Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Then Eric Roth’s script arrived. “It didn’t work at all,” says Redford. “I wanted to pull the plug. I became unsure of the story. What I was seeking was a fable about faith and redemption, not a story about a sexually frustrated woman.” He tried Roth again. “What I wanted to do was for us both to fly to Montana and check out the location because I felt it should ‘speak’ in this script, as it had in A River Runs Through It. I wanted Roth with me, to write as we went, but he wouldn’t play ball.” Disney dithered, threatening to withdraw should Redford delay any further, but, as ever, he followed his instincts, funding the development personally for the next five months and assigning Richard LaGravenese, who had contributed to Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County, to take over the writing. LaGravenese had attended the Sundance labs as an adviser, and Redford thought highly of him.

  By April 1997 Redford was racing against the melting snows in Albany, New York, to begin filming the road accident in which Grace and Pilgrim are injured. Previously, since Ordinary People, he had used his own drawings to denote scenes as he visualized them for the cinematographer. On The Horse Whisperer he spent hundreds of hours scribbling and collaborating with two storyboard artists and with cinematographer Bob Richardson, famous for his work with Oliver Stone and his inventive use of light. “For the New York part of the movie,” says Redford, “I wanted a very congested and disharmonious visual sense that reflected Annie’s heart. For Big Sky Montana I wanted Frederic Remington.” What this translated to, daringly, was a movie that would be presented in two screen aspect ratios: the New York scenes in standard 1.85:1 ratio, and the Montana sequences widened to a 2.35:1 ratio. There was also a conscious decision, shared with LaGravenese, Richardson and editor Tom Rolf—who had edited Sneakers—to create a “novelistic” pace to the drama. The notion in part came from the casting of highly lyrical actors like Dianne Wiest, who played Booker’s sister. “Actors like Wiest have extraordinary power,” says Redford. “The timbre of their voice carries meaning. I wanted this film to take its time so that the audience could find those small pleasures. I also wanted the audience to slow down to the pace of the West so that the journey made by Grace and especially Annie from Manhattan to Montana is a temporal experience.”

  The filming spanned the rest of the year. Wiest and Scott Thomas were fine, as was young Ty Hillman, a local find, playing Booker’s nephew. Johansson was a “complete natural,” says Redford. “A real talent, though she acted by the numbers.”

  Directing himself, however, proved a bigger challenge than he’d imagined. “Your judgments move to another level. There is absolutely no way you can properly balance your performance, other than by intuition.” On-location video playback was of limited help. “Yes, it was valuable to be able to try something, then go to the monitor and evaluate. But it was an experience like no other I’d had. I was not sociable during The Horse Whisperer. I cut off and was dependent on Bylle as my lifeline to the real world.”

  Throughout the movie Redford was most impressed by Scott Thomas. There was just one, late problem. LaGravenese’s revision had removed the pregnancy and melodrama of Evans’s book and used Redford’s idea of restraint and redemption. Through Booker’s calm and guidance, Grace’s confidence is restored and, in the parallel story line, the slow-burning attraction between easterner and westerner turns into full-on love. At the end, Annie finally faces separation from Booker, as she must return to her family and her life in New York. “Kristin was strong,” says Redford. “She was often very poignant, and I told her how much it meant, how well she’d read Annie. But then came the goodbye, where the two of them studiously avoid the Big Love Scene. It is a heartrending moment that required Kristin to break down and weep, but she couldn’t get it. She tried. She struggled with the text and the reasons. But it wouldn’t work in her head.”

  Watching her unease, Redford called her aside. “What’s going on?” he asked her.

  Scott Thomas was shuffling notes in her hand. “I don’t know why I’m leaving. I mean, my character is confusing here. Why am I doing this?”

  “I found myself looking her straight in the eye,” Redford recalls, “and saying, maybe a little sternly, ‘You’re doing it because it’s the end of the movie and you have to do it.’ ”

  The economy of words epitomized Redford’s trust in good actors. The tears came on cue.

  At one point during preproduction, walking at Bodega Bay, Jamie had queried his father’s involvement in the film, sparing any niceties. “Why are you doing this crap?” Jamie asked, reminding his father of the work he personally most admired, work like Jeremiah Johnson, which seemed courageous, encoded, loaded with worth by comparison. “I interpreted that as the biggest challenge,” says Redford, “because there’s no question about the facile nature of screen romances, or the seduction of the old Disney way. It was a bit of a minefield. But I promised him I was aiming for something more stratified and purist. I said, ‘It won’t be playful. It won’t be sexy. But it’ll try to tell a great story with feeling.’ ”

  Some believe another, deeper stream fed the movie: that Redford, fully acknowledging Pollack’s skill with love stories and his contribution to Redford’s romantic iconography, wanted to demonstrate his individual worth. “If that was true,” said Hume Cronyn, “it was a big plus. The jock in Bob never died. And competition is a great incentive.”

  According to Vanity Fair, Joe Roth, the new chairman of Walt Disney Studios, wept when he saw the first half hour of the movie, claiming it indicated one of the most emotional pictures he’d ever seen. Half a year later, with the movie running four months behind schedule, word came from Burbank that Roth disliked the Montana sequences and judged the film overlong and tedious. At Disney’s request, Redford engaged two extra editors, Hank Corwin and Freeman Davies, known respectively for Oliver Stone movies and MTV work, to radically recut it down from four hours.

  The best part of the postproduction, says Redford, was his decision to install editing facilities in the basement at Calistoga, far from Burbank. “It saved my sanity because I could be upstairs and hit a hot idea, then run down to the basement and insert it.” Still, Tom Rolf often found Redford struggling for objectivity: “Of course, it wasn’t easy with Roth on his back, but that’s the way of Hollywood. His trouble was with his own scenes mostly, the ones where he was on-screen, carrying the drama. I would see an obvious moment to cut in some sequence, and he’d say, ‘No, no, no, there must be a better cutting point for me.’ He was impossible to please. He was very critical of his own performance and he sweated blood on it.”

  To satisfy Disney, fifty minutes of cuts were made, but the film still came in at almost three hours. Redford sought more cuts, and Rolf steered him to an early hospital scene, which, said Rolf, ran long. Rolf proposed to cut what he deemed an unnecessary verbal exchange where a doctor tells Annie that Grace has had half her leg amputated. Once the information is related, said Rolf, the scene is over. Redford objected. When the doctor delivers his line, LaGravenese scripted Annie’s response as “Which leg?” Rolf says, “I said to Bob, ‘Please, it’s redundant. We can save three minutes here.’ ”

  Redford refused emphatically. “For me it was the Chekhovian element,” he says. “The obvious cut was the commercial way. But Chekhov would always present the surprise beat, the wrong reaction that drove right to the heart of the meaning. So I said to Tom, ‘To hell with Disney. To hell with time fixations. Do it this way.’ ”

  By Christmas, assembly work on the film had shifted to Skywalker. Tom Newman had started scoring the music; the final vocal dubbing was in train at Todd-AO in Los Angeles. Then, in March, the marketers flew to northern California with their distribution projections and pasteup designs for billboards to be used as far away as Sydney and Tokyo. Predictably, the template poster featured a smoky close-up of Booker and Annie poised for a kiss. Redford would have none of it. “I’m trying to present this as a story of some metaphysical power,” he told the ten-man team gathered around a
boardroom table at Skywalker. “I don’t want the cliché.”

  Redford came out of the Disney meeting furious—and very significantly troubled. “I was expected to do Oprah Winfrey and Larry King and Barbara Walters and bang the drum all over the planet. I saw the ‘me’ they wanted to package, the commodity. I said, ‘No, I don’t wish to do this again. It’s a story, a movie story, that’s all. Let the audience decide its value. Take it or leave it.’ ”

  The Horse Whisperer had cost $80 million, making it the biggest budget Redford had handled for a directorial feature. His slice was $10 million, with a 10 percent profit share. When the movie opened in May 1998—with a galloping horse dominating the poster—its success around the world was instant. It made its money back in eight weeks and went on to gross more than $120 million.

  But the damage was done with Roth. “I heard he hated it,” says Redford. “But he never had the guts to confront me directly.” Calls went unanswered, and it became clear that Lourd’s dream of a multipicture deal with Disney was dead.

  What was most significant about the play-out of The Horse Whisperer, however, was the intransigence of Redford’s marketing response. Much as he conceded to the nobility of playing iconic heroes, and to the public’s expectation of him, his greater need was newness and discovery. His nature was always stoutly independent. And there is a paradox in the fundamental ideals we associate with individuality. We expect the individual to remain faithful to their essential character, but we also expect rebellious renewal. Redford conformed: he was ready for change again.

  22

  The Edge

  Studio connections would come and go, but the resolution of independence was permanent. So, too, was Sundance, in Redford’s mind. But that commitment would be put to the test once again.

  Sundance’s finances had, ironically, been at their most fragile since the start of the nineties. The exponential growth of the entities (defined as arts, corporate and activist departments) following the 1989 film festival breakthrough looked good on paper, but the greater exposure meant greater demands on resources. The Sundance Institute, the arts lab beating heart of the empire, began the decade $1 million in debt. The regular benefactors—including Paul Newman, David Puttnam, Vidal Sassoon, Jake Eberts, Irene Diamond and Hume Cronyn—could not fund all that needed to be done to keep the pace. Brent Beck and Gary Beer’s retail catalog, now largely in the design hands of Shauna, proved a cash-flow asset, but much more was needed. By the mid-nineties, with the institute budget in excess of $5 million yearly, much was dependent on the film festival. In 1995, 30 percent of the institute’s budget was covered by the festival receipts, but still there was a colossal deficit.

  In 1994 Redford came up with a possible solution, conceiving the idea of a dedicated Sundance television cable channel that would present alternative moviemaking to a wider audience. The concept seemed a natural one, piggybacking on a communication phenomenon that had taken wing since the deregulation of the television industry in 1972. Cable was originally a modest business, devised to relay over-the-air broadcasts to inaccessible areas. By the mid-nineties almost half of all householders across the country were cable subscribers. Redford entrusted Beer to build a partnership with Showtime (a division of CBS), Universal Studios (part of NBC Universal) and an international cofunder, Polygram Filmed Entertainment. The aim was to start in big, sophisticated markets like New York, then expand into other urban areas where cable thrived, until gradually a national coverage was achieved. The initial target audience was four million, projected to grow to fifteen million. The Independent Film Channel, however, beat Sundance to the starting gate by a substantial lead. IFC was a sister channel to “cable’s cultural powerhouse” Bravo and started transmitting in September 1994 with an advisory board that included Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee. Sundance Cable got going eighteen months later, promising a similar bill of uncensored alternative viewing, with an accent on Sundance festival films and documentaries. “But it was a heartbreaker,” says Redford. “We were well capable of moving faster, but the executive expertise was sloppy, and the window of opportunity was missed.” Sundance Cable, nevertheless, pushed on, launching to three million households in February 1996, with Nora Ryan of Showtime as titular head and Dalton Delan of the Travel Channel in charge. “We had all the tools to take on the IFC,” says Redford. “Beyond that, it was just a question of sales drive and determination.”

  There was also financial scope, it was decided, in Sundance movie theaters. Redford remembered from his childhood a picture house he loved, the Aero on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he’d seen The Fallen Sparrow with his uncle David. In the early nineties, its fading art deco splendor prompted him to purchase the site and restore the building to its former grandeur. This set in motion another underwriting plan. “What I imagined was, again, the alternative experience,” says Redford. “What we had was the characterless multiplex, the same in Seattle as in Orlando. I thought of a different setup, where each exhibition arena would serve two purposes. First, it would culturally reflect its location in every way, in the building design, the building components, the local history. Second, it would offer integrated facilities that promoted independent filmmaking at the most basic level. For example, a library unit, an equipment rental space, even an advisory desk.” He hoped this vision of Sundance Cinema Centers could expand internationally. In meetings with the key players in the Sundance family—Geoff Gilmore and Nicole Guillemet (overseers of the film festival) and Ken Brecher and Michelle Satter (overseers of institute and labs respectively) and international programs director Patricia Boero—a potential map of global Sundance Cinema Centers was drawn up, stretching from Cuba to China. To partner this extraordinary venture, Redford signed a deal with Richard A. Smith, chairman of General Cinema, the eighth-largest chain of theaters in the country.

  Meanwhile, the day-to-day struggle to keep afloat went on. Ostensibly, Gary Beer was directing overall business operations for the multientity Sundance Group, as it was now known, but it was Redford who made the decisions, halving the administrative budget to $2.7 million and pressing all his business contacts for more support. Broadway designer Ian Calderon, serving as a Sundance business adviser, persuaded Sony to contribute gratis equipment to the labs, so that student filmmakers would have the best available new technology. Other contributions came from SegaSoft and Panavision, and new funding came from the Cissy Patterson Trust and the Edward John Noble Foundation.

  All the time, says Redford, he was aware of his failings as a manager: “I tended to be disorganized and too spontaneous,” he says, “and I also trusted too much.” He became concerned at this time that crucial initiatives were being mishandled within the group. Failings in the actualization of the cable scheme and the cinema centers initiative sounded the alarm, but then Redford discovered troubling aspects of the deal making. The finger pointed to Gary Beer, who, as one staffer put it, “tended to operate as a one-man band.” Redford was particularly bothered that the cable deal allowed Beer to cash in his Sundance shares at any time. Arguments ensued, then Beer resigned “by mutual agreement.” In his place Redford installed Bob Freeman, who had helped create the sports-themed restaurant franchise ESPN Zone. To join him in a retooled management, Redford also appointed Gordon Bowen, a Madison Avenue adman responsible for the redesign of American Express and Coca-Cola, with responsibility to rebrand Sundance. Shortly after, as part of the executive shake-up, the team managing the new cable channel was replaced by Tom Harbeck, former creative linchpin of Nickelodeon.

  There was still, stubbornly, a perception problem about Sundance and what it truly represented. The oft-expressed, easy-target obloquy “purveyors of granola film” was fueled by the rebels of Sundance themselves. In June 1990 Quentin Tarantino had arrived at the labs to workshop Reservoir Dogs with adviser Steve Buscemi. Eighteen months later, as a favor, festival director Geoff Gilmore rushed the late-delivered movie into festival competition. When it failed to win
the grand jury prize, Tarantino left town declaring Sundance a waste of time. “They were liberal in the worst sense,” he was reported saying. “When [the competition] was over I stormed out. It was a slightly less dramatic version of, Fuck off!” On its later release Reservoir Dogs was much honored as the movie that reclaimed the spirit of film noir for America. But no credit went to Sundance.

  Sterling Van Wagenen was vehement about what he saw as a built-in contradictory dilemma. “When the summer labs started in 1981, the sanctity of the independent artist was written in stone. In those early meetings we were surrounded by Victor Nunez, Moctesuma Esparza, Larry Littlebird and Annick Smith, all of whom had very strong opinions and were protective of the notion of liberal thinking and freedom. It was a place for radicals. Those people were weeded out over the years. At my last Sundance board meeting, which was held in a conference room at CAA in Beverly Hills, Joe Roth was sitting on one side of me, and Mike Ovitz on the other. When I looked around, there were no independent filmmakers in the room at all.” Hume Cronyn said, “The problem centers on the word ‘independent.’ Bob always stated that he wanted to create opportunity for new voices, some paradigm that allowed others to speak, as it were. This was about equal opportunity arts. But those new artists are looking for the wide audience, too, and they often become absorbed in the mainstream. So ‘granola’ only means ‘organic’ and ‘new.’ What happens afterward, after these new independent voices break out, is nothing to do with Sundance, or its identity.”