(ARCHIVE 90S)Tucked in the lower right-hand corner of Robert Redford’s dressing-room mirror is a black-and-white photo of Samuel Beckett. The great Irish playwright of existential despair looks wintery and hawklike, his visage a crumbling tombstone of deep cracks. It’s not the face one would think a Hollywood superstar known for playing sunny romantic leads would want staring back at him every time his hair is brushed. At least not while working on Redford’s current project, ”The Horse Whisperer,” a big-budget, big-emotions melodrama based on the shamelessly corny best-selling novel by Nicholas Evans. ”The Horse Whisperer” — which Redford is being paid about $20 million by Touchstone Pictures to produce, direct and star in — isn’t Beckett, or even close, and Redford’s role as a kind Montana rancher with a gift for soothing traumatized animals is frankly heroic and warmly optimistic. It’s a movie about ”healing,” according to Redford, a movie about the ”textures of the West.”
So why the glowering old pessimist in the mirror?
I made a note to come back to the Beckett question. There wasn’t time to ask it then. It was the next to last day of shooting, getting on toward evening, and Redford was in costume and half in character, wolfing a meal in his trailer between scenes and exuding the peculiar aura of a laid-back control freak. On his plate was the best sashimi in Montana (the only sashimi in Montana, that is), and his face showed the strain of months of overtime, overbudget movie making. It had been raining all summer, a storm a day drenching the foothills of the Engles ranch, home to the movie’s main set. Everyone seemed tense and tuckered out, like flood relief workers weary from heaving sandbags.
Redford, 60, was gamely answering questions about his career despite interruptions by headset-wearing crew members. ”My first ambition was to be a painter and live in Europe,” he said. At issue was why he has split himself in two, pursuing a high-road, low-road strategy of starring in gold-plated studio movies while strenuously supporting, and sometimes making, edgier, smaller independent films. Because by now it’s a question of who’s more famous: Redford the idol or Redford the impresario, the headliner with the million-dollar smile or the behind-the-scenes guiding spirit of the Sundance Film Festival, the Sundance Institute, the Sundance Channel and — in a deal only recently finalized — a nationwide chain of Sundance movie theaters.
”Anyway,” Redford went on, still eating fish, ignoring the growing knot of anxious crew members in his trailer door, ”when I started becoming an actor I felt this pull. I felt embarrassed. Conflicted. I’d been raised in a pretty cynical West Coast climate, see, and I didn’t take show biz seriously at all. I mean, in high school it used to make me cringe watching my classmates up on stage with shoe polish in their hair.”
Joe Reidy, Redford’s first assistant director and associate producer, stepped into the trailer. The two men conversed in the coded, Masonic language of high-level movie making. Redford nodded, squinted, nodded again. And it struck me then that his craggy laugh lines aren’t unlike Beckett’s, though they seem more carefully tended. I caught a reference to Kristin Scott Thomas, the movie’s female lead.
The conference over, Redford continued: ”What interested me about acting was character work. Craft was important. It’s how you got to Hollywood. You apprenticed in New York, in the theater, then went on to doing TV plays. Thank God I got in on the end of that — the theater of simple storytelling and bodies in space. It disappeared so quickly.”
A crew member switched on a monitor to show him a scene he’d directed that morning. The man who looks after his trailer took Redford’s plate away and heated a slice of peach pie in the microwave while a woman rushed by with several Western shirts identical to the one that Redford was wearing but in slightly different colors.
Suddenly, amid all the glamorous chaos, I had a hunch why Redford kept the Beckett picture there — for much the same reason medieval monks set human skulls on the corner of their writing tables. He was trying to remind himself of something. Something having to do with art and time, with movies and mortality. Something that, if you were Robert Redford — actor, director, one-man entertainment empire — might be very easy to forget.
To say Robert Redford embodies a contradiction is to put it mildly. That the same human being could practically invent the independent movement, and later star in ”Indecent Proposal,” as naked a schlockfest as anyone knows how to make, doesn’t argue versatility but something like professional bipolar disorder. With one foot securely planted on each bank of the entertainment river, Redford has watched the water rise and the channel widen. As his directing efforts have grown nobler, culminating in the impeccable ”Quiz Show,” his starring roles have grown broader and softer, culminating in ”Up Close and Personal.” Unlike most stars, Redford, it appears, doesn’t believe in selling out in increments. In return for the independence he craves, he’s willing to deal directly with the devil.
If that bargain seems to be getting more expensive, well, everything related to the movies is getting more expensive. Using mainstream movies to gain ”leverage” for more personal ventures has been Redford’s way for nearly 30 years now, and it isn’t his fault that back in the 70’s the studios’ idea of a crowd pleaser was ”Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and nowadays it’s ”Indecent Proposal.” Michael Ovitz, Redford’s agent for nearly 20 years, claims to have had difficulty selling Redford on the film. ” ‘Sneakers’ and ‘Indecent Proposal’ made money for Redford and for their studios,” he says. ”The reality is there’s a marketplace out there and we had to protect his position in it. We can’t forget the man’s a movie star. He had to do some movie-star roles.”
Indeed, the intensity of that stardom may not allow for small-scale movie making. It’s possible he can only play himself now, and the fact that writers still give his characters names may be a mere formality. Stars like De Niro or Pacino are the sum of the roles they’ve played, but Redford stands for the industry itself, somehow, in all its California dreaminess. Smuggling him into a textured, character-driven movie — say, a family comedy by his protege Edward Burns — would be like trying to hide the President at a small-town picnic.
Despite his secure position at the top, something gnaws at him. ”I always felt like I missed out on something: the Paris art scene in the 20’s, the New York TV community in the 50’s. Just as I got in on it, it vanished, it gave way to the 60’s. Maybe that’s what all this is here — my way of recreating a community. ”
The ”here” that Redford’s referring to is Sundance, his Park City, Utah, artists’ retreat slash ski resort slash family compound. Though Redford is divorced he married Lola VanWagenen from Provo, in 1958 — he remains close to his three children and has set aside land for them near his own home. He has come here to decompress for a few days before heading out to Northern California to edit ”The Horse Whisperer” (whose release has been delayed until early next year). It’s a curious place. Staffed in large part by smiling young Mormons, Sundance mixes for-profit condos and restaurants with decidedly nonprofit film and theater labs. Set in a vast alpine canyon that served as a sheep ranch before Redford bought it, Sundance seems barely tamed, a little tattoo of sophistication on the broad shoulders of the Wasatch Range.
Redford takes me on a walking tour and describes how Sundance, the place, came about and how the place became the institute and how the institute became the festival. Redford is not a systematic planner. He relies on enthusiasm, serendipity and a certain all-American carelessness that may be as cultivated as his seemingly all-denim wardrobe. What may look today like a carefully thought-out, vertically integrated entertainment company is more like a house that has been added to repeatedly until it has become a mansion.
Redford first came upon this canyon while hunting mountain lions in the 60’s. (He doesn’t hunt lions or anything else these days.) First he bought two acres for himself. He kept adding to them, and when he got wind of big development plans that would line the slopes with rows of A-frames, he partnered up with a couple of finance types and brought the total to 5,000 acres. ”It was a lousy business deal, but I didn’t care,” he says. ”I had no idea how I’d make the payments. I only wanted to keep the place intact. I was naive. I thought I could just sit on it.” When Redford’s sense of environmental integrity led to building a restaurant around the trunk of a tree, his partners ”freaked out” and took their money elsewhere.
Redford flips on the lights in the Sundance screening room. He started the institute in 1980 with two goals in mind: to preserve the canyon (”I didn’t see how art could hurt the environment”) and to give something back to the business. He wanted to fight what he saw as a general trend, both in movie making and in society, toward chilly materialism. ”The 70’s were the last time of variety in Hollywood,” he says. ”When Reagan came in you saw huge expensive cartoons being made: ‘Popeye,’ ‘Dick Tracy’ and so on. I could see this industry going into a numbed-out place. Reagan was like a panzer division rolling across the country.”
Redford remembers the spe cific moment when he felt the cultural climate cool: ”I went to Yale to guest lecture in 1980. When I’d been there 10 years before, the students were smoking joints in the room, throwing paper gliders. Anything that smacked of formula was laughed out of the room. Not this time, though. A girl in the group had been mugged and beaten up and was saying how it was her fault for being in a poor neighborhood. Suddenly I hear these two guys say: ‘I wish we’d been there. We would have kicked their [expletive].’ And I thought, Uh-oh, we’re headed for a new time.”
In Hollywood this ”new time,” in Redford’s view, was marked by a preference for spectacle over storytelling. He founded the institute to buck the trend. One model was Yaddo, the artists’ colony. Another was the assembly line. ”My idea was to stretch out the film-making process on a kind of conveyor belt. No. 1: Story. 2: Actors. 3: Stage the thing. 4: Film it.
5: Edit it. And for each of these stages I wanted to create resources.”
Success and attention came slowly to the project. Film makers who went on to make a splash in Hollywood often failed to acknowledge their alma mater. Fund-raising was a problem, too, especially, Redford says, among movie types, who were both condescending and suspicious. (What was he up to in that Utah canyon?) The sum of all these difficulties was burn-out. ”I lost a lot of time in the 80’s, a lot of career time,” he says. ”I spent so much energy trying to support Sundance that frankly I got a little lost.” Redford has publicly blamed this dark period for the end of his marriage, and referring to it he looks genuinely troubled.
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