Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [101]
The underlying dilemma, however, was about the essence of his acting career. Gregson, like Paramount, saw a big future for Redford as a glamour attraction, making headline movies with the likes of Paul Newman and earning big paychecks to underwrite Sundance or whatever extracurricular notion appealed to him. Redford was more considered. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was a joyous experience, but he was realistic about it: it might be a fluke. He also didn’t want to base his decision making on Hollywood mores. He wanted independence and experiment. “The trouble was, his obligation to Paramount meant they had some control over his direction,” says Mike Frankfurt. “He liked the experience of the small-time movie with Ritchie so much that he wanted more. But Paramount now had a positive sense of what Robert Redford should be. He was a romantic adventure boy, and that’s how they’d pitch him from now on.”
Redford rejected the first half-dozen scripts Paramount offered, but accepted Little Fauss and Big Halsy, which had an edginess that smacked of the emergent alternative cinema. That Hollywood was changing under the weight of foreign influences and youth power was unquestionable. The Brits were here in force, evidenced in movies like John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, an essay in social agitation. Elsewhere, the piss and vinegar of youthful experiment was flowing in Woodstock, M*A*S*H and Five Easy Pieces. This “adventurous disinhibition,” in Redford’s words, was also in Little Fauss. The script was written by bit-part actor and playwright Charles Eastman. Eastman, whose family served in the technical and secretarial departments of various Hollywood studios, had worked for three uncredited months on This Property Is Condemned. As a writer he’d become legendary for holding on to the screenplays he wrote. One of his unproduced works, “Honey Bear, I Think I Love You,” was cited by Robert Towne, the screenwriter of Chinatown, as highly influential. His breakthrough, such as it was, was his self-directed The All-American Boy, a six-part meditation on human fallibility, couched in the profile of a boxer, played by Jon Voight. The movie languished on the shelf for years, and was only released in 1973, following Voight’s success with Deliverance. Eastman’s next project was Little Fauss, which new producers Brad Dexter and Al Ruddy sold to Paramount.
A trailer-park-trash story about two dirt-track-bike-racing enthusiasts, the unctuous Fauss and his manipulative, sexually insatiable buddy, Halsy, the new script was distinguished mainly by its insistence on glorifying losers. This Milleresque cynicism was the appeal of the proffered role of Halsy. Michael Ritchie felt the choice was “plain ornery, just Bob’s way of flipping the bird at convention in general.” But Redford says, “It was the great writing that got me. It wasn’t Henry Miller, but it was sweet and iconoclastic. Plus it did exactly what we tried to do with Downhill Racer, which was deflate false myths.”
Sidney J. Furie, a Canadian whose career began directing Cliff Richard, the British equivalent of Elvis, in travelogue musicals, was the unlikely director. Redford didn’t know his early work, but Gregson had introduced him to Furie’s quasi–James Bond movie, The Ipcress File, starring Michael Caine, and the recent Frank Sinatra vehicle, The Naked Runner, which Redford liked. He was stimulated, too, by the proposed costars. Michael J. Pollard, the New Jersey–born actor who started in television and was nominated as best supporting actor for Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, would play Little Fauss, and Lauren Hutton, the leading Revlon model, would play Halsy’s girl, Rita Nebraska.
Shot in three different western states through the summer of 1970, Little Fauss tested Redford’s physical and emotional stamina. The bike racing, filmed at the Willow Springs