Brandon’s Reviews > Robert Redford: The Biography > Status Update

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)

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).