Status Updates From Robert Redford: The Biography

The over-sized war bonnet scene cut from The Candidate suggests several things: indigenous satire, Redford’s anxiety over his iconography or both. The war bonnet is not the kind of mistake McKay would make (237).

Ritchie: thematic over descriptive: ”it was to Bob’s eternal credit that the form, the theme, if you like, of this movie was the center. Very few productions I’ve been involved with developed with such evaluative power” (235).

The Candidate’s budget, drawn up by Ritchie and production manager Walter Coblenz, was agreed to at a rock-bottom $1.5 million, with no off-the-top fee for Redford, who accepted because he wanted to get on with it, shot in documentary style, “with the camera frame jumping around” (233).

Larner: “In my experience, liberals “don’t sell out. They get carried away….They fix on a belief and are confronted by the Niagara Falls of reality. They hear the sound of the rushing water but don’t see it. Then, before they know it, they are over the falls, and they evolve into something else” (231). Sounds similar to Welles’ greatest tragedy.

Oops. The above analysis is Redford’s after talking with Sen. Bill Bradley.

“…From 1972 onward the cream of the rebels rose to the surface: Tom Harkin, Pat Schroeder, Gary Hart, Jerry Brown—great political minds who concentrated on working the system against itself while Nixon was busy getting us involved in Cambodia” (229).

Bradley: While Nixon was…in China working his realpolitik,…guys slid in underneath and were the brains behind the National Environmental Policy Act, the Energy Production and Recovery Act, everything that matters in calling a country a country…(229).

Redford on non-debate inspiring The Candidate: “It’s not about substance, it’s about presentation, about perception of reality, which allows for manipulation” (229).

Ritchie contends Wildwood was the enclave where “secret” Redford lived. “He was really an author. His writing credit wasn’t on Downhill or Jeremiah…but he really was an author as much as David Rayfiel, or even Salter. I always felt that was denied him, but he was in a no-win situation, because he had all this luminous stardom and neither the public nor critics have much patience for author-stars.” 228

“The writer Robert Pirsig has observed that Redford’s appeal to the public, like Gary Cooper’s, is the ‘inscrutable silence,’ as portrayed in the Sundance Kid. “ (219).

Losers who survive: Jeremiah Johnson, according to Newsweek: “These new heroes are often losers whose heroism is measured not in their ability to triumph, but to survive.”

Redford on Big Halsey: “I thought the underlying sentiment was an expression of what was truly at risk in the sixties fallout: loss of faith.” Losers are people who loose faith (212).

Eastman’s screenplay: “Somewhere is Halsy, somewhere is Little, but they are lost in the crowd for they are not winners but rather among those who make no significant mark and leave no permanent trace.” Redford loved this … “Because we are in a remedial society that actually isn’t about remedies at all. It’s a lie. And people like Halsy do their thing and vanish. Their lives have no consequence.”

Redford to his business attorney Handler: ‘Who made the world? An accountant? No, it was made from chaos, and creativity led the way out of the chaos, so for God’s sake let us focus on the creativity.’ ” 208

Redford told Richie to do “nothing.’ The end result, with Chappellet as with the Sundance Kid, was that audiences had to reach out to find Bob” [
Emphasis on “reach out“] (199).

Redford responded to European cinema: “Swinging Britain, which was just consuming itself in self-parody, but with directors like Fellini, Truffaut and of course Bergman who were giving us another view of the human experience” (194).

“film historian Andrew Horton, later evaluating his oeuvre, concluded the director (Hill) deployed ‘Voltaire’s traits of the master storyteller who frames a serious view of life in a comic-ironic vein, manipulating genres for his own purposes’” (189).

“Of the 178 movies produced in 1967, just 11 percent were westerns. What remained of the western fantasy was a bloodbath in the hands of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Choreographed violence dominated; nuance of cultural or historical exploration was rare” (175).

“movies like The Great Train Robbery in 1903 rounded off a stratified universe where Indian attacks, cattle rustling and mail robberies defined survival. By 1940, of the 477 movies released that year, 30 percent were westerns….”

“I was Bonfaccio, the white interloper,” (168).

As a “journalist,” Redford notices that JFK assassination changes laughter: “The sound of the audience laughter changed. It was subtle, but it was very marked. The laughter became raucous and harsh. And it never returned to the way it was before” (136).

“I felt I’d already ransomed myself to the Sanderses’ contract, and that felt bad, like I was an Indian who’d lost his spirit to a photograph” (126).

Howard Taubman favorably reviews the “humor” in the play Sunday in New York in NYXs, expanding RRs
iconography (121).

Tom Skerritt on RR’s complexity: “War Hunt was one piece of the mosaic. Comedy was the next piece.” 119