Robert Redford

by Callan, Michael Feeney

  The movie started filming the last week of April 2003 in Kamloops, British Columbia. “I didn’t really direct Bob,” says Hallström. “I got to witness him working.” It seemed clear that Redford was in the process of remodeling his image to striking effect. If The Clearing was an admission of age, An Unfinished Life wallowed in the damage and detritus of time. From the first frames, where Einar starts the daily drudgery, milking the cow and preparing medication for his bedridden friend, to the last, where he scares off Jean’s abusive boyfriend and makes his peace with the new family he has found, Redford seemed experimentally fresh. There was nothing familiar about the performance. What emerged, for those who knew him, was a completely untypical self-revelation. Redford had, said Pollack, “always cherished the theory of keeping something back from the audience.” Here, searching for the essence of late-life despair, he laid it all out. The script helped. The words were written for him. But it was Redford, not Einar, who grumbled incessantly in a chronic, half-audible inner dialogue; it was Redford whose empathy with animals and landscape brought the light to his face; it was Redford who struggled to pass a compliment; it was Redford who expressed devotional love with a mere shrug.

  An Unfinished Life deserved recognition—for some, even merited the best actor Academy Award he had never scored—but it was not destined to succeed. Hampered by oversentimentality—and by the Weinsteins’ second thoughts about Lopez’s talent, which induced ridiculous pressures on Hallström to “shoot more of the damned bear”—the movie was lost in a maze of boardroom bickering. When Disney acquired Miramax ten years before, the Weinsteins were small change. Then Miramax grew powerfully as a production entity, turning out multiple award–winners like The English Patient and Chicago and contributing 40 percent of the studio’s output by 2003. But it had never been a comfortable partnership. Michael Eisner never really hit it off with the Weinsteins, and throughout there had been disputes, the most damning of which was Eisner’s refusal to back the Weinsteins in making the Lord of the Rings series, which was picked up so triumphantly by New Line Cinema.

  At Christmas 2003, when An Unfinished Life was due for release, the Weinsteins’ contract with Disney was up for renewal and, inevitably, under debate. It was announced instead that the movie would open the Cannes Film Festival in May. When that was canceled, it was to be the major holiday release of Christmas 2004. The delay reflected a contractual tug-of-war. By the time Eisner parted ways with the Weinsteins, An Unfinished Life was all but forgotten.

  And so one of Redford’s most important movies, a careful template for his late-life work, dribbled onto screens in September 2005. There was no marketing, and reviewers mostly dismissed it. Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter wrote, unfairly for many, that “the film never realizes its dramatic potential, choosing to take predictable story paths with obvious characters.” Pete Travers in Rolling Stone acknowledged the skillful rapport between Freeman and Redford but hated the “drag-ass solemnity.” And Variety disliked both the movie and Redford, “who seems to be putting his own laconic spin on a part that feels like it was written for Clint Eastwood.”

  Was Redford’s performance so lacking? The question is vital, because the barrier he’d reached—age—he’d met with awareness, energy and the highest ambition. Writer Walter Kirn’s observation at the time of The Horse Whisperer provides the plausible answer to negative reviews. Great stars like De Niro and Pacino, said Kirn, are the sum total of the roles they’ve played, “but Redford stands for the industry itself, in all its California dreaminess.” As such, no variation of the gilded icon was permissible. Sydney Pollack, estranged from his old sparring partner since the filming of Havana, spoke of the difficulty of separating “acting” from “megastardom”: “It’s an impossible conundrum because that kind of stardom has invested the actor with the audience’s preconceived needs. Look at Elvis. He was this phenomenon who satisfied everyone’s dream of rebellion, and then he settled down to make cozy movies. He was never forgiven. Take Stallone. He tried comedy and he made a good fist of it, but they threw it out. Take Woody [Allen]. He’s allowed to make a certain kind of movie, but dare he move out of the box? Same with a star like Bob. It’s a deal with the devil. He will always be thirty, blond, perfection. There will be moments when smart critics will cut through it, but even the best of them want the idealized actor. They want the continuance, because no one wants the death of fantasy, no one can stand too much reality.”

  Redford’s personal realities, however, were unavoidable.

  24

  Jeremiah’s Way

  Tom Jolley and the young Salt Lake City accountants proved a godsend, but they couldn’t reverse the damage of years of less than efficient managerial control at Sundance and the overhiring and overspending that arose from bad deputizing. Redford accepted their verdicts with aplomb, but he was adamant about the importance of preserving Sundance.

  In May, shortly after the delayed release of An Unfinished Life, he announced the relaunch of the Sundance Cinema Centers, this time in partnership with Paul Richardson and Bert Manzari, described by The Hollywood Reporter as “stalwarts of the independent theater chain business for more than thirty years.” On its heels came another IRM-style venture, the Sundance U.S. Conference of Mayors Summit, staged with the United Nations–funded International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, for the purpose of reactivating debate about global warming. The conference, attended by forty-five mayors, was a success, but its collateral value was as an expression of Redford’s never-say-die stubbornness in the face of overwhelming doubt. A twelve-step resolution committed 170 cities to a new pact for pollution reduction independent of national policy, and Redford again felt stimulated, even optimistic.

  Sundance, however, needed more than initiatives. It needed cash. A quick fix offered itself in Paramount’s animated Charlotte’s Web, a version of E. B. White’s children’s classic directed by Gary Winick, which Redford did as a favor to Winick and in which he lent his voice as the ornery Ike the Horse. The movie was useful, but it was the project he wanted to do next that he thought could earn him big dollars. Lions for Lambs was written by Matthew Carnahan, brother of Joe Carnahan, the director of the successful cop thriller Narc, and originated with Paula Wagner, the long-term production associate of Tom Cruise. In 2005, Cruise’s life and career had taken a turn with marriage to Katie Holmes and a series of ill-judged promotional appearances that allegedly offended the executive of his old studio, Paramount, and caused the termination of his contract. Cruise and Wagner’s partnership with Paramount had lasted fourteen years and spanned several major blockbusters. In November 2006 it was announced that they had become effective controllers of the relaunched United Artists, a studio division of MGM that had served only as a boutique name since its collapse in the early nineties. In its new incarnation, MGM remained majority owner, but Cruise and Wagner took control of development and the creative rebirth of a studio that had been made famous ninety years before as a venture partnership between Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith.

  The two projects the new UA planned to relaunch with were the wartime Valkyrie, which would star Tom Cruise, and Carnahan’s Lions for Lambs, which Lourd proposed to Redford to direct and star in. Redford had great incentive to make Lions for Lambs work because he knew that a successful outcome could well lead to further codevelopments with UA, even a formal business partnership.

  Lions for Lambs was about the war in Afghanistan or, more specifically, the national mood relating to American involvement in a foreign conflict that seemed to many not much different from Asian engagements of old. Redford was to play an idealistic West Coast professor, Stephen Malley, who attempts to motivate a college student slacker, whom Carnahan based on himself. The story also traced the fate of two of Malley’s motivated students who join the U.S. Army and enter the conflict in Afghanistan. In a parallel plotline, a Republican senator and presidential hopeful attempts to persuade a leading female journ
alist to whitewash a questionable military strategy against the Taliban.

  “I thought it was massively challenging,” says Redford, “because it could so easily slip into leftist bias, and that would defeat its purpose. Malley’s mission is to encourage social engagement in his students. It calls for talk before action. It’s about learning as much as teaching, but it couldn’t be preachy. It’s about morality, but it can’t be moralistic. Because of the divisive nature of Bush’s war on terror, I thought it was timely. As a director, I emphatically wasn’t taking sides. I didn’t want to say this or that is right or wrong. I just felt Lions for Lambs could provoke a meaningful wider discussion.”

  Redford envisaged Meryl Streep for the journalist Janine Roth and Denzel Washington for the Republican senator Irving. Streep jumped at the part. But Cruise became Irving. “You roll with these things,” says Redford, “and of greater concern to me was the small budget—$35 million—and the short time frame, since our deal was to have the movie ready for a grand UA launch by Christmas 2007.”

  Troubles rained down. First, no major soundstage was available in Hollywood, so production was based at “a utility barn” at Ren-Mar Studios on Cahuenga Boulevard. Since extensive Afghanistan action scenes were required and the budget would allow no foreign locations, complex snow-machine work was sited at sunny Rocky Peak Park in Simi Valley. Then came eighteen-hour days “shuffling and reshuffling pages like card sharks.” Some people thought Cruise was unprepared. He did not interact well with Streep and Cruise and Redford seemed to be on different wavelengths. Cruise was on record saying his interest in the project revolved around Redford, whose work he had followed joyfully since Ordinary People. But Redford struggled with his costar’s approach. “At one point he brought in some neoconservative foreign policy advisers, among them Robert Kagan, whom I thought were inappropriate,” says Redford. “I called him on it, saying, ‘Wait a second, Tom. This is not the way I want to do this, and certainly not with these people in my eye line.’ ” Cruise backed off. The delays went on. “It got to the point where we had to deploy cards with the lines written on them,” says a crew member. “Meryl lost interest. She started playing with her BlackBerry. Bob freaked. It became very, very tense.”

  Lions for Lambs stumbled through to make its deadline and opened, as promised, in November 2007. The previews did not go well. After the first screening in New York, Fox News reported that neither Streep nor Redford accompanied Cruise to the Museum of the Moving Image, where he was being honored that night. Observers read between the lines.

  Ironically, the film incited some of the most impassioned reviews of Redford’s recent career. Critic Amy Biancolli in the Houston Chronicle called it Redford’s “bravest” film, and The Hollywood Reporter agreed that it “raises many important questions.” But these plaudits were challenged by savage reviews deriding “pompous-assery” and “preachiness.”

  Redford considered the failure his and his alone, and lamented the fact that the movie grossed just $63 million worldwide, rendering a loss, taking marketing costs into consideration, estimated by The New York Times of about $50 million. Shortly after, with Valkyrie running late, Wagner announced the termination of her association with UA, and Redford’s hope for some continuing production relationship was dead.

  In May 2008 the bombshell came when the Sundance Channel was sold. The channel, in terms of audience numbers, sponsorship investment and its documentary production slate, was never healthier. Surpassing the projections made twelve years before, almost thirty million homes were now served, but its sacrifice was inevitable. It was the bitterest pill to accept that the purchaser was Rainbow Media, the programming subsidiary of Cablevision, owners of the Independent Film Channel. Redford’s 6 percent share gave him $30 million. In the acquisition announcement, Josh Sapan, CEO of Rainbow, praised Sundance’s record of achievement without acknowledging what media analysts predicted: that Sundance and the IFC would probably be merged in the coming years.

  Wounded but uncowed, Redford stayed on as creative adviser to the Sundance Channel, retaining an office alongside its chief executive at Penn Plaza in New York. He immediately began to work toward a series of short films designed for mobile phone users. “I don’t intend to rescind any of the policy we started out with,” he said defiantly. “Sundance Channel was conceived to preserve experiment and diversity, and that’s what it will continue to do.”

  Behind the bravado was a deep hurt. Sundance as defined just ten years before was no longer viable. “But he told us,” said one staffer, “it’s about evolution. We go forward with Sundance and remember our purpose: stewardship of independence, the same old acorn.”

  There was, of course, much for Redford to be thankful for. His personal life was never so serene, his fulfillment rich in interacting with his children and grandchildren, whose legions swelled to five when Amy and her husband, Denver-born CalArts theater director Matt August, had a daughter, Eden Hart, in August 2008. Old wounds, too, seemed healed. Lola’s new life was based around Lake Champlain in Charlotte, Vermont, from where she ran Clio Inc., a media-based “virtual corporation” designed to pursue environmental and sociological activism, with her new husband, George Burrill. Part of each year she spent in New Zealand, but Redford often dined with her, enjoying, says Jamie, “the most pleasant relationship imaginable.”

  There was a special joy in seeing the creative growth among his loved ones. Shauna was no longer involved with the catalog or Sundance, but she continued painting and resided in Connecticut with her husband, Eric Schlosser, whose books Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness became classroom staples and earned him the moniker of the new Upton Sinclair. Jamie’s screenwriting was thriving, with two script credits for the Hillerman Indian detective stories, now funded by PBS, under his belt and a directorial feature debut with Spin, a small-budget movie about a Latino family that starred Rubén Blades and was well received. Amy was also on the road to a significant film career, moving from acting roles in mainstream television series like Sex and the City to her own directorial start, The Guitar, described by festival director Geoff Gilmore as “a whimsical fairy tale,” which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Redford “stood back and relished” all this, and was especially moved by the progress of Bylle, whose art rapidly evolved, veering through southwestern and Arabic themes to coalesce in Miró-like dream imagery that won the attention of IMG Artists, the adventurous management group whose concert and exhibition festivals would provide a global forum for her. “I had a skepticism about American expressionist art since CU,” says Redford. “But Bylle’s experiments changed my perspective. It reminds me how not all problems respond to linearity. The abstract viewpoint, the lateral thought, the poetry, is often the way to resolution.”

  The serenity was dented by losses: Pakula, Michael Ritchie, George Roy Hill and Stuart Rosenberg all passed away over a short period. Then came news that Paul Newman and Sydney Pollack were in advanced stages of terminal cancer.

  For years he’d been trying to revive collaboration with Newman, and he’d come closest just recently, in optioning Bill Bryson’s sunny memoir, A Walk in the Woods, about the author’s trek with an ornery old buddy along the Appalachian Trail. Newman loved the idea, and the film was already alive in Redford’s mind, was even penciled in for a 2009 shoot. Friendship between the men had never wavered. They had a spontaneous mutual empathy, a love of sports and the arts. Humor kept it moving. Throughout its thirty-five-plus-year span they kept in touch, usually visiting each other in Connecticut, at Newman’s home in Westport. Newman’s pleasure in his children’s charity work and the initiatives that launched his Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy (CECP) was as meaningful to him as Sundance was to Redford, but they never ceased taunting each other’s self-seriousness. Throughout the years, the jokes were so endless they’d become ingrained. Once, Newman wrote to ask Redford to include his daughter’s boyfriend’s hemp-woven western shirts in the Sundance catalog. “Sure,” Redford wrote b
ack. “On the assumption that, if they don’t work as fashion, they can be smoked.” When Newman’s Own, the internationally marketed sauces and other food products whose profits went to the Hole in the Wall children’s charity, took off, Redford sharpened the gibes. In a scene in The Milagro Beanfield War, a shopper in the background asks the clerk for Newman’s Own salad dressing. “That’s no good,” says the storekeeper. “Try something else.”

  Even in the grip of terminal illness, Newman remained ambitious. Keen on A Walk in the Woods, he also wanted to direct for the stage for the first time, and his production of Of Mice and Men was under way at the Westport Country Playhouse when he passed away on September 26. Redford saw him six weeks before he died. He had recovered well from a long bout of chemotherapy at Sloan-Kettering and was at peace. “It was tough. He was frail. But we’d had such a joyous shared experience and his spirit was so strong that it was hard to be sad about it. I was pleased. He was pleased. It was a calm adieu.”

  Making his peace with Sydney, though, was never going to be easy. Their history was too intense, their achievements over forty years too intricately interlinked. Living in Pacific Palisades, Pollack had been working nonstop until The Interpreter, his 2005 movie with Nicole Kidman. He hadn’t visited Sundance for several years but maintained an interest in indie film and was preproducing a drama for HBO about the Bush-Gore presidential election when stomach cancer was diagnosed. He resigned from the movie, Recount, and Redford heard of his illness through the children, Becky and Rachel, who had stayed very close friends with Shauna and Amy. Redford phoned the Pollacks’ home and spoke to Claire, his wife, but the requested callback from Sydney never came. Finally, Redford “just got in the car and drove over and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ ” The reunion was awkward. Pollack was upbeat, even exuberant. But there was no talk of the past.