financially successful movie in thirty years (over its theatrical span, Jaws would earn $470 million). Two years later, employing the same now generally adopted strategy, Star Wars set a new record, establishing a precedent for a kind of box office competitiveness hitherto unknown.

  Redford embraced the shift, but with reservations. Warners was happy to follow in Universal’s footsteps, and Redford embarked on his first major tour, visiting six cities across the country in rapid succession. It was to be his last press junket for years. “I was concerned about the marketing aspect. Were we at the point where the packaging was as important as the content? Jaws was a good, populist movie. But it became the flagship for a campaign that overtook American movies. It became a very slick process, advertising directed, about selling popcorn and product placement. I thought the timing of All the
President’s Men very fortunate, because it was a very honest and unpolluted film. I’m not sure if we could have managed it in its purity a decade or two later.”

  Redford had been working nonstop in television and film for more than ten years. There was never a day, his daughter Shauna attests, when he hadn’t a script or text for adaptation sitting on his lap. He was getting run down. “Somewhere around that time I experienced a panic attack,” says Redford. “I was on the promotions circuit. I’d flown into La Guardia and went to catch a cab. It was a frantic time, all deadlines and media and legal documents and op-eds and all the drivel of celebrity raining down. I was alone, standing at the curb, when someone pulled into the space allotted for the cabs, and someone else got aggravated, and there was blaring of horns and shouting and all the rest. But it sounded different. And I looked around at the airport building: that huge rabbit warren of impersonal lights, faces at windows, the anonymous vastness of it all. I thought, Jesus, what if this cab doesn’t hit the spot allotted to it? Does the whole universe unravel? And then I started sweating … and for a moment I slipped out of my body. What if the system fails? What if the center comes undone? Look at all the things that have to work in synchronicity just to turn a wheel! It became an out-and-out panic attack. Like, How can anything work in this world!