Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  Sundance was still, unquestionably, a lure for those with fresh ideas. By the mid-nineties, the institute (now distinguished as the nonprofit kernel of the group) operated eight separate creative workshops, covering tuition in all areas of filmmaking, with the June writer-director labs attracting more than a thousand applicants yearly. The ten-day for-profit film festival had become a national cultural reference point, a place, wrote Richard Zoglin in Time, where “festivalgoers complain about overcrowded screenings” and distributors like Samuel Goldwyn Films, Sony Pictures Classics and Fine Line flocked, following Miramax’s trail, to buy “a selection of offerings from Latin and Native American filmmakers.” But it was all still, despite Van Wagenen’s suggestion, independent film, conceived away from studio patronage, nurtured with altruistic aim and made available in the most democratic of forums.

  Redford still saw perceptual difficulties with his core determination for Sundance: to create opportunity for artists. “I saw the problem of my personal fame and the association with what attempted to be an egalitarian colony. I began to wonder was that problem ever answerable. Was it best, in order to get a night’s sleep, just to step out of the equation?” In his journal he wrote: “How can I express what Sundance is? I seem to have found something in taking the value of the old, and integrating it in the new. A third eye for a new third way. But it’s a sonofabicth to make people get it. I have to get it so clear that I can pass it down as an axiom. A word. An icon. An acorn.”

  Whatever the criticisms, whatever the difficulties, the public had a stubborn appetite for Sundance. “People wanted it,” says Gordon Bowen. “Bob always spoke of inclusiveness, of the validity of a forum that allowed all American filmmakers a good chance. He wasn’t overly political or philosophical, and that’s what brought so many people in. Marginalized people, minorities, whoever, could have a shot at it. One forum for all. Speaking as a product promoter, I thought this is noble, decent and secure.”

  Security, though, was the real problem. After two years, Redford was depressed to learn the Sundance Channel was reaching just six million subscribers, compared with the IFC’s ten million–plus. He was losing ground. A series of emergency task force workshops was arranged to review the overall executive management of the group. Initially, it looked hopeful. Progress with the cinema centers seemed assured. Building was already under way at the University of Pennsylvania and in Portland, San Francisco, Dallas and Boston. Sites in Europe, China and Cuba had been visited, surveyed and short-listed. Media reportage was positive, even enthused.

  But at a time of millennial recession, when yet another severe stock market tumble chilled the world, four of the six leading movie exhibitors went out of business. In the summer of 2000, to Redford’s astonishment, General Cinema Corporation, the partners in the Sundance chain, filed for Chapter 11. Within a short time, Bowen, Harbeck and Freeman were gone. Sundance was, again, in executive free fall.

  In November 1998, shortly after completing a new political thriller, The Devil’s Own, with Brad Pitt in Ireland, Alan Pakula died in a car accident near Melville, New York. Redford was upset by the news, doubly so because he’d just returned from a visit to another dear friend, the environmentalist Margaret Owings, who lay dying at her home at Big Sur. He wrote an emotional eulogy for Pakula in Time. Just weeks before, Pakula had mused on his old collaborator’s durability. Sundance, Pakula opined, was a kind of Camelot that “has worked long enough for people to start debating independence in filmmaking, which in itself validates it.” And yet, he felt, Redford’s most enduring creation must be his screen persona. “He has disappointed me at times, and yet, in terms of a romantic icon, no one holds a candle to him. He assumed Clark Gable’s crown, and they will both be remembered for the complexity under the surface. They were glamorous, but there was always the threat that romance is dangerous.”

  But Redford’s screen persona, if it was to be solely encapsulated in The Horse Whisperer, provided a personal conundrum. He was in his sixties when he romanced Kristin Scott Thomas, almost twenty-five years his junior, on the screen. And while it is true that “the contract” the heroic star makes with his audience is often forgiving, his basic adventurous nature railed against stagnation. Few Hollywood actors maintain bankability into their late sixties. Those that have—Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery—endure because they embrace old age. The extraordinary potency of Redford’s romantic image, however, complicated the transition.

  George Roy Hill, confined to his Upper East Side apartment in the late stages of Parkinson’s disease, hadn’t spoken to Redford in years but was aware of the inevitable changes he faced. For him, Redford’s career as an actor divided in two: he was the buckskin saddlebum, a part of his nature that grew from the Texas frontier; the other part arose from his friendship with Pollack, a probing Jewish sobriety that extracted the seductive Casanova from what Hill called “troubled” Irishness. “Everyone wants to be Irish in Hollywood,” said Hill, “because it connotes Shaw and Joyce and that long, tormented history of suffering and alienation. Nowadays they’re even calling Jack Nicholson an Irishman. But Bob’s Irishness, as remote as it is, springs from the genuine well of despair. He has trouble balancing himself in the world.” Reflecting on his work over the years, Hill concluded: “There’s a lack of resolution that makes Redford special. It’s summed up in that final scene in The Candidate, his best picture, where, after the shenanigans of the election, McKay says, ‘What do we do now?’ That question is in Bob.” For Hill, the way forward for Redford in his sixties was “to turn inward, and give voice to some of that turmoil we’ve only seen glimpses of.”

  At the turn of the century, Redford seemed ready for transformation. He was in contact with Robert Pirsig, whose Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a personal account of recovery from a nervous breakdown on a road trip with his son, deeply touched Redford. He found it “familiar” in the best sense and had met with Pirsig years before in an attempt to mount a movie based on the book. Pakula had wondered if Redford’s seemingly exotic desire to make the movie wasn’t unfulfilled remedial family work. Redford thought not. It was, he insists, a desire to connect with “the freedom inherent in the surrender to insanity, or the insanity inherent in freedom.” Pirsig invited Redford to join him on the road in a battered old Cadillac. Redford imagined the delights of immersing in Pirsig’s spiritual adventures and finding out more about the “energetic facts” of true awareness poached from Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui guru, Don Juan Matus, that Pirsig so obsessively beat the drum about. But Redford was tied up with Sundance business, and the Pirsig connection slipped.

  At that moment, serendipitously, Jake Eberts arrived with the outline of a novel called The Legend of Bagger Vance. In Eberts’s recollection the novel “somehow seemed important. I found myself flying to L.A. to see Bob with a sense of urgent purpose.” An arrangement to meet at Redford’s beach house was made, but with a flight delay and heavy traffic, Eberts arrived at Trancas Beach in a sweat, running late. “I was wired, and when Bob saw the state I was in, he offered to find me a change of T-shirt. I thought, That’s it, then. Knowing him, I’ve lost my window. He’ll start taking calls and answering faxes and I can forget Bagger Vance.”

  Eberts offered to read the outline there and then to Redford, and within the space of one page, he saw the change in Redford. “He switched off the fax and phone and settled in. ‘I like this,’ he told me, and I knew my instinct was right: that he was waiting for a movie like this, something mystical and fresh, to take him in a new direction.”

  Steven Pressfield’s novel The Legend of Bagger Vance was attractive to Redford in part because of its subject matter, golf. He had started playing golf while caddying at the Bel Air Club in 1948 and at one time played to scratch. Recently, as part of his rehabilitation, Jamie had taken to the game, and since he and his father were near neighbors in northern California, it seemed an ideal way of sharing time. But the greatest draw was the philosophical symbolism of the story,
which amounted to nothing less than a midlife confessional, laying out the values that dictated all his choices.

  Redford had recently discovered analyst James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code, with its theory of benevolent destiny. According to Jamie, Bagger Vance—the fictional story of a gifted golfer who loses his swing—“echoed” Hillman. “It was obvious Dad was crossing a bridge, in terms of his self-definition,” says Jamie. “And Bagger Vance was an expression of that.”

  In keeping with his desire to explore new collaborations, Redford commissioned former psychiatrist Jeremy Leven to draft the screenplay and assigned design to Stuart Craig, whose work on movies like Gandhi and Mary Reilly impressed him. With Leven, he emphasized that this was a movie of metaphors; when he met Craig, he told him, “I want an exaggerated sense of reality. I want the golfing greens to be greener and the 1920s setting to be fairy-tale.” His casting notions swung like a pendulum. First, wildly, he thought of playing the title role himself or costarring with golf adepts like Jack Nicholson or Sean Connery. But Connery and Nicholson, like himself, were past sixty and far from the youthful presences in Pressfield’s novel. He switched to the idea of Morgan Freeman as Bagger, the golfing mystic, and Brad Pitt as the story’s troubled hero, Rannulph Junuh. Both men turned him down. Eberts landed DreamWorks as the funder, and though Redford found enthusiasm and support from Katzenberg, the studio nudged the movie toward the casting of Matt Damon as Junuh and Will Smith as a younger, racier Bagger Vance. (Damon had never held a golf club, but a tutor took care of that.)

  Superficially, Leven’s Bagger Vance became a romance. Set in the Depression-era Deep South, it tells the tale of war-traumatized Junuh trying to break a perennial bender by helping his former sweetheart, Adele, who is striving to save the town’s economy. She has inherited her father’s golf course and wants to stage a tournament hosting golf legends Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones. For the tournament to go ahead, Junuh, once the district’s great sports hope, must participate, but he cannot recapture the rhythm of his famous swing. The mysterious caddie Bagger Vance arrives from nowhere and, with Adele’s loving coaching, guides Junuh back into the zone.

  But the romance, says Redford, was merely the hook. Of most value was the morality fable. For Pressfield, the original inspiration was mysticism in the form of the Mahabharata, as summarized in the Bhagavad Gita: Rannulph Junuh, or R. Junuh, is Arjuna, the mythical character who refuses to fight for possession of the kingdom that is rightfully his, since he believes war is wasteful. Lord Krishna lectures him on duty, explaining who Arjuna truly is, who God is, and how one finds peace and meaning in conflict.

  In Redford’s interpretation the mysticism was secondary to a hero’s story. It was, says Redford, drawn from the Jungian well, and from elements of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which illuminates the interweaving of all cultural mythologies and proposes the importance of the retelling of tales to reinforce our sense of common spiritual purpose. “Given that we have abandoned myth in our culture,” says Redford, “it seemed like the right time to offer this compendium. I had a sense that the way we receive information is faulty. Too much that comes into our heads—from the daily media, mostly—is redundant. Do we really need to know such a huge amount of detail about the minutiae of every event in every country? Bagger Vance was about remembering who we are and this shared spiritual journey we’re on.”

  As with so many script developments over the years, Redford’s perfectionist vision slowed the process. Leven drafted and redrafted but was replaced by LaGravenese, since his divided attention on another directorial project irritated Redford. “Bob was really authoring himself,” says Eberts, “but that’s his style. He is the ghostwriter, don’t doubt it.” Script finally in hand, Rachel Portman, an English composer, was engaged to produce the lushly nostalgic sound track. Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer of Quiz Show, was, untypically, hired again. South African Charlize Theron, whom Redford had liked in The Astronaut’s Wife, was cast as Adele. For Theron, Bagger Vance had a special resonance. Her own life story was about recovering the groove. Her father had run a very successful business as a road builder. When he died, the banks descended, recalling loans. Only her mother’s tenacity, says Theron, regained the family’s solvency. “I related to Bagger Vance,” said Theron. “[I had] an emotional connection with the characters and with their predicament.” Jack Lemmon, professing himself retired, was lured back as the elderly narrator recalling Junuh’s grand moment. Says Redford, “As a director, you are looking for actors that are tonal, like paints on a palette. You need them to complement and set off each other. I didn’t get all the right people on Bagger, but I got enough to make a go of it.”

  There was optimism in the air in the summer of 1999 as Bagger Vance shooting got under way in Savannah, Georgia. “He’d proven a lot commercially with The Horse Whisperer,” says Jake Eberts, “and we were feeling he was going from strength to strength.”

  When the movie wrapped at Christmas, Redford was satisfied. He stayed alone in Utah as the year 2000 dawned, in the Big House, reading Carlos Baker’s Emerson Among the Eccentrics. Throughout his life, he learned, Emerson carried a compass. The miracle of its magnetic needle, wrote Baker, bore witness to the divine spirit of nature. “I like,” said Emerson, “to hold the visible god in my hand.” Redford found the notion of palpable metaphor intriguing. It recalled for him his instinctive aspiration in all his ambitious work. “I tried not to overanalyze any movie of mine or anyone else’s, and generally self-important cinema annoys me. But there’s no question that there’s such a thing as ‘serious cinema.’ Seriousness, as Leonard Cohen says, is deeply agreeable to the human spirit. So there’s a validity to movies of ambition, movies that say something. Concept and realization may not marry, of course. Movies fail. But the trying is legitimate. I didn’t always stretch with my work, but when I did, it was in hope of generating other ideas—in the audience, as in myself. Observation, commentary, polemic—all seem to me fairly within the remit of modern cinema. And it’s healthy to stretch.” Such was the reasoning behind Bagger Vance.

  Bagger Vance was announced for a June 2000 release, but when Walter Parkes, the studio executive, saw the proposed final cut, it was pulled at the last minute. Reportedly, Parkes was less than delighted with its two hours–plus of sunset golf courses, mellow whimsy and rambling voice-overs. “Parkes couldn’t make sense of it,” says a Sundance staffer. “The trouble was, as the cliché goes, no one knows nothing in Hollywood. They all admired A River Runs Through It. But it didn’t make the money The Horse Whisperer made. Bagger Vance was visually akin to River, so there was wariness. Also, to be truthful, DreamWorks’ big hits that summer were Gladiator and Cast Away, two big, starry, showy melodramas. They wanted more of the same from Bob, not a morality tale.”

  In November 2000, DreamWorks finally authorized the release of Bagger Vance. The movie previewed in New York the day America cast its vote in the Bush-Gore election. It was not an auspicious day for Redford in any respect. The size of the movie’s failure was considerable. Routinely reviewed as a disappointment, it earned just $30 million, against a production cost of $60 million. Gladiator, by comparison, earned half a billion dollars.

  When Redford visited Bali and Java with Bylle a few weeks before the opening of Bagger Vance, with Sundance’s business problems heavy on his mind, he wrote in his diary: “A strange thing. I have huge-scaled symmetrical thoughts of an order not like me, complete, formal and philosophical—and negative. So much negative energy pouring out of me, day and night, it feels like torture. Yet what sustains me is the faith that this is process.”

  The fact that he had produced a movie so full of mystical whimsy and hopeful philosophy—and one so personally revelatory—and the fact that it had been so resoundingly rejected drove him freshly and deeper into self-analysis. As reflected in the controversy of the disputed national election result, America too was going through a time of great uncertainty and self-questioning. Hurt as h
e was by the rejection of the movie, he was heartened by this national urge for reevaluation.

  The Clinton era in general had been good for him, and the National Medal of Arts, presented to him by the president at a White House ceremony in May 1999, seemed as much an acknowledgment of his constant conservation work as of Sundance and some durable films. The two campaigns he participated in during the Clinton era, though—the ones he took most pride in—had delivered mixed results.

  The expanded highway dispute with the Utah Department of Transportation that had absorbed a hefty amount of his spare time since the seventies seemed resolved when, with Governor Calvin Rampton’s intervention, the proposed six lanes were reduced to four. Sundance then suggested further truncation to an environmentally friendly new two-lane road that would be serviced with picnic areas and scenic hike routes built by Redford. Sundance’s environmental spokesperson, Julie Mack, felt victory was in sight, that the defacement of the canyon was uppermost in the minds of all locals. But Redford always underestimated local opposition to him and the reality that, for many, he was still an interloper imposing personal priorities. Beyond the ring of resort properties buffering what Gary Beer called “the little kingdom” were three hundred acres of privately owned lands run by eight independent property owner associations amassed under the North Fork Property Owners Council. “They’d always argued with Sundance,” says Beer, “starting with rows about who got the first use of the community plows when everyone was snowed in each January. Their position was that they frankly didn’t care that Bob’s resort had brought a little cash into the local economy each winter season and each summer lab season. They weren’t interested in the small fry and they certainly didn’t want talk of conservation. They just wanted to make good and invite all and every developer into the area.”