Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  As soon as he recovered and could travel, he left for a soul retreat, a Native American festival in New Oraibi, Arizona, to which he had been invited. Two nights later he was in a Hopi kiva, bandaged up like a mummy, for the Powamu winter solstice bean dance. Still in pain, he found the environment once again restorative in the familiar Zen way. Without any conscious effort, it seemed, the company, the chanting, the talk elevated him to what he calls “a transcendental state of release that brought me away from the pain and anxieties of the world. I lost all the confusion and negativity of my thinking. It was like before, that feeling of going beyond ‘the now’ to a higher place. Next thing I knew, I was mellowed out and feeling well again. I thought, This is where I need to be, this place of roots. I need to work my way back here.”

  In March, Redford agreed to attend the fifty-third Academy Awards ceremony. Norman Jewison produced a running homage called “Film Is Forever” that punctuated the evening with memories from Gish to Gable and a tribute to Henry Fonda, which was presented by Redford. Duly, the awards came, to Hutton for best supporting actor (winning over Judd Hirsch, also nominated), to Sargent for best adapted screenplay, to Redford as best director, and for best picture. Mary Tyler Moore was nominated in the leading actress category, and though she lost to Sissy Spacek for Coal Miner’s Daughter, she felt “vindicated.” Redford took his award from Lillian Gish but found himself “weirdly unmoved. Probably it had to do with the cynicism I’d shared with the guys at the CU frat house, watching the Academy Awards on TV and making fun of the pomposity. When my turn came, I was thinking, So this is it! The big night.” The acceptance speech for best picture was unscripted and longer than he intended: “I just didn’t think I was going to see this, but I’m no less grateful. I would like to express my debt to the directors I’ve worked with in the past, for what I’ve learned from them, consciously and unconsciously. And I couldn’t go much further without expressing what for me is the greatest gratitude, and that keys around the word ‘trust.’ I really am grateful for the trust I received from this terrific cast—Mary, Donald, Tim, Judd and Liz. I love them, and appreciate their love, too.”

  Within days he was in therapy, considering his future. “People consult therapists for the inevitable questions,” says Redford, “and most boil down to, ‘What have I done wrong?’ I was no different.” Twenty years later he would find a better perspective on the failure of his marriage in the writings of the social philosopher James Hillman. In The Soul’s Code, Hillman implies that the tendency to cherish family and children is a smoke screen that denies the true responsibility of fulfilling one’s own destiny, which is the key to all balance in existence. Citing appalling statistics regarding the abuse of children globally, Hillman talks of “a fatherless culture with dysfunctional children.” In Hillman’s writings, Redford would find a rationale for what he calls “the drift” of his life. Jamie, in a better position than most to evaluate, would later find “a thorough enlightenment” in Hillman. “My father, like everyone else, had a capacity for self-absolving denial,” says Jamie. “But there’s no denying that, if he did err as a parent, he erred for ‘the calling.’ What he got from Hillman was an understanding that intellectually endorsed what he was and how he was.” Redford insists that the therapy was no palliative: “I was prepared to take criticism. You have to, to get enough out of it to move forward.” Carol Rossen believes the therapy was “not to recover what was lost, but to reconcile himself to the losses incurred and those to come.”

  What was certain was that he had embarked on a new road, emerging from the straitjacket of superstardom with a grand new plan in mind.

  PART FOUR

  Canyon Keeper

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

  18

  Sundance

  Several of the directors who worked with Redford recognized the barrier he had crossed with Ordinary People and speculated about his prospects. Most insightful was Michael Ritchie, who, despite his disappointment at being overlooked for All the President’s Men, continued to cheer his old friend as a film formalist in the European tradition, “more interested in signs and ideas within a movie than plots and actors.” The summary shone a light on Redford’s direction. In the resolution of therapy, Redford himself saw his career as parallel tracks, starting from the same point, but serving separate aims. The acting drew on primitive instinct, with the economy of verbalism and gesture that Robert Pirsig noted, and achieved a solid audience connection. The directing, half hewn in projects like Downhill Racer and now fully formed, reflected an urge to break new ground. He did not see himself as European influenced, nor did he favor heavy intellectualization of his work. He liked Truffaut’s work but was skeptical of Godard and much of the neorealist and New Wave work. All this made him a generalist; he didn’t like to label his endeavor. But it was clear that anarchic ambition was at work. Some aspect of contemporary cinema rankled, and he found himself straining for another approach, another perspective.

  Out of such an instinct, in the heady months of the creation of Ordinary People, the transition from Sundance the resort to Sundance the arts laboratory was made. One minor incident, says Redford, set the wheels in motion. Attracted as he was to experimental work, he was interested in the student films shown at the low-key United States Film and Video Festival staged in Salt Lake City by the Utah Film Commission since 1976. Created by his brother-in-law Sterling Van Wagenen and commission chairman John Earle, the festival was supported by Warners’ vice president Mark Rosenberg, by director George Romero and by the actress Katharine Ross. In 1978, Redford accepted the invitation to become honorary chairman, seeing his function, as with similar posts, as that of being a media magnet. But sitting in a tiny theater off Temple Square watching a 16 mm road movie called The Whole Shootin’ Match by Texan Eagle Pennell, Redford had an epiphany. “I got to thinking, No one else is going to see this little gem. It seemed a crime to me. I imagined myself in Pennell’s shoes, the way I’d felt all those years ago in a freezing apartment in Florence. At the time Wildwood was dug into setting up Ordinary People, with all our resources and contacts working for us. I decided, There is an inequity. This guy needs some help.”

  He invited Sterling Van Wagenen to Sundance to discuss a radical idea. Sterling recalls being surprised by the summons. He had had little contact with Redford beyond get-togethers at the Van Wagenen family home on Center Street during the sixties but had, he says, grown up idolizing his brother-in-law while remaining mostly distant from the film business. In his youth, says Van Wagenen, “film was for me War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still.” In the early seventies, Van Wagenen encountered two formative influences: critic George Steiner and the British theater director Jonathan Miller. At Brigham Young University, Van Wagenen read Steiner’s Language and Silence, which postulated the value of art in politics. Shortly after, in his early twenties, he fell into the job of assistant to Miller, who was directing a production of Richard II at the Los Angeles Music Center. Chafing from the narrow-mindedness of the local culture, says Van Wagenen, he was transformed in Los Angeles. He decided on a career in the arts in Utah, which led to his cofounding the film and video festival with Earle.

  As Van Wagenen drove his little Beetle to Redford’s office at the base of Timpanogos, he imagined chitchat about festival selections. Instead, Redford bluntly suggested a plan to merge the festival with his own half-defined “arts community,” perhaps like Yaddo, the famous Saratoga Springs colony that had nurtured writers like John Cheever, Truman Capote and scores of Pulitzer winners. Redford was highly enthused, says Van Wagenen, envisioning a new horizon, with opportunities to drag Hollywood into Utah and stir up support for local writers and out-of-state students who wanted to tell stories on film, but lacked resources. Van Wagenen suggested that the mode
l not be Yaddo, but George White’s Eugene O’Neill Theater Retreat in Connecticut, where new and traditional plays were experimentally performed and critiqued by visiting dramaturges for the benefit of writers, directors and actors. “But I don’t take credit,” says Van Wagenen. “Bob knew what he wanted. He said, ‘That’s it, that’s exactly how it should begin. Now we know what we want to build, let’s get on and just do it.’ ”

  The first objective, said Redford, was National Endowment for the Arts backing, and this was swiftly achieved with a $25,000 grant to fund an exploratory workshop in April 1979, just twelve weeks after completion of Ordinary People. This was followed by seminars in October and November, which were attended by Cathy Wyler, the daughter of director William Wyler, representing the NEA; Orion’s vice president Mike Medavoy; United Artists vice president Claire Townsend; Howard Klein of the Ford Foundation; Czech filmmaker and ex–American Film Institute tutor Frank Daniel; Native American director Larry Littlebird and filmmakers Annick Smith, Victor Nunez, Robert Geller, Moctesuma Esparza and Sydney Pollack. Also attending were former congressman Wayne Owens; Redford’s legal counsel Reg Gipson; Redford’s constant personal assistant since Three Days of the Condor, Robbi Miller; and theater executive George White himself. “It was a very adventurous collection of people,” says Van Wagenen, “and the composition of that team suggests Bob’s outlook. It was he and he alone who mustered those heavyweight names. I certainly couldn’t have done it. And he had a future game all mapped out in his mind. The NEA was for artistic credibility. Medavoy and Townsend were business credibility. The filmmakers were the think tank. George White was the great old sage. It was very sweetly tuned.”

  Redford felt himself rejuvenated by the new project. He attributes the fluidity of the organizational setup to Van Wagenen; Van Wagenen says it was Redford who sat in the NEA offices in Washington to make the pleas, who took the minutes of the meetings, who made the late-night phone calls to secure essential supporters, including cash investors. The financial champions, says Van Wagenen, were the NEA’s Brian Doherty, Wall Streeter Dan Lufkin and Augie Busch of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery, all of whom contributed to the $100,000 seed capital. Redford personally contributed $100,000 a year over the next several years, “primarily to keep the doors open,” says Reg Gipson, who contends the arrangement was “extremely fragile, living on the edge of a precipice really, in terms of a commonsense business plan.”

  The new Sundance Institute board, handpicked by Redford, included Christopher Dodd, later chairman of the Democratic Party and a U.S. senator; Marjorie Benton of UNICEF and Save the Children; Bill Bradley; Frank Daniel; filmmaker Saul Bass and Gipson. Under their guidance an innovative schooling program was designed, to commence in the summer of 1981. The object of this program was not to launch a rival or remodeled film festival, but to develop a George White–style summer lab for aspirant filmmakers, who could potentially take their work to the screens of the U.S. Film and Video Festival, and beyond. Admission to the lab would be a selection process from script submissions, headed by Frank Daniel. Successful candidates would then visit Sundance and rehearse and film excerpts of their work under the supervision of volunteer established actors, directors and technicians. The work would be analyzed, debated, refined and reshot over several days.

  “The success of this format was entirely dependent on the quality of what we called creative and technical advisers,” says Redford, who immediately sought the involvement of a host of friends and associates from film and theater, including Morgan Freeman, whom he’d met on Brubaker, Robert Duvall, Karl Malden, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and writer Waldo Salt.

  “It was footslog,” says Reg Gipson, “not at all the overnight success some people have said. Bob was personally knocking on doors begging favors for a long, long time.” Celebrity had rewarded him with positions in various boardrooms, among them the Museum of Modern Art’s. At a MoMA benefit he targeted potential supporters. Actor Hume Cronyn recalls being buttonholed by Redford. “He told me this fanciful story of how he wanted to create a film and theater group in the Southwest that would change contemporary movies,” said Cronyn. “I didn’t believe a word of it, but I was smitten.” Thereafter, Cronyn volunteered for the regulation six years on the board, all the time working also as an adviser, a role he kept till the last years of his life.

  Michelle Satter, introduced to Redford by George White, was a Bostonian in her twenties who had organized outdoor festivals for her hometown Institute of Contemporary Arts. Initially she was invited to conduct a study of marketing and distribution, a gesture, she says, that comprehensively shows Redford’s long-term vision. “It seemed crazy back then, because we were all newcomers with no product of any kind to distribute. I wondered was I wasting my time, but the energy generated by Bob was seductive. He led, we followed.” Satter became lab director.

  The first Sundance Institute lab took place over the month of June 1981, with a budget of $160,000 cobbled together from the NEA, Orion, Time Warner, the Ford Foundation, the Marjorie Benton Foundation, and Irene Diamond of the Diamond Foundation. By the standard that would shortly develop, it was primitive, just a handful of young tyros debating scripts in the mountain meadows with a bunch of seasoned pros, with the accent as much on theater—on account of the access to the on-site open-air theater—as film. Redford saw the immediate value of the process. “Half of the submissions were Third World themes. I’d seen so many minority films fail because of lack of finessing. Instantly, before our eyes, we saw how expert tutoring could address that. It was an issue of promoting confidence in aspiring filmmakers, as much as teaching technique.” But his main preoccupation was the frantic assessment of so many new alliances, and a rearguard fight to silence the dissenters. “I never talked as much as I did that summer,” he says. Gary Hendler, for one, was deeply suspicious of the venture, believing it to be a wasteful indulgence. “The trouble with Bob,” he complained to Gipson, “is that he only listens to himself.”

  Shortly after the first lab, Brent Beck asked for a meeting with Redford in the log cabin administrative annex a short walk from the main meeting hall.

  “It won’t work,” he told Redford.

  “Why?”

  Beck slid across the desk the receipts of the two-week lab, which was serviced entirely by resort catering and accommodation. “Because, the way it is, almost none of these people, advisers or benefactors, are paying guests. So every time you convene a planning meeting, or a lab, it’ll put a terrible strain on resources.”

  “So?”

  “We’re still a business, Bob. It’s the bottom line that counts.”

  Redford glanced at the receipts and pushed them back.

  “It will work,” he told Beck.

  At the time, Pollack reported himself uplifted. “The spirit of Sundance reminds me of my early experiences, when I was constantly turned on,” he told a visiting journalist. “I’m refreshing myself.” Like Redford, he also believed the Sundance Institute would work—but under one condition. “Utah is a beautiful place,” he later said, “but there were obstacles beyond finance. The canyon is an hour by road from the Salt Lake City airport, and a long way from anywhere else. Those students and advisers would keep coming—but only if there was a hit product, something people could point to and say, ‘That’s different, and that came out of Sundance.’ ”

  The formation of the institute took place against a background of new political upheaval. Ronald Reagan was in office, with a huge mandate, and Carter was out. Redford needed to make new connections, find new financial angles to further his concomitant environmental goals. He decided that the institute must embody a sister activist agency, and to this end he met with Gary Beer, a point man for his friend Ted Wilson, who had expertise in out-of-state PAC environmental groups. Redford and Beer clicked fast. “His style was against the grain,” says Redford. “Immediately I thought, This is energy I can work with. We’re in new territory here, and we need people who are ready to go against th
e tide.” In time, Redford would see his choice of Beer as a mistake. Though Beer was unquestionably skilled at raising money, he had not, in Redford’s view, the true sensitivity to the arts and environment that Sundance needed. For the moment, though, the glove fit. Born in New York and based in Washington, D.C., Beer knew Utah life inside out, having previously consulted for both the State of Utah and Governor Scott Matheson. “I was inured to the conservatism of Utahans,” says Beer, “which put me ahead of the game in Redford’s eyes. So we hit the ground running with this ambitious new Institute for Resource Management that would parallel the arts group under the Sundance Institute banner.”

  Redford had already engaged Hope Moore, a Carter ally from the Department of the Interior, as his environmental adviser. By the time Beer joined, Moore had in place a tentative graduate program for environmental studies at the University of Washington, a template educational scheme that Redford hoped would spread across the country’s campuses. Beer saw it was doomed, through lack of maintenance funds. “All Bob had achieved amounted to establishing a community of like-minded people. This was crucial, obviously. But it was nothing without money to spread the word.”

  Beer relocated to Utah and worked alongside Van Wagenen, who welcomed a national operator with savvy instincts and solid pragmatism. For Beer, Van Wagenen was a family insider who could help him to a better understanding of his new boss. What emerged for all was a rapid growth in development that unfolded with the grace of good chess playing. “It wasn’t straightforward,” says Beer. “It was learn as you go. I discovered about Bob that he wasn’t the radical he professed himself to be. On the contrary, he, too, was a pragmatist. He’d gone to war with Southern Cal Edison and ended up winning over Howard Allen. Once, Allen was his sworn enemy. By the time the Kaiparowits row was over, Allen was in Bob’s camp. He’d been reeducated. From that, Bob learned the benefits of diplomacy. Howard Allen was welcomed into the Sundance family, which was a stroke of genius, because he opened up access to the corporate community, which got a lot of things moving for me.”