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By Root 719 0

Raceway outside Los Angeles, at the Manzanita Speedway in Phoenix, and at Sears Point in Sonoma County, in the sweltering heat of June, was the easiest part. But Furie and Pollard made the going tough. “Furie was one of the dictatorial, do-it-my-way-and-don’t-ask-questions brigade,” says Redford, “and that works with a lot of actors; in fact, they crave it. But it wasn’t for me. The trouble was, I knew this Halsy character. He was the kind of self-serving bum I’d known in my younger days, and that was an interesting psychology in the context of where America was going in the early seventies. But Furie wasn’t up for that.” Pollard, another of Stark Hesseltine’s finds, was moody and introverted. Redford made several attempts to discuss the deeper levels of the script, but gave up. He found Furie entrenched and Pollard “a self-absorbed, freewheeling Actors Studio anarchist” who had no patience with revision. No friendships were formed.

That the end result was eccentric was no great surprise. Jamie, Redford’s son, later regarded Little Fauss as a personal favorite because he felt it captured his father’s essential rebelliousness. Alan Pakula regarded it as the last unself-conscious revelation of the actor’s real-life “edge.” These revelations, however, struggled against a thinly plotted script that was remarkable for its repetitiveness. Longueurs apart, Redford’s Halsy might be seen as a metaphor for the blind self-centeredness of rebellion: he uses women like Kleenex and compulsively manipulates the hero worship of Little Fauss for his own purposes. Beyond the generalities, the plot plods: Halsy sweet-talks Little Fauss into joining him on the race circuit, causes the accident that breaks Little Fauss’s leg, abandons him, then borrows his name, license and bike to compete elsewhere. The biker groupie, Rita, the object of contention for both, gets pregnant, but neither her pregnancy nor Little Fauss’s being drafted affects Halsy at all. At the end, the men drive to another race at Sears Point and disappear among the faceless competitors. The mood in turns is darkly comic, then wildly self-referential, then finally nihilistic.

The epilogue of Eastman’s original draft, the draft he and Redford cherished, contained this sentence: “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 subtle observation of a crucial social lie. “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.”

In the end, Redford felt keenly that the movie was a lost opportunity. He described it to Rolling Stone as “a fucked movie.” But he remains fond of it. “I thought the underlying sentiment was an expression of what was truly at risk in the sixties fallout: loss of faith. It was about the condition that makes losers. Furie didn’t get that. There were so many moments when he told me to do it one way, and I just couldn’t. I knew the truth of these people, but he couldn’t go there.”

Redford’s displeasure with Paramount grew. Since the studio had done nothing to push Downhill Racer, he instructed CMA to seek reversion of its nontheatrical rights to Wildwood. The request was received unsympathetically. Paramount had invested in him over the years and seemed offended that he was not keen to return the commitment. During the production of Little Fauss, Paramount learned that Redford was preparing a movie for Warners with Sydney Pollack. Stanley Jaffe, the new vice president working with Robert Evans, was allegedly offended, disappointed, doubtless, that his star was moving away from the studio just as he had hit the big time. In the fall of 1970, Paramount complained formally about Redford’s “contempt” for the legal settlement of 1968. The terms of that agreement had specified the actor’s availability for three movies before September 1971, for a fee of $150,000 per movie. That agreement, said Paramount,