Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  The conservationist Utah Coalition’s lawyers, partly funded by Redford, lost to the UDOT in the Salt Lake courts. The widened four-lane highway that would allow a heavier volume of cross-state traffic was authorized and, within weeks, construction began. According to Mack, the evidence of serious environmental damage was immediate. Landslide pollution poisoned much of the Provo River stock, and sections of the mountainside fringing the road became unstable and had to be harnessed with permanent, unprepossessing steel buttresses. “It was a case of what happens when you start unraveling a ball of string,” says Mack. “It might have been worse, with a six-lane highway and wider land reclaim, but it was still upsetting for everyone interested in land protection.”

  But there were successes, too. Under Clinton, Republicans in Congress had advanced a bill that proposed the limiting of wilderness in Utah to just 1.8 million acres of Bureau of Land Management–preserved lands. President Clinton had vetoed it. Redford, Mack and Joyce Deep, serving the Utah Coalition, worked with Wayne Owens and Bill Bradley on an alternative Citizens’ Proposal Bill calling for 5.7 million wilderness acres. Even the most loyal of Sundance staffers—people like mountain manager Jerry Hill—had their doubts about Redford’s goals: “I saw the coalition’s viewpoint but the bottom line was our employment and our survival. Preservation was fine. Still, we, and our children, needed to be able to utilize this landscape as needs be.” But Ted Wilson, a Mormon, agreed with Redford, feeling it was a moral responsibility that had religious echoes, a land tithing comparable with the Mormons’ culture of tithing income. Redford won this round and the bill finally signed into law by Clinton effectively endorsed unspecified expanded wilderness.

  Joyce Deep’s respect for Redford’s vision and tenacity grew. But among his executive staff there was greater dissent. He was often regarded as a difficult, sometimes intimidating presence. “You knew his wrath,” said one staffer, “and you always tried to avoid his company if you were on the wrong side of a discussion.” But Deep defended the kind of obstinancy needed to match the challenges he had set himself. “He could be a pain in the ass,” she says, “because it was often hard, say, writing a speech for him, to please him in the details. He also was not known for dishing out massive praise. But he was a fighter, with the best. And he was modest, too modest, in situations like the wilderness challenge. He wanted to credit the coalition, but his personal achievement was huge. His style was to get his hands dirty, and he did most of it out of the media glare. When he wanted [California senator] Dianne Feinstein on our side, he just got in his car and drove right up to her home in San Francisco on a Sunday morning and knocked on her door: ‘Can I talk with you about these bills? We need you on our side.’ Feinstein became one of the great voices of the conservationists, and that was thanks to him, though few people knew it.”

  When President Clinton inaugurated a new national park in the Escalante Red Rocks—at 1.7 million acres, the biggest new national easement since Teddy Roosevelt’s day—Redford was standing proudly beside him on the Grand Canyon podium, though, says John Adams, he’d made it clear that he bore no special allegiance to any one party. “Though he’d done so much for us at the NRDC, we didn’t regard him as ‘our own’ because he resisted labels. He felt he wanted to address the causes that felt right, and be unimpeded by partisanship of any kind.” Redford liked the Clintons, admired the president’s work, especially in race relations, and concluded “his centrist policy is probably right, for now at any rate.”

  Through 1998 and 1999 Redford continued to be sporadically involved in elective politics. He supported twenty-three candidates in congressional elections. Only six of the candidates for whom he made radio commercials or speeches failed to win a seat. In the presidential stakes, however, he was not so lucky. Bill Bradley’s aborted run for the presidency saddened him. But he continued to support the League of Conservation Voters and strategized “a better, effective awareness of environmental threat issues by taking a state-by-state approach, candidate by candidate, rather than lobbying for change at the top.”

  Joyce Deep saw the obsessive nature of his strategizing, but as she got to know him better, she also saw that everything was secondary to his love of cinema. “He’d talk shop, politically speaking, for hours,” she says. “If [a political story] was dominating the headlines, he was first in with a point of view—never gossipy, but intellectually probing. Still, there was always the shadow of some creative project. You’d want a meeting to discuss someone’s congressional campaign, and he’d be looking at his watch. There was always some Wildwood imperative, just one more script to read.”

  In the aftermath of the collapse of the would-be Sundance Cinema Centers and the poor showing for Bagger Vance, Redford was depressed. Bylle took him home to Hamburg to distract and revive him. With Sundance teetering again, she suggested an independent review of Redford’s finances, corporate and personal.

  For years he had entrusted his investments and property purchases totally to Reg Gipson. Gipson had become a family friend, always with a smile on his face and a kind word. The two men had a natural kinship that made time in each other’s company—whether in Gipson’s Corporate Management Group offices on Avenue of the Stars in Los Angeles or in Calistoga or Utah—joyful. “I’d never really paid attention,” says Redford. “Reg handed me summary sheets of my outgoings and I asked no questions.” There were sensitive areas, on reflection, where Redford should have asked questions. He did not, for example, query the stock purchases advised by Gipson’s brother’s brokerage in New York, or the details of the six major mortgages on properties stretching across the country, from Manhattan to Trancas Beach. “I would go out, make a movie and call Reg and say, ‘I like New Mexico. Buy me a property, or take a lease.’ ” Now, when the review results were in, Redford was staggered by the accumulated exposure of his mortgages and the size of his personal debts. He saw the error of his ways.

  Immediately, he instructed Gipson to sell off all his properties except in Utah. He was, he admits, “tailspinning.” His film business lawyer since the seventies—originally backing up Hendler and at the fore since Hendler’s demise—was the esteemed, expensive Barry Tyerman. Redford consulted Tyerman, passing on Gipson’s records. The men met in Tyerman’s office in Century Park in Los Angeles. Redford recalls Tyerman’s sharp intake of breath. “You need to declare bankruptcy,” said Tyerman.

  Redford knew the wisdom of Tyerman’s expertise but could not bring himself to accede. His track record of stubbornness and winning—from defying Paramount over Blue to helping defeat the Republicans’ rollback wilderness initiative—bore him up. “Of course I probably should have taken Barry’s advice and laid down my hand. But that would mean walking away from Sundance. That was never going to happen.”

  Redford rolled up his sleeves once again.

  23

  The Actor in Transit

  The original design of the Sundance Group was radically modified, out of necessity. A new, edgier version of Sundance Productions, headed up by former MGM executive Jeff Kleeman and capitalizing on the marquee value of the Redford connection to produce movies made either independently or under the auspices of South Fork Pictures, a Wildwood-allied company managed by Michael Nozik, was launched. It coproduced a number of Sundance-developed features, such as Ed Burns’s She’s the One, with the urgent goal of buttressing Sundance’s finances.

  It wasn’t to be. And neither was the salvation package that hung on Microsoft’s cofounder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions, the seemingly perfect cash-rich partner to plug the gap left by the collapse of General Cinema. With Allen’s cash, Redford intended to buy out his cable partners and rid himself of what he saw as “the boardroom compromises” that dogged the institute’s history. He came close, but Vivendi, the French conglomerate, undercut him, purchasing Universal (the Sundance channel’s co-owners) and, says Redford, scared Allen off.

  Being tested as never before, Redford relied on his quirky attributes of self-sufficiency,
instinctive reasoning and sheer will to keep him on track. “He was never good at self-pity,” says Jamie. “Because he was a man of action, every crisis he saw, in the Chinese way, as an opportunity. So, perversely, he was wildly motivated when things hit the bottom.”

  Redford saw the remedy as a mixture of introducing new blood and, at the same time, reinstating old concepts. He retained a Salt Lake City adviser, lawyer Tom Jolley, and two young accountants, Kyle Pexton and Tye Davis, who immediately took charge and redirected his energies. Within a very short time, new initiatives for the Sundance Institute were announced to steer it back to its arts-purist roots. These included the establishment of the International Documentary Fund, a scheme to underwrite fifty indie documentaries over five years for the Sundance Channel, aided by $4.5 million in grants from the Open Society Institute.

  But the best efforts of Jolley, Pexton and Davis couldn’t counter the damage of years of financial overreaching. In 2002 Bruce Willard, founder and president of the apparel catalog The Territory Ahead, acquired a controlling 50 percent share of the Sundance catalog in a deal that replenished Redford’s personal wealth, and, therefore, stabilized Sundance. Two years later, Willard and Redford sold the company to Boston-based Webster Capital and New York–based ACI Capital for close to $40 million. Willard disposed of all his shares, but Redford maintained a nominal 3 percent, less as an investment than a fingerprint.

  How painful was this surrender for Redford? “It cut him up because of the unavoidable suggestion that a key component was gone,” said one longtime staffer. “Sundance had been growing its branches over the years. This was the first to truly go.” Redford insists, “It was a necessary reordering, that’s all. Over the years, Shauna, myself and others built a very individual and unique western profile in the retail trade, and we continue to take pride in that. It’s out there, it goes on, and I am still a part of the Sundance catalog and always will be, so the ‘acorn’ pertains.”

  What lay ahead was a continuing erosion and a fight that he knew could only be engaged in by maintaining the high public profile that launched Sundance in the first place. Reasoning the importance of his mission, he decided, was easy. Emerson spoke of a nation in terms of “conscience keepers,” and that was a concept that still sat well with him. Bob Woodward, who had stayed in touch with him, believes that “conscience” is the word that underlies All the President’s Men and so many of Redford’s other ambitious works. It also, Woodward believes, lies at the heart of his Sundance experimentation and, further back, at the heart of his decision in the sixties to acquire and preserve the Sundance canyon: “He had a problem about profligate use of land and indifference, and that never stopped.” Though he was most comfortable domestically now in northern California, the canyon—and the colony it bred—continued to embody his raison d’être. “I hated this continual firefighting. But then what worthwhile cause is easy?” says Redford. “I knew I had to persevere in order to finance Sundance, and that came down to persevering as an actor and an artist.”

  Out of the threatened bankruptcy came renewed vigor to experiment and extend. The next film he took on, Spy Game, seemed at first a backward step. It was originally developed by Dutch director Mike van Diem and producer Douglas Wick and inherited by Enemy of the State director Tony Scott. The attraction for Redford was Scott’s dazzling son et lumière reputation and by Michael Frost Beckner’s electric script, which bore distinct tones of Wick’s all-time favorite movie, Three Days of the Condor. Markedly in the stylized contemporary thriller fashion, which borrowed an MTV sensibility of equal emphasis on rock music and flash editing, the movie represented a distinct step into the youth market, a pleasing act of appeasement to Lourd and CAA.

  Beckner’s script, revised with David Arata, was set in 1991 and dealt with two generations of CIA field operatives, moving forward and backward over sixteen years of subterfuge in Vietnam, Berlin, Beirut and China. Superficially a buddy story, Spy Game distinguished itself as a condensed history of recent American foreign policy, enshrining a critique of institutional amorality. That naturally pleased the man who had created All the President’s Men. Redford’s role was CIA veteran Nathan Muir, who, on his last day at Langley, learns that his protégé, “Boy Scout” Bishop, played by Brad Pitt, has been incarcerated in a Chinese prison under sentence of death. Intercut with long Redford monologues that unveil the sacrificing of his friend, the movie ticks down toward Bishop’s hour of execution.

  Filming Spy Game presented substantial logistical problems. To convey the variations of time and place, Scott used archive black-and-white reversal film stock that intensifies colors, digital video, differing gauges of standard film and vintage cameras. Redford’s work, from late November through January 2001, mainly involved location shooting in Morocco, followed by the Langley CIA interiors staged at Shepperton Studios, outside London. Originally, the Beirut sequences were scheduled for Tel Aviv and Haifa. “But we had troublesome incidents in Israel,” said Scott. “There was a firebomb thrown at our hotel, and then it reached a crisis point when someone was killed and dumped on the steps. We cut our losses and looked elsewhere to duplicate Beirut.” The troubles were heightened by the fact that Pitt had signed on for Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, which was due to commence directly after Christmas. “We were hemmed in [by Pitt’s dates],” said Scott, “so there was a stopwatch on us all the time. But Bob understood the pressures on Brad, and he never complained.”

  Forbearance required an emotional adjustment by Redford. A decade before, he had effectively started Brad Pitt’s career. Now it was Pitt in the spotlight, and it was Pitt’s minders and agents who dictated scheduling and the mood on the set. Redford could grin and bear it, though he did chafe at Pitt’s insistence on a closed set, with no interruptions or visitors. Pitt himself was courteous, announcing to the media that he’d committed to the picture “basically because Bob was aboard” and expressing warm friendship to Redford throughout. “I wasn’t, obviously, resentful,” says Redford. “I fully understood the rules of the game and I acknowledged how hard it is to retain balance in the kind of promotional frenzy Brad was experiencing. I’d been there. I knew the territory. Now it was his moment. So I sat it out when I had to.”

  Shooting shifted to Casablanca. For Redford, this was the best news. Just the previous year he had promised Bylle a long vacation in Morocco. As he expected, he felt an affinity for the local culture and threw himself into learning as much as he could about it. “We can’t bury our heads in the ground about foreign cultures,” he says, “and I took this opportunity to observe and learn with enthusiasm.” The urge to understand Arab life, says Redford, was exactly equal to the drive to experience Europe in the fifties. “I found I connected comfortably with the setting,” says Redford, “the same way I connected with the Hispanic people, or the people of the Celtic Isles.”

  A surprising ebullience about moviemaking returned to Redford during Spy Game. The breakneck speed of the movie gave him energy. He lamented the fact that, because he was sixty-four, the insurance underwriters limited the helicopter battle sequences in which he could appear. “I did some stuff regardless,” he says, “and it was new to me, a real adrenaline blast. The insurers were pulling their hair out, because it was all dangerous, low-level flying, with explosions going off right and left. I loved it.”

  Redford fit in easily with this new, teen-targeted movie dynamic that demanded texturally variant story lines, an astonishing array of visuals and an average shot duration of 2.6 seconds. “It was a new film language, but it was also a case of the more things change, the more they remain the same. You can set off a million firecrackers, but if you don’t have a story to tell and capable actors to relate it, you have nothing but smoke.”

  Redford’s effortless command was highlighted because of its juxtaposition to Pitt’s hip, crinkly eyed posturings. “Robert Redford has been around for so long,” wrote Edward Guthmann in the San Francisco Chronicle, “and has diversified his talents to such
an extent—director, environmentalist, indie film guru—that one forgets what a strong and persuasive actor he can be.… There’s a texture, a dimension to him now that wasn’t there before—not only in his weather-beaten face and lumpy hands, but in the way he holds himself and regards the world; in the way he commits himself to this role and doesn’t balk at playing the cynical, callous and dishonest aspects of his character.”

  Spy Game may not have been Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jamie observed, but the central device of the mentor-protégé—what Scott called “the father-son story”—provided what he sought: a chance to essay the bonds of fractured kinship and the difficult business of fixing things.

  A career marker was noted by many. Rita Kempley of The Washington Post wrote that the film helped Redford “regain the dignity he threw away as Demi Moore’s billionaire john in Indecent Proposal.” But if CAA imagined such success would plant him firmly in the youth market like, say, Mel Gibson, they were wrong. For a follow-up, Redford quickly opted for a script by thirty-eight-year-old Israeli-born former radio journalist Rod Lurie, who had recently appeared on the front page of Variety with his controversial political sleeper, The Contender, about a campaign to humiliate a female vice presidential candidate, starring Joan Allen. That movie had been modestly funded by DreamWorks to the tune of $9 million but, after a slow start during the summer, crossed the $100 million earnings mark.

  As a journalist broadcasting on KABC talk radio in Los Angeles, Lurie had a reputation as an outspoken leftist who was occasionally barred from press screenings and Republican get-togethers. Redford was flattered that Lurie credited All the President’s Men as his greatest artistic inspiration. With West Point and a career as a broadcaster behind him, Lurie had started as a filmmaker in 1998 with a half-hour short, Four Second Delay, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Deauville American Film Festival. It portrayed a radio call-in show galvanized when a listener threatens to kill hostages unless the on-air interviewee, Bob Woodward, confesses the identity of Deep Throat. Lurie followed this with his feature debut, the one-set Deterrence, a political meditation in which the president is forced to a nuclear showdown with Iraq from the isolation of a remote, snowbound diner. “He was obviously smart,” says Redford, “and he was very ballsy. He appeared to have an interesting slant on human behavior, and he also had in his hands a great script. I thought it would be good because he was a younger voice, a new-ideas man to work with.”