Status Updates From Robert Redford: The Biography

Final line: “Redford well knows it, and to recognize a frontier, as Heidegger says, is to have gone beyond it” (485).

“Bill Bryson’s sunny memoir, A Walk in the Woods, about the author’s trek with an ornery old buddy along the Appalachian Trail” was to reunite RR with Newman (480).

RR matures: “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” (479).

Pollock continues, “…It’s an impossible conundrum because that kind of stardom has invested the actor with the audience’s preconceived needs….It’s a deal with the devil. He will always be thirty, blond, perfection….They want the continuance, because no one wants the death of fantasy, no one can stand too much reality.”

After RR fails to connect with The Clearing, Last Castle and Unfinished Life, Pollack says of the difficulty of separating “acting” from “megastardom”: ….

Sundance Contradiction: Although Sundance labs develop new voices, success of independent movies is measured by acquisition by major studios. Sterling Van Wagenen notes transformation of Sundance, Utah, to Beverly Hills, CA, from board members Moctesuma Esparza to Michael Ovitz (443).

Redford: paraphrases Quiz Show audience: “‘We accept venality; we are not too interested in honesty or decency, only in rhetoric.’ ”

“When a population is distracted by trivia,” wrote Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. Culture death is a real possibility.”(423-4)

Jaime Redford worked on abandoned sci-fi version of The Odyssey for Universal (420).

RRTI was underwritten: “I saw the dichotomies between the book and the reality. The thing was, Norman left out a lot. It was in those gaps I found the invisible story Bob wanted” (Friedenberg 407).

In adaptation, screenwriters “find” and “invent”: “I accept, as the screenwriter, my responsibility is to find the story line. So that is how we progressed…. I would go off, meet Maclean, research and invent some film story line that reflected the book” (Friedenberg 406).

Redford found himself debating the authenticity of the concept of the western. “We were discussing the essence of the western experience—living it, as opposed to loving it,” re: A River Runs Through It.

RR’s liabilities ultimately turn out to be his attributes: “Redford’s personal control [of Sundance] was positive and vital but, at the same time, his distractions with projects like Milagro and the unending political activism weighed against a stable future” (392).

This might be bigger than the acting and directing: “Geoff Gilmore, the former head of the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s programming department, said, there was no “standard” Sundance festival movie: “We decided to go for the broadest range, ideological, marginal, countercultural, whatever….The idea was, Let us take down the barriers and bring an alternative stream of movies to the public” (390).

Does Ebert’s disparity about tonal difference between church meeting and the bean harvest take into account plot points between the two (382)?

U.S. government fails to follow through on Institute of Resource Management lobbying, returning Redford to moviemaking (388).

Re: Out of Africa: “that risk of ‘America abroad’ films. Foreign culture has been historically difficult for American filmmakers” (364)? Even America At Home movies have been difficult.

Redford converts an enemy: “Once, Allen was his sworn enemy. By the time the Kaiparowits row was over, Allen was in Bob’s camp. He’d been reeducated. From that, Bob learned the benefits of diplomacy” (352).

New Sundance technical staff: Morgan Freeman, whom Redford had met on Brubaker, Robert Duvall, Karl Malden, cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and writer Waldo Salt (350).

Ritchie’s analysis of Redford’s direction on Ordinary People: “a film formalist in the European tradition, “more interested in signs and ideas within a movie than plots and actors” (346).

Eisner cannot see value in the moment: “Hendler had been asking for $750,000. Now [Redford] accepted $30,000. When the [Ordinary People] scored, Diller chose to pay an unsolicited bonus of $750,000. Eisner lamented this payment, judging it “hardly worth it, since Redford never made another movie for us” (332).

In The Electric Horseman, Redford identified with the horse (317).

Redford use of solar at Sundance causes “Herb Schmertz, vice president of Mobil…to rebuke Redford personally in a letter to the editor (in the NYXs)…. Redford found this ‘a real victory for the cause, because the fact that they took note meant they were scared’” by the local approach (314).

Redford fines, Annie Hall “too parochial“ (313); how so? Alvy boosting Annie’s career?

More movie making business irony: UA funds A Bridge Too Far on James Bond profits (310).