Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  But it was plot, not character, that drove Legal Eagles, and no amount of redrafting could salvage it. When the sexy client, played by Hannah, comes to Logan’s apartment in the middle of the night and gives a silly performance-art recital to a cacophony of cracking fire, bells and whistles, then asks him rather aimlessly how he feels, Logan responds, “Uncomfortable.” That, says Redford, encapsulates his escalating emotion during what he increasingly saw as a no-hope production.

  Legal Eagles offended Debra Winger, a CAA client like Redford, because she felt Ovitz’s “packaging” mania removed all integrity and opportunity. After filming, Winger split with CAA, vowing never to work with Ovitz again. The movie opened with the usual summer vacation razzle-dazzle in June 1986, was slaughtered by critics, made its money back and faded away.

  19

  One America?

  In the disarray of failures—of marriage, friendships and films—one constant remained for Redford: Sundance. Here the ground stayed beneath his feet and the frontier air unfailingly reminded him that all was still possible, that endurance was what mattered most.

  When he was away making movies, he was dependent on his sidemen at Sundance. Sterling Van Wagenen proved the most reliably staunch, and his job was to manage an entity in constant flux. There seemed no end to the inflow of youthful talent, and Sundance grew, aided by benefactors like Irene Diamond, whose foundation injected an annual $150,000 for the first couple of years. When Sundance began, Redford’s alleged vision was simply for an arts retreat in the mountains where novice filmmakers could be tutored toward making new movies. By the mid-eighties, Sundance had expanded beyond the two-week June lab to encompass a producers’ program, a screenwriters’ lab, and a dance and theater workshop styled by Merce Cunningham, Michael Kidd and Twyla Tharp. Van Wagenen helped mold these labs but maintained a close focus on the showcasing of films in the shape of the U.S. Film and Video Festival, which had shifted from Salt Lake City to Park City in 1981, then surrendered its operation entirely to Sundance management in 1985. Both Redford and Van Wagenen recognized in the film festival the shopwindow to the world that might elevate the canyon-based arts experiment to something of wider significance. Both collaborated on refining it, and Redford came up with the notion of moving it from September to January ski season, the more to signify its uniqueness.

  Redford’s declared aim with Sundance was independence for the artist and the avoidance of commercialism. And yet there were painful, obvious paradoxes at play. Sundance, the mother ship resort, was a commercial entity on whose survival the institute depended. Also, the survival and viability of the experimenting artists depended on finding recognition beyond the idyllic glades of the canyon. Wasn’t the composition of the infrastructure itself, embodying as it now did an established festival forum, the ideal route for widening the lab artists’ audience? Sterling Van Wagenen thought so and felt many of Sundance’s woes—a lack of media support, the constant cash flow crises—were curable by the simple expedient of entering into all-out production.

  “It was an issue of linearity,” says Van Wagenen. “We were coaching independent-thinking young filmmakers to make films, and at the same time we had a presentation forum up the road at Park City. There was no contradiction, in my mind, for anyone in the Sundance fraternity to get involved in actually making films.” Redford’s absence while preparing for Out of Africa and Van Wagenen’s impatience would cause the first serious philosophical rift to unhinge Sundance, the effects of which are still felt today.

  Under pressure from Van Wagenen, Redford agreed to commit to Desert Bloom, a first feature by a newcomer, Eugene Corr, honed in script at the labs, then coproduced by Sundance with funding from Columbia and launched at the festival. Redford knew nothing about Corr, other than that he had directed some long-forgotten PBS drama. Desert Bloom was an extremely ambitious film in that it strung a woman’s emotional life story together from a series of vignettes, but it also reached beyond, searching for some parallel symbolism between the woman’s blooming in a coming-of-age fated romance and the blooming of mushroom clouds in the fifties at Las Vegas bomb test sites, the locale of the story.

  All this new development came courtesy of the Production Fund, an executive innovation funded to the tune of $1 million by the NEA, about which Redford maintained the highest suspicions. “There was a philosophical tension,” admits Van Wagenen, “between the radicals and the conventionally minded. Bob was a rebel. But the NEA and the Ford Foundation wanted a conventional board, with logical strategies. Gary Beer, acting as business ‘brain,’ felt the same. To us, the Sundance Production Fund made perfect sense. But Bob was ambivalent, so from my perspective he was green-lighting things and at the same time undermining them with equivocality.”

  Redford thought Corr’s movie was awful. “Corr had talent,” he says. “He wrote a very nice script, but he had no experience to make a full-blown feature. After the first two days he handed the movie over to his assistant director. He couldn’t watch the dailies.” Redford prepared himself for confrontation with Van Wagenen and Beer. “I felt we were overextending at a cost to the filmmakers, and ourselves,” he says. “The central principle of Sundance was to give the aspirant filmmakers room to explore and develop their ideas. It was not supposed to be about generating box office. I called up Sterling and told him, ‘I have concerns. The institute is a lab, not a preproduction office.’ But he was thinking differently.”

  Van Wagenen was also shepherding a second feature for Sundance, The Trip to Bountiful, which was to be directed by Pete Masterson. This was an immaculate Horton Foote script about an elderly woman’s determined scheme to escape senile immobility and return to the homeland of her youthful bliss in Bountiful, Texas. It moved forward nimbly with Van Wagenen producing. Both movies would premiere at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival. They faced polar fates. Desert Bloom was recut and lambasted. Bountiful went on to win a best actress Academy Award for its star, Geraldine Page. That, however, did not please Redford. Resurfacing after Legal Eagles, he found a Sundance that felt disembodied and dangerously off-kilter. Recently, the programs had been run by Susan Lacey, of whom he was wary and who supported Van Wagenen’s view of Sundance as a production entity. In one Sundance staffer’s view, “Bob came back from Africa to discover that Sundance under Sterling, Lacey and Beer was a different business altogether. The accent was not on the students and the debates in the meadows. The accent was on Hollywood production, and the speed with which Lacey and Van Wagenen were pushing this forward.”

  Yet another Sundance production was already in progress, this time Van Wagenen’s version of The Giant Joshua, a fictional story based on a dissertation about Mormon polygamy by Maurine Whipple originally published in 1941 and developed by John and Denise Earle. Van Wagenen’s initial idea was to produce the movie, with Redford directing. It was clear the dynamic had changed between Van Wagenen and Redford, though, at first, few words were spoken. “I was trying to build a new ethos in those June labs,” says Redford. “But we were in danger of becoming an assembly line.”

  Briefly, Redford went along with the board, endorsing the founding of a new company poised between Wildwood and the Sundance Production Fund, called North Fork Productions, specifically designed to make small-budget movies with Garth Drabinsky, chairman of Cineplex Odeon, an exhibitor with fifteen hundred screens at his disposal. Van Wagenen then announced his plan to direct The Giant Joshua himself. The entire process slammed to a dead stop. Van Wagenen felt he had been hijacked. “Bob took the reins from me, without any apology. I was all set, and then suddenly I found myself doing other assigned work.”

  There were certain things Redford could not compromise on. “He didn’t set up the institute to make money,” said Hume Cronyn. “I asked him one day, ‘How would you like people to remember Sundance in a hundred years?’ And he told me, ‘Like Walden Pond. A place where some kid, some student, came up with a great idea that changed some lives.’ ”

  Redford used his boardr
oom-majority prerogative and canceled the Production Fund. Preserving Sundance, he decided, meant doing it his way.

  Within Redford’s grasp was a project that corralled many of his interests. The Milagro Beanfield War was a magic realist novel, the first part of John Nichols’s New Mexico trilogy about Hispanic life, myth and history, that exemplified the sanctity of place and the importance of avoiding the machinations of big business. Redford had first encountered it in the seventies, at the time of its publication. Ever since, it had haunted him. Before Out of Africa, he had driven impulsively to Taos, where Nichols lived, and discovered that Mocte Esparza, one of the Sundance labs’ greatest supporters, owned the rights. Redford approached Esparza and they made a handshake deal to coproduce the film.

  Redford admired all the distinctive oddities of Milagro (Spanish for “miracle”). Here was a David and Goliath story, where a humble farmer poaches a big developer’s lands to access life-sustaining water and, in doing so, stirs an entire community to resist the behemoths. Here, too, was a yarn of ecological wisdom that rang loudly for Redford in the din of Reagan’s trickle-down economics, which nudged free enterprise toward an unlegislated free-for-all. Here also was a story of cultural uniqueness, populated with poets and ghosts, all in service of the mythic themes of right and wrong. It seemed like a sparkling expression of Sundance-like ambition.

  For Berkeley-born Nichols, the journey to Milagro began when he experienced “a conversion to humanist values” during a hiking trip in Guatemala in the sixties. The result was an evangelistic belief that national redemption lay in “securing the integrity of southwestern culture as a foundation for common ethics.” Out of this epiphany, the New Mexico trilogy and Milagro were born. Nichols and Redford had much in common, including being inspired by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where the trilogy was set. Redford felt “an anthropological contact” with them, and a feeling of rightness. “That landscape brought me back to the long, long ago and all those lost wisdoms. You cannot be there and not feel the need to reevaluate. Nichols felt it. I felt it.”

  Nichols’s experience with film was a staggered one. In 1966, at the age of twenty-five, he published a college romance, The Sterile Cuckoo, which was made into a movie by Alan Pakula. By the late sixties, he says, he had run dry, his writing suffused with political rage. He exiled himself to New Mexico “because [it] seemed to resemble a colonial country where political struggle could be as clearly focused as it was in four-fifths of the rest of the world.” The five hundred pages of The Milagro Beanfield War, written over the winter of 1972, was a manifesto that said institutional power begets misery. Over the next five years, a number of players, including CBS, Tony Bill, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, were attached, but the movie failed to take off. The trip wire, says Redford, was its panoramic scope, since the novel had two hundred characters. “But Mocte and I saw it more simply. It could never have been the huge production with the multicharacter viewpoints that John tried. It had to be a reduced ensemble piece cast with Hispanics. Mocte was wary about giving it to me, but when I showed him Ordinary People, he said, ‘Fine, it’s yours.’ ”

  Esparza started the auditions, interviewing two thousand Hispanic actors and videotaping the best one hundred. Nichols’s seventh draft of the script, reworked from the single viewpoint of the central character, the impoverished, agitating farmer Joe Mondragon, still did not please Redford. To hone it, he called David Ward, The Sting’s writer, whose career had progressed into directing and producing. Ward fashioned a Capraesque story of the homespun hero who takes on the fat cats; Mr. Smith here became a Chicano. “But there was also,” says Ward, “the magical realism of the angel Coyote counseling Amarante, the village elder. Amarante says, ‘People have forgotten how to speak to angels,’ and that summed up the second strand, that greater forces were at work here than small farmers, big developers, lawyers and sheriffs. That’s what I took hold of: the double strand. And that’s how, finally, the Milagro movie began to work.” Ten years down the line Ward found Redford more committed than ever. “I was intrigued to see how he had changed, because ten years at the top is ten years in a madhouse. But he was the same, even more so. He was the perfectionist. Social life, family life, everything came second. He was there 200 percent.”

  Just before his final business separation from Redford, Gary Hendler negotiated a last great deal with Universal for The Milagro Beanfield War, delivering a $10 million budget, which was negotiable upward should Redford agree to star in the movie. Redford demurred, insisting that nothing should detract from Hispanic heroes and the integrity of a provincial fable. To appease the studio, he offered compensatory bankable costars in the non-Hispanic roles. But his first choice, Melanie Griffith, whom he thought ideal for Flossie Devine, the seductress wife of Mondragon’s land developer bête noire, refused even to audition. “I made an approach but lines got tangled and she probably thought, Who needs that arrogant bastard?” says Redford. Griffith, to her credit, rethought the invitation and agreed to meet at Wildwood’s new Rockefeller Center suite, not to audition, she says, but for a one-on-one get-together. Recovering from a bout of drug dependency, she was unsure of herself but, says Redford, disarmingly honest. “We clicked. She was kooky and wild but very full of originality.”

  Original, too, was the idea to cast Christopher Walken as Kyril Montana, the agent assigned to end the bean field dispute. Redford’s thinking was that “this would be a great chance for him to play against type. Because, if you take away the zany haircuts and the weirdness he likes to portray, he’s quite WASPish. I wrote to him, explaining, and he responded. So we had casting that pleased Universal over one layer of the movie, and that gave us time to tackle the trickier Hispanic casting.”

  As Esparza screened his audition tapes, Redford was aware of “subcultural aspects one needed to be careful of. The Hollywood style of generalized ethnicity often destroys movies, but compromises are essential. What I wanted to do was minimize compromise. The challenge was that the pool of talent is so small and diffuse.” Seventy-four-year-old Mexican Carlos Riquelme was cast as the oracle Amarante, and Brazilian Sonia Braga ideally fit the role of Chicana activist Ruby. Rubén Blades, the Panamanian salsa songwriter and actor, who wasn’t summoned, took the initiative: “The word was out. I knew Redford was having trouble casting the movie. So I went up to him unannounced and said, ‘Hey, compadre, how is the lay of the land? You want to do this movie right? Then you want me.’ ” Blades was cast as Sheriff Bernabe Montoya, the bridge between the warring factions.

  The main role of Joe Mondragon remained elusive. Redford considered comedian Cheech Marin, then Edward James Olmos, a relative unknown, and rejected him because of age. Neither seemed fresh or young enough. Finally Chick Vennera, a Broadway actor hungry for a movie break, arrived at Wildwood’s Los Angeles office, recommended by producer Chuck Mulvehill. “Chuck’s reasoning,” says Vennera, “was that they’d looked everywhere else, so why not me? I wasn’t Chicano, but I had Argentinean family and a definite Spanish affinity.” Vennera read for Esparza, then went back to his motel. Four hours later he was called back to meet Redford. He read from the Ward script and knew instantly he had cracked it. “I’d done my homework, hanging out in border bars with a tape recorder to get the idiom and the accent. I was confident, fluid.”

  Filming commenced on what was scheduled as a ten-week shoot in August 1986. Originally, Redford wanted to shoot at Plaza del Cerro, a neighborhood of the town of Chimayo and the location of what is reputed to be the last surviving fortified Spanish plaza in North America. Ironically, the local folk resisted, objecting to any suggestion of commercialization. So the production moved to Truchas, New Mexico, forty miles from the unit base at Santa Fe, and higher in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. “We had to rewrite the entire production schedule,” says Redford. “We were forced to forget Chimayo and shoot it all in the mountains, but that ended up an advantage because all along I’d visualized a bleak, vivid horizon throughout the movie and that was
available at the higher elevation.”

  Casting and location delays put pressure on Redford’s schedule. Unlike on Ordinary People, he conducted no formal rehearsals. In Vennera’s view, Redford “modeled” the movie, frame by frame, with cinematographer Robbie Greenberg. “It was the most extraordinary experience. I had a voice coach, Julie Adams, to keep the Chicano dialect straight, but beyond that artificiality Bob had us work like an improv exercise. We just did what we did as he moved the cameras around us and strategically placed this incredible natural light. A lot of directors will shoot five or six takes to cover themselves. Bob shot a very high ratio for entirely different reasons. He would say, ‘Hey, Chick, try this scene that way.’ And when I did it, he’d say, ‘D’you want to try it your own way now?’ That’s a luxury actors don’t often get. What it did was pump up the actors’ esteem. It loaded the whole thing with a new level of emotion. And confidence. I suddenly understood why Ordinary People won an Academy Award. I saw that Bob had a vision, but within that he was so at ease as to allow everybody to contribute theirs.”

  The many start-up delays had pushed the shoot into December, a time of heavy seasonal snows in the mountains. The fact that many interiors scheduled for Chimayo had to be replaced with outdoor scenes intensified the problems. “Journalists started writing that there were wasteful delays,” says Redford, “that I was doing my usual late shows, all those hoary clichés. But it was garbage. We were going well until the snows stopped us. We couldn’t get continuity, we couldn’t replace some of the interiors, so we put a nine-month hold on production to wait for the weather.”