Status Updates From Robert Redford: The Biography

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

War Hunt crew: “Apart from…Pollack…was John Houseman as UA’s creative adviser, Francis Ford Coppola as gofer, Dean Stockwell in charge of the still photography and Ted McCord as the cameraman. ‘These guys were the second generation out of UCLA film school, following the…”breakthrough” guys like Stanley Kubrick, who’d just hit internationally with The Killing….They were the American New Wave” 114

Sundance aesthetic: “a very broad sense of America, or the parallel Americas, and I knew I wanted to study the differences. I wanted the power of witness. Then I wanted to turn it into some performance truth. You have to be careful of overstatement, but I suppose I had some intuition or observation about America or Americans that I wanted to essay.” (114)

“Since Florence when I was depressed, I’d perfected a kind of meditation, a self-hypnosis that tuned out the world and reoriented me. At Gallup, while meditating, something bizarre happened. I was locked inside myself, and suddenly there was an Indian face at the window. This apparition cut in and whipped me to some other consciousness….Just be” (112-113).

In 1959, Redford played the part of a painter who won Abercrombie & Fitch fishing tackle on the quiz show “Play Your Hunch” (98).

“Through his teens, movies had lost their fascination for him. ‘I’d always had a problem with authenticity,’ says Redford. ‘When I was very small, my dad would project 8 mm films of Tom Mix on a sheet in the living room. I bought into all of it. But when I got older, it bothered me that Gene Autry couldn’t walk right and John Wayne couldn’t ride right.’” (85-86)

“I didn’t want to be an actor. I wanted to be Modigliani. I wanted to study theater because someone somewhere said, ‘You can go out in summer stock and paint backdrops.’ So I could be an artist, at last!” (83)

“‘I realized I hated L.A. for its compromises,’ says Redford. ‘I decided that somehow I must get out of it permanently’” (59); yet, he ends up in business based in LA, which he brings to Park City.

After Redford has polio and Martha loses twins, she organizes a trip to Yosemite, which Redford remembers as coming out of a tunnel to see “onto Glacier Point Road, there it lay before me: El Capitan, Bridalveil Fall, Half Dome, wilderness” (50).

The loss of chaparral and orange groves post WW two made Redford “sad“ (45).

“What began as a casual interest, says Vivian, became Martha’s social staple, gradually drawing in Charlie. ‘She never stopped talking movies, and I saw the effect on Bobby from infancy.’ Vivian remembers coffee mornings at Tennessee with baby Bobby obsessively doodling ‘cowboys, cowboys, cowboys, almost before he could walk.’” (36)

“West of the west/I have lived”—Robinson Jeffers

America is the girl (Mort Sahl). “Recognizing this unconditional determination to protect land became the first key to a fruitful understanding of Redford.”

Critique’s of Sundance allude (sloppily) to Citizen Kane. Redford did not inherit his wealth or power. “This rustic Xanadu and the ideals behind [it] are his way of keeping that decade alive in all its skepticism and sincerity.” Some accused him of “granola” filmmaking.”

Redford write about Sundance in the Harvard Business Review that “people need the chance to see how much agreement is possible.”

I just noticed that page “9” in CloudLibrary is page 3 in Libby. Unfortunately, Robert Redford: The Biography isn’t available right now in Libby, whose layout looks a little more reader-friendly.

Original Sundance faculty: actor Karl Malden, writer Waldo Salt and cinematographer László Kovács