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by Frankfurt and Hendler, including Steve Frankfurt, Universal’s Lew Wasserman, producer Dan Melnick and Sydney Pollack. The idea was for them to build vacation homes adhering to controlled architectural guidelines. A search was then begun for venture capital partners for a major expansion, led by Hendler and his mentor from Harvard, Larry Fleischer, who managed sports stars. Fleischer had managed the basketball careers of New York Knicks Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley. Frankfurt, like Redford, was comfortable in these circles, but less comfortable with the business operations of Fleischer. “No one was saying yet that this would be the arts center of the Southwest,” says Frankfurt, “but it was clearly going to be arts connected, and I worried that Bob’s art vision and Fleischer’s business would clash. We all accepted that the facilities had to be expanded, and Gary said Fleischer would involve Restaurant Associates, the restaurant and catering enterprise he was heading up, and they would buy into the resort and invest seed capital. We all hung on for this deal, but nothing happened.”

Some began to believe the new setup was a ready-made disaster. Brent Beck, who joined as resort manager at the end of the first Sundance season, found “low morale among the few staffers and a feeling that this so-called new resort was operating beyond itself.” For Jerry Hill, who had worked in the canyon since he was fifteen, the early scenario was “nightmarish—it was a race to the bank in Provo every Friday to get in first and make sure the darn check didn’t bounce.”

Some investors introduced to Redford were less than desirable. There was the Utah tourism executive who proposed the training and sponsoring of America’s first all-black Olympic ski team as a novelty draw. There was the executive of an NBC division interested in cashing in on the current second-home tax break advantages for staffers. And then there was the southern businessman who saw great potential in a cowboy-themed mountain park that would be accessed from the Alpine Loop by motorists driving under a Disney-like hundred-foot-high billboard depicting a smiling Redford as the Sundance Kid.

When they started out, Hendler was a junior partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Irell and Minella. Within a year he was in partnership with Art Armstrong and handling the legal affairs of star clients like Ella Fitzgerald and, later, Sean Connery, Pollack and Streisand. “That’s where the real trouble started,” says Redford. “Gary was clever, and he made money for these people. I did not want to be dragged into the territory of, ‘You must do this picture for X cash, because we need X cash.’ Everything I’d done till that point was about avoiding that trap. But Gary would sit me down and say, ‘Sean [Connery] is doing three movies a year. You can be like Sean. He’s financially far better off than you. You can use this money for the resort.’ I would say to Gary: ‘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.’ ” Later, Redford would say that Hendler had his best interests at heart, but that down deep Hendler really conceived of Sundance as little more than a tax write-off.

Redford had also become uneasy about Gregson, now an equal partner. Too many projects Redford expressed interest in were sidelined, and the easy communication between the men had lapsed. “I felt affection for him,” says Redford. “He was a smart man. But I never knew exactly the truth of how Wildwood was being run. I was never told. When he set it up, he insisted on structuring it as a Bermuda-based company, for tax reduction purposes. It was legal and impressive on paper, but it was far too complicated and maybe compromising for my liking. And then, like Gary, his vision and mine diverged. I discovered his ambition for Wildwood was an empire. He wanted an alliance with a major entertainment music company, and he put the wheels in motion to start that without consulting me. We were thinking differently, so I