Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  He was not all right, and he knew it. In a state of suppressed rage he agreed with Pollack to take on The Electric Horseman for Columbia. Anything but epic, yet mordantly resonant, it was a movie about a champion rodeo rider and a champion horse abused by commercialism and about to make a valiant escape to more honorable values. It had, for Redford, a poignant biographical ring.

  17

  Painted Frames

  America had vastly altered over the last ten years, beginning with the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., then with the debacles of Vietnam and Watergate. The dissidents who smoked pot in the Summer of Love became the graduate environmentalists and politicians who, too briefly, breathed hope into the seventies. But while politicians like Jerry Brown, Gary Hart and Jimmy Carter promised much and accomplished little, some significant spiritual ground shift was undeniable.

  Redford’s relationship with Pollack had also changed. Over the decade Pollack’s career had been consistent. He had made half a dozen movies and enjoyed a stable married life with Claire Griswold and their three children. Redford’s career was stellar. This was the decade that gave him superstardom beyond his wildest imaginings, where his name and image were so ubiquitous that even dictionaries listed him under words like “glamour” and “idol.” He had acclaim, wealth and opportunity, but he also had a failed marriage. Now, when the men got together, they inclined toward argument. Three of Pollack’s six movies that decade were Redford movies. In the same period Redford had made a dozen movies, of which The Sting and All the President’s Men, movies unrelated to Pollack, garnered the most attention. When All the President’s Men proved so successful, Redford felt Pollack was jealous. Pollack expressed “surprise” that the movie worked at all and told Redford wryly, “I should have done it.” Pollack, for his part, found his friend less accommodating and kind.

  John Saxon, who joined the cast of The Electric Horseman, saw Redford, fifteen years after they worked together on War Hunt, as a man divided. That his fame was “monolithic” Saxon found ironic: “Not least because I was once a studio contract star. I played by the rule book, the studio way, and saw my career terminated by studio decree. Bob did it the other way, by bucking the system. He was an emblem of the new style, where artists took control of their destinies. This was what the seventies were about, from Scorsese to Lucas, from Redford to Stallone.” Redford was a decent man, Saxon says, a man who had secured his casting in the film without making any big deal of it: “But he wasn’t an easy guy to say thank you to. There was a chasm, a distance he’d put between himself and the rest of the world. I thought, This is the price you pay for that kind of fame.”

  “I was aware of it,” says Redford. “I knew I was facing a sea change. I knew what was coming and it probably made me a tough person to be around.”

  The Electric Horseman was very much a stopgap that facilitated continuity in the relationship between Pollack and Redford, which might otherwise have fractured irreparably. Its preproduction, according to Pollack’s files, was a mess, commenced upon with no script, no coherent casting plan, no sensible scheduling. All they had, in fact, was an agreement to make a movie for Ray Stark’s company, Rastar, to be distributed by Columbia. Part of the trouble, said Pollack, was that he had panicked when A Place to Come To failed to gel and had rummaged around Stark’s optioned projects until he found this oddball outline from the mid-sixties that was sure to interest Redford. Redford had been speculating about making a rodeo movie for years; Pollack thought Shelly Burton’s treatment was a perfect fit. Later Steve Bernhardt, Redford’s old friend from the Emerson Junior High days, would contend it was he who, years before, sent The Electric Horseman to Redford. Redford believes Bernhardt may be right: “The seventies were awash with script submissions.”

  In the story, Sonny Steele, an ex–rodeo rider, is employed by a multinational corporation called Ampco to promote Ranch cereal, riding a doped show horse around at entertainment spots. Anesthetized with alcohol, Sonny goes AWOL. The original story went only as far as Sonny’s flight from the venality of Las Vegas to the great outdoors and leaned heavily on symbolism. It then fell on Pollack to create and shape a full-length movie. “I saw we had problems even when I commissioned the first script,” said Pollack. “The story ended after the first act. I scrambled around for more. I like that part, wringing out a film story. The redemption, I decided, must be in a romantic relationship. Sonny needed to be saved by love. And so we invented the character of Hallie Martin, a television journalist who has a good feeling about Sonny’s integrity and follows him into oblivion to get his side of the story.”

  Pollack commissioned Bob Garland, a writer he knew from television, to develop the screenplay, but, Redford says, the resulting work was “spaghetti junction. It was just so many unresolved incidents sitting there. I thought it was ironic that Sydney abandoned the Robert Penn Warren because it was so tricky, and then we ended up with this mishmash.”

  They soldiered on. Redford requested that Jane Fonda take the co-lead when Pollack’s first choice, Diane Keaton, was allegedly blocked from participating by her possessive boyfriend, Warren Beatty. “Quite simply, Warren wouldn’t have Diane kissing Bob Redford, the most desirable star in the world,” said Pollack. “He wasn’t dumb. He wouldn’t want the competition.”

  The previous year Fonda had lambasted Redford in an article in The Village Voice. “I’ve known two Robert Redfords,” she’d said. “When we made Barefoot in the Park he was a young man full of interests, sensitive to the problems of the time, politically and socially involved. But now he’s perfectly integrated, and an instrument of the star system. He is, and remains, a bourgeois in the worst sense of the word.” Redford stayed silent. He was sensitive to the tumultuous changes she had been through. In 1966, when he’d last worked with her, Fonda was approaching what she calls “the psychological metamorphosis” that steered her toward the leftist campaigning that branded her Hanoi Jane. Her marriage to Roger Vadim ended and she turned to leftist activist Tom Hayden, head of Students for a Democratic Society and author of the “Port Huron Statement” (the group’s manifesto calling for participatory democracy), who would become her husband and crusade partner through the seventies. Today, analyzing her espousal of extremist activism, she expresses regret for excesses. “Everyone now understands it: it was a transitional time for most thinking Americans, and for me personally it was a painful and exploratory time.”

  When they reconnected, Redford was pleased to find he still had much in common with Fonda. She had worked with Alan Pakula in Klute, for which she won an Academy Award, and was about to receive her second, for Coming Home. Hayden, who had been indicted with the Chicago Seven for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention, had been appointed to the Solar Utilization Scheme of the Southwest Border Commission by California governor Jerry Brown. Hayden and Fonda’s broad-issue group, the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), was also currently lobbying for rent control, government-sponsored child care, new police review boards and the public takeover of utilities. Fonda was pumping in $500,000 a year to CED. “You couldn’t help but admire her,” says Redford. “Jane liked to get her nose into things. That’s how she ended up sitting on tanks and buddying up with the Vietcong. She was not a talker, she was a doer. If she was a dissident, she was the kind the country needed, because she made people think and she put her money where her mouth was.”

  Through the summer, Bob Garland, David Rayfiel and Alvin Sargent worked around the clock on the script, which Fonda had yet to see a page of. At one point, Rayfiel sent an ominous Churchillian note to Pollack: “Never has so much been written by so many for so little.” Fonda, though, was not amused: “There were moments when I began to fret. It wasn’t a normal scenario. It seemed to be a movie based on a lot of talk and no paperwork, which was something I’d never before encountered.” On August 1, twelve weeks before filming, Redford wrote on his copy of the latest cobbled-together script: “The present version is too encumbered.
Too much hardware, too much plot, too much ‘necessity’ to justify the size of it all. Too urban, as opposed to simple rural.” Pollack and Redford continued to work very closely and amassed piles of videos to watch. “It was the start of the home video era,” Pollack said, “and so we had easy access to the old Cary Grant movies, the Billy Wilders Bob loved and the Frank Capras I loved. Out of them we took the spirit of joy and brightness and put it into The Electric Horseman. All the time we knew we were dealing with a story about the cynicism of showbiz, about the exploitation of humans and animals that fall into the trap, about dark things. But we played with it until we found the upbeat story. We also had a wonderful bonus. The story became stronger with the history of these actors, of Jane and Bob. The hard-driving characters meet, clash and fall in love. What could be better? I’d developed a reputation, or so Jane told me, as the master of foreplay. She said, ‘You’re always leading the characters right up to the bedroom door, and that makes for a very sexy picture.’ So that’s what I built on: foreplay. Let the audience impose their fantasies on these characters. Let them play with the notion: Is Bob screwing Jane? Will it go that far?”

  Though the script Fonda was given still only amounted to a scattering of action pages, some notes Pollack made to himself five days before production titled “Night Thoughts” finally defined characters intertwined by childlike romantic idealism. Pollack singled out one speech for Hallie: “When I was a kid, the prince was all in white. Nothing he did was ever wrong. He had justice and morality and ethics all on his side. It was loaded, really loaded. I guess like most fantasies.” On the same page he summarized Redford’s Sonny in a speech: “There are people in Africa or some damn place who believe that if someone takes their picture, they won’t live as long. That you take something away from them. Well, maybe you just have so much to give out—like a light bulb—and if other people are taking it all the time, then there isn’t much left for you.”

  “Once I had those speeches, I had the film,” said Pollack. “From that point on we knew who these characters were, how they were attracted to each other and what they truly represented.”

  Redford condensed Pollack’s theorizing into a simple trick: a walk. “There was too much development,” he says. “In the end you could look at Sonny sixty ways. I wanted to see him as the guy who says, ‘No more.’ He has given it all to the point where he’s literally bent out of shape. His back no longer works. He walks with a rick, like every step hurts. His story is in the walk.” And the romance? “It made sense; it was organic in the story. And with Jane it was easy.”

  The Electric Horseman started location filming in November at Caesars Palace, the only casino in Vegas willing to trade gambling losses for Hollywood publicity (since gaming tables would be closed for long hours daily during production). Redford was glad to be moving at last, but impatient with the kind of intrusive photographers and crowds that had dogged him in Holland. According to Fonda, who had her own contingent of noisy fans, Redford was “prodded, tugged, felt, kissed and treated like one of those animal curiosities from Siegfried and Roy.” In his off hours, Redford dined and drank in the privacy of his suite with Pollack and Fonda, or the country singer Willie Nelson, who was cast in his first dramatic role playing Sonny’s manager, Wendell. Mostly, though, evenings were dedicated to work with Pollack on the script. “The thing that kept me concentrated,” says Redford, “was the fear that the movie wouldn’t hold together at all.”

  As Fonda spent her free time giving fitness lessons, based on routines she’d learned in Gilda Marx’s Body Design gym, to crew members in her suite—a prelude to the Jane Fonda Workout industry to come—Redford enjoyed the horsemanship. Movie wrangler Kenny Lee had located for the movie a calm, disciplined five-year-old bay Thoroughbred, Let’s Merge, at a dressage school in the San Fernando Valley. Redford and the horse hit it off. “Managing the horse kept me healthy,” says Redford. “Sometimes I talk better with horses than with people.” To Pollack’s surprise, in one particularly tricky scene, Redford refused the stunt double and insisted on riding Let’s Merge down the traffic of the Strip at rush hour. “Secretly I think it was his biggest buzz,” says Pollack. “Very symbolic on a personal level, and a little malevolent, since it screwed up traffic and the business of the town for half a day.”

  Fonda became Redford’s anchor, a presence to keep him focused when, he admits, “there were mornings I didn’t want to get out of bed. I was not a pleasant person to be around for that movie. Sydney said I behaved like an uncooperative bastard, and he was right. I didn’t want press around, for instance. [The critic] Gene Siskel sneaked on the set, and I told Sydney, ‘I will not act while he’s here, period.’ I was in a dark place. I later apologized to him. But we forged through it together, as I always performed for him as an actor.”

  With weather holdups during the southern Utah portion of the shoot in January and February, the $11.2 million budget overran by $1.3 million. Never missing a marketing moment, Ray Stark circulated the story that $300,000 had been spent filming forty-three takes of the key moment, when Sonny and Hallie kiss. “I justified it as our reward,” said Pollack. “We’d been through a mountain of scripts and finally we got the magic.” For Pollack, a lover of heyday Tracy-Hepburn, utter redemption was in the kiss. “Bob and Jane should be proud. That’s the moment they joined the big leagues, in my book.”

  It seemed extraordinary after the million and one script deviations that The Electric Horseman would calmly find its place as a simple old-fashioned romantic comedy. But that’s how it fared. At various stages all of the participants had prophesied doom for it, but it sidled out into the marketplace between Moonraker and Apocalypse Now in the winter of 1979 and took in a very respectable $60 million. To almost all reviewers it was an anachronism, but no less welcome for that. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times summed up Pollack’s triumph of instinct when he likened it to Capra’s It Happened One Night and the other Golden Era romances. The relationship between Fonda and Redford, it turned out, was exactly like Hepburn and Bogart’s in The African Queen, another movie about a mismatched pair sharing the rigors of life on the run. “Both Redford and Fonda have associated themselves with a lot of issues in this movie,” wrote Ebert, listing the evils of corporate conglomeration, the preservation of wildlands, respect for animals, the phoniness of commercialism, and the pack instincts of TV journalists, among others. “But although this movie is filled with messages, it’s not a message movie. The characters and plot seem to tap-dance past the serious stuff and concentrate on human relationships.”

  For Ebert, as for many critics, Pollack’s strength was in “orchestrating” the Redford-Fonda chemistry. Like the directors of Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Colbert and others, said Ebert, Pollack understood “that if you have the right boy and the right girl, all you have to do is stay out of the way of the horse.”

  The success of the movie, however, did little to mend the rift between actor and director. Many observed “the formula” at work—where Pollack relied heavily on the romantic cipher—and, given Redford’s radical mind-set, predicted a further breach.

  “Dad wanted to direct movies to express his own way of telling a story, without any compromise,” says Jamie. “He really wanted to get away from Sydney for a while.” Still, while angling for his own directorial debut, he was amenable to acting in another film for another director.

  Three years before, as he immersed himself in Native American issues for The Outlaw Trail, Redford had been prompted by author-activist Peter Matthiessen to follow the case of Leonard Peltier, a thirty-two-year-old Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The charges against Peltier arose from the deaths of two FBI agents and one Native American shot during an incident of public disorder in Oglala. Peltier claimed his innocence, and the evidence against him, as Matthiessen demonstrated, was tenuous. But in April 1977, Peltier was found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Fonda and Brando were among Peltier’s supporters, but Redford v
irtually adopted the case as his own. He met Peltier in prison, campaigned for his pardon, even took the matter to the White House, where successive presidents considered, but rejected, a pardon. “You start to look twice at the institutions you take for granted,” says Redford. “It’s a healthy state of mind to reach. It’s not enough to drive a car, you ought to know something of what makes the car go.” The possibility of a gross miscarriage of justice in Peltier’s case started a train of inquiry that was echoed in a script from producer Ron Silverman that landed in Redford’s hands during The Electric Horseman.

  Brubaker, based on the writings of Arkansas prison reformer Thomas O. Murton, portrayed a corrupt justice system. Murton’s story was every bit as sinister as Peltier’s. Appointed by Governor Winthrop Rockefeller to revamp Arkansas’s jails in the 1960s, Murton posed as a prisoner at Tucker Prison Farm and unearthed scandalous abuses and the covered-up murders of three inmates. As the bodies were disinterred, Murton demanded full disclosure in the national media. Instead, he was vilified and fired. His subsequent memoir, Accomplices to the Crime, attracted sympathetic attention, but it was ten years before Silverman acquired rights to the book and sealed a deal with Twentieth Century–Fox, with Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson’s friend and business partner, directing.

  In hindsight, the odds seemed against Brubaker succeeding. All the principals—producers, screenwriters and director—had variable, television-oriented careers. Silverman’s background was in series like Stoney Burke and The Wild Wild West. Screenwriters W. D. Richter and Arthur Ross were also television writers, though Richter had done well with John Badham’s recent adaptation of Dracula. Rafelson was, perhaps, the most controversial component. He had cocreated The Monkees, and he developed the Monkees’ movie Head, which he directed. Rafelson admitted to having made Head heavily under the influence of LSD and in homage to the French New Wave, which was the film form he most admired. “I liked that complete disrespect for the film itself,” he said, “the idea of handling it roughly and not aiming for perfect lighting.” Though Head failed, Rafelson’s follow-up with Nicholson, Five Easy Pieces, won four Academy Award nominations. But he was still widely regarded as a wild card.