Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  20

  Beyond Hurricane Country

  The students still came, the programs were ongoing, but Sundance was for most of the country largely invisible.

  The entire operation, Redford came to believe, needed better, more effective, more widespread branding; with that, the indispensable media exposure would follow. A new approach was called for. “I knew I was scattered,” says Redford. “I knew I was fair game for those who accused me of being a dabbler or stretching too far. But I was never offended by failure. In fact, risk was the lodestar.”

  The Production Fund may have failed and political forums may not have raised awareness enough, but in 1989 a modestly budgeted movie made by a twenty-five-year-old southerner would accomplish what Redford hoped for, electrifying the January film festival and propelling Sundance to the media center stage. At the beginning of the eighties, according to lab student and NYU film school graduate Tom DiCillo, New Yorkers viewed Sundance, labs and festival, as the home of the granolafest. “Before I first came there,” says DiCillo, who was a cameraman for Jim Jarmusch, another lab attendee, “we laughed about Sundance. We associated it with boring pastorals about ‘going home’ and ‘returning to the land.’ ” But there was far more to Sundance “product” than Utahan ideals or the mild, bucolic movies Van Wagenen had pursued. Redford saw this problem of recognition as deep-rooted. For many, it was hard to distinguish the labs, where the works in progress were nurtured with advisers, from the festival, where a committee selected new movies from far and wide to reflect the Sundance aspiration of diversity. Sometimes the lab projects grew into finished features with no help from Sundance beyond the script phase; these were often premiered at the festival. At other times the festival films were outside productions, with no prior association. The very first lab, in 1981, generated El Norte, a story about Guatemalan immigrants cowritten by Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, which won a festival premiere and critical admiration on its cinema release two years later; Three Thousand, workshopped by Jonathan Lawton in 1988, would shortly metamorphose into the popular studio hit Pretty Woman. These successes strengthened Redford’s belief in a new-style infrastructure for movie development. “The granola idea was anathema to me,” says Redford. “I recognized where our earliest endeavors might have been misread, but the deduction was wrong. What I wanted in the labs was experiment. What I sought in the festival was variety.”

  The head of the selection committee for the remodeled film festival was Geoff Gilmore, the former head of the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming department. For him, there was no “standard” Sundance festival movie: “We decided to go for the broadest range, ideological, marginal, countercultural, whatever. The charm, in fact, is that we decided we wanted no real definition other than newness. The idea was, Let us take down the barriers and bring an alternative stream of movies to the public.”

  For the 1989 festival, Gilmore chose Atlanta-born newcomer Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape, a movie with a shoestring budget written in eight days and shot in thirty, about marital relationships and voyeurism. It won the audience prize and, crucially, distribution from the new marketing lion Miramax and would go on to win its writer-director a Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination. “It wasn’t something I personally connected with,” said Sundance adviser Hume Cronyn, “but I saw how it was perfect for spotlighting the Sundance Bob wanted. The truth remained that the Sundance the board of governors imagined and the one Bob wanted weren’t the same thing. Soderbergh’s approach was radical, and that was Bob’s kind of Sundance.” Radical, Redford knew, wasn’t sufficient. Sundance offerings must connect with the widest audience if the breakthrough of media acknowledgment was to happen. Soderbergh proved the perfect bridge.

  The achievement for Soderbergh—and Sundance—was sizable. By the end of the eighties, cinema was in lockstep with the growth of technology, dominated by Batman and its look-alikes. There were still plenty of thoughtful movies about, including, in 1989, Driving Miss Daisy and Dead Poets Society. But sex, lies, and videotape employed Godardesque innovation, seeking, as Godard would seek, to film life—“to discover life in film, and discover film in life”—by using the homemade confessional newly available in the domestic video age. It was intimate; it was original. The movie was made for $3 million, without studio backing, and delivered via Sundance and Miramax to the kind of mass audience only available to big studio productions. Prizes apart, it earned almost $25 million, validating Sundance’s pledge of experimentation. Soderbergh, in Roger Ebert’s description, became “the poster boy for Sundance.”

  Victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat. The moneymen like Gary Beer and Brent Beck, whose job it was to balance the books, had felt Sundance was teetering on bankruptcy. Said Beer: “It was only a matter of time before major packages of land and development went up for sale because, to put it simply, Bob had us ridiculously overcommitted.” To their credit, Beck and Beer had moved to solve the Sundance financial crisis by introducing a mail-order Sundance catalog. “To be honest, it took no great ingenuity,” says Beck. “Sundance was known as a southwestern endeavor, and to most of our visitors Bob was still the Sundance Kid. Trading on the design paraphernalia that he and Mary Whitesides conceived was a no-brainer.” Shortly before the breakthrough festival, the Sundance mail-order catalog was born, advertised first statewide, then nationally. Its launch in September 1989 cost $500,000, and though it provided vital new credit lines, it took four years to turn a profit.

  The Soderbergh film brought the desired press attention, but also scrutiny. Redford was forced to face up to accusations of poor managerial skills. According to anonymous sources interviewed for a Premiere magazine story, indecision was Redford’s main failing. The replacement of program director Susan Lacey by Tom Wilhite, formerly of Disney, led to division within the boardroom. One staffer recalled, “Wilhite was Bob’s man, and those of us who were at the coal face for years felt neglected. We were just overlooked about his appointment, or the initiatives. Sundance was supposed to be about democracy and cooperative art, but that’s not how it looked to us.” To add insult to injury, Redford then interfered with Wilhite’s new initiatives and awarded money to established writers who’d decided to change careers, moving, say, from television to film writing, without consulting anyone. “People started to wonder was Redford in control at all,” said the staffer. Cinda Holt, a senior administrator, felt Redford’s personal control was positive and vital but, at the same time, his distractions with projects like Milagro and the unending political activism weighed against a stable future.

  The distractions would only continue, despite Redford’s best intentions. The pattern was already established by now. Activism and film had to be parts of his life. Even as Holt and others were raising their concerns, he was producing a documentary about Yosemite with Van Wagenen and director-photographer Jon Else and, at last, a version of the Leonard Peltier story, called Incident at Oglala, with Michael Apted directing. Hume Cronyn spoke with the nascent mutineers but was unsympathetic. “I didn’t agree with all his choices, but the way I saw it, Bob was assembling a delicate picture puzzle at Sundance. That required momentum and great dexterity. Remember, there was no independent cinema movement then. There was just the Hollywood way, then some crazy guys making little movies out in the boondocks. Bob was pioneering, he was laying the ground for a whole new cultural movement, and there was no map for that. He just played it day by day, doing the best he could.” Cronyn especially admired the efforts of Redford, Gilmore and lab director Michelle Satter to extend the awareness of alternative moviemaking to the Latin and Far Eastern markets, persuading Gabriel García Márquez to convene a special lab for South American filmmakers and organizing a mini Sundance Film Festival in Tokyo. “But it was exhausting work for such a small-scale setup. I remember meeting Bob out jogging one morning, and he looked like an old man, so drained. I said all the platitudes and I invited him down to my home in the Bahamas, because I kn
ew he needed time out, but he was just too busy.”

  Among the distractions was the decline in Jamie’s health. Though Jamie had effectively diagnosed himself, the years of inaccurate treatment for his ulcerative colitis—where the body attacks the lining of the large intestine—had created other problems. His first major health collapse had occurred in 1981, shortly after Ordinary People. His body went into spasms and he suffered crippling arthritic-like pain that had him bedridden for days. But this wasn’t an aggressive colitis attack, as diagnosed, and it would take many more years before the true extent of his illness became known. By the late eighties Jamie had abandoned hopes of a career in rock music because of his constant collapses. He had decided to return to his studies and move with his CU girlfriend, Kyle Smith, to Chicago, where he would study at Northwestern University Graduate School. “While I was transferring from my doctor in Utah to one in Chicago,” says Jamie, “I was given a newly detailed series of tests, which included liver function. The result was black-and-white. The doctor came out and said to me, ‘You have an end-term liver disease. But the good news is, you can get a transplant.’ ” It emerged that the wrong drugs prescribed over so many years had aggravated an underlying chronic liver ailment, and permanent liver damage had been done.

  At the time, Jamie was in remission, suffering no symptoms. “So I backed off. I told Dad, ‘I’ll fix it my way, don’t worry.’ And I tried, I really tried. I tried acupuncture, herbs, every sort of quack cure.” Redford took great joy in the fact that family life was stabilizing. In 1986 Shauna had finally emerged from the shadows of Sidney Wells’s murder to marry the new man in her life, Eric Schlosser, the journalist son of Herb Schlosser, president of NBC. Jamie married Kyle in June 1988, shortly before his planned transfer to Northwestern. But soon afterward he collapsed and was hospitalized. “The Jesuit chaplain visited me at the hospital and asked my views on life and death,” says Jamie. “That was the moment. It suddenly hit me: I’m really ill. I can die at any moment.” Bothered by the insensitivity of the Jesuit, Jamie set out on a three-month exploration of faith, visiting dozens of churches and spiritual centers. He found sanctuary, temporarily, with the Unitarians. “There were limitations to what Dad could provide, and the Unitarians filled the void. I was different from my father. I was a believer in chaos theory. Dad was a believer in benevolent fate. I remember flying from Vegas to Utah with him during The Electric Horseman. We had time totally alone on the mountain then. Suddenly I understood that he viewed that tranquillity as a God-given thing. He had a superstitious religious outlook that was half Indian, half Christian. All of his life was a meditation on the interpretation of the signs. If he thought about some old friend and then the next day that friend called, he believed it was purposeful fate. I was not like that. I saw the mountain as nature, nothing with an agenda. Dad had ‘belief’ in a way I didn’t, and the Unitarians, who believe in no afterlife, helped me accept the roll of the dice, the bare, pragmatic realities.”

  Amy describes her father’s response to Jamie’s illness as “that stubborn old mechanism of ‘You cannot succumb to the false mythologies—it’s all about winning.’ ” Redford concedes this might be true but adds, “I could not imagine the loss of Jamie, and wouldn’t tolerate the concept. I was proud of him as a fighter. At his weakest moment I sat by his bedside and held his hand and told him, ‘There’s all sorts of right things I should say. But let me just cut to it: you have to get this devil off your back. You know that? You have to beat it.’ ”

  Redford paused to reevaluate the allotment of his time. For the moment, the world of formal politics had lost its luster. There was progress on environmental reform: Wayne Owens was back in Congress after a twelve-year hiatus and was beginning to work the wilderness initiatives they’d long discussed; Bruce Babbitt, the Democrats’ torchbearer since Gary Hart fell out of the 1988 presidential race, was another new friend with a strong, hopeful reformist slant. But Ted Wilson believed a fire had gone out in his friend: “[Bob] was upset by the ignominious outcome of Gary Hart’s campaign, because he’d supported him very actively. On top of that was the disappointment of the IRM. All of it had a cumulative effect and movies seemed to be a far safer bet.”

  But the movies were far from a safe bet in the wake of Legal Eagles and The Milagro Beanfield War. For a decade Redford had off and on given the appearance of being bored and disinterested. Now he was forced to remind himself of the continuing importance of his maintaining a high profile to help Sundance. What he still had going for him was his working relationship with Mike Ovitz. And Ovitz had ideas, principal of which was packaging Redford with Spielberg. Spielberg was in an unassailable position, having raked in fortunes with successive megahits over fifteen years and won three Oscars. His latest nostalgic notion was to remake the 1943 Spencer Tracy movie A Guy Named Joe, a love story set among firefighters in national parks. Spielberg and Redford met at Spielberg’s home, which was filled with amusement park items like gumball machines and arcade games, and watched the Victor Fleming–directed film in the den. But Redford was uncomfortable and found “no reason to remake a movie that was pretty average to begin with.” (The movie was finally made by Spielberg, retitled Always, and starring Richard Dreyfuss.) An alternative was offered by Disney. Frank Wells, now Disney’s president and chief operating officer under chairman Michael Eisner, liked and trusted Redford and let it be known he wanted him under contract. Maybe Wildwood could nominate some mutually interesting projects that would unite Redford and Disney?

  Redford’s hesitation reflected his recognition of the importance of choosing the right project after such a lengthy fallow period, but also his awareness of the changes in cinema. Soderbergh’s breakthrough seemed a signal moment not just for Sundance, but for moviemaking in general. By the end of the eighties, the status quo as it existed in the twenties still prevailed. The industry still functioned as an elite club, whose membership was never more than twenty-five thousand. The eight major studios (Columbia, Disney, MGM/UA, Orion, Paramount, Twentieth Century– Fox, Universal and Warners) still monopolized distribution and the box office, their takings amounting to 80 percent of all movie earnings. Their required packaging and slick marketing-cum-distribution had become far more expensive. Gary Lucchesi, the new president of Paramount, defined the working model: for the average movie, $3 to $7 million was spent on the star name, about $2 million on the director and $1 on the script. Then untold millions were invested in marketing. When the humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount for the theft of an idea that became Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America, Paramount argued that the movie, even though it had earned $350 million, had yet to show a profit. Such profligate extravagance was bound to run aground, and it did when reform-minded David Puttnam became Columbia’s chairman and refused to support the overweight Warren Beatty movie Ishtar. Puttnam further offended Ovitz by stating emphatically that his studio would no longer have anything to do with star packages. By the dawn of the new decade, Ovitz’s brief shining moment was past and studios were in the process of redefining themselves. Disney, under Wells and Eisner—who imported Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount to manage the movie and TV divisions—was now, unthinkably, earning its way with a fair smattering of R-rated movies, such as Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills. “It was a different playing field then,” says Redford. “Home video loosened it up, and investigative journalism shook out the fat cats, as when Begelman was busted for fiddling his clients’ checks. What we had in the early nineties was a jerky period of culture growth that meant more was possible in the mainstream than had been for years.”

  Briefly Redford contemplated Manny Azenberg’s offer of a return to Broadway in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which, wrote Azenberg, “[Mike] Nichols believes you should do, and has agreed to direct for virtually nothing.” When Redford finally refused, Azenberg came up with the idea of Redford and Pollack in The Odd Couple. “I don’t recall that as anything other than a joke,” says Redford.

  Redford fo
und himself having supper again with Pollack and discussing a new project, the Universal-funded Havana, to be set in Batista-era Cuba. Jamie, who, among the family, was closest to the Pollacks, was stunned by what he called “the volte-face,” believing the friendship had “irrevocably ended with the breach of trust during Out of Africa.” Alan Pakula saw things differently: “No one ‘read’ Bob like Sydney. The eighties had not been great for Bob. The world was different. So maybe the call of the familiar was the attraction.”

  Pollack had fallen in love with Cuba when he first visited with Mary Hemingway in 1978. “I was struck by every aspect of it,” said Pollack. “The architecture. The climate. The people. The danger. The hope. I saw immediately what Hemingway got out of it, and I imagined what it must have been like while he was there and the future was up for grabs.” The script, originally commissioned from Judith Rascoe, grew in fits and starts over the next ten years and was finished by David Rayfiel. “Think 1950s, an all-American fast-talking gambler falling in love with a Communist gangster’s moll in the political turmoil of the Caribbean, with Sydney directing,” says Rayfiel. “It had to be Bob.” Carlin Glynn, still a regular participant in the Sundance labs, doubted that Redford and Pollack could patch up their differences. Pollack’s commitment to Sundance, beyond his ownership of a house in the canyon tract, had now diminished to nothing. His life was fully absorbed in mainstream Hollywood, with the offices of his development company, Mirage, shifting from one studio lot to another. “It became quite a mysterious alliance [between Redford and Pollack],” says Glynn. “And the kind of films each wanted to make were just different. To attempt another collaboration at that point seemed like the craziest folly.”