Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [103]
Redford was outraged by the misrepresentations. “I cared about Charlie Bluhdorn because I liked him,” says Redford. “I did not care about Paramount. As far as I was concerned, the onus was on them to come up with the good scripts, and they didn’t, so I moved on. They had no allegiance to me. They paid me a lousy $60,000 for Barefoot and $90,000 for Little Fauss. So I felt as though I owed them nothing at all.”
The heat of Paramount’s fury reflected Redford’s new importance. He was now a hugely valuable commodity.
13
Two and a Half Careers
As Redford became a star, Sydney Pollack was hitting his stride. Burt Lancaster’s patronage and friendship proved their worth on The Scalphunters, the gritty, mature western that made its money back in six months and served as the movie breakthrough Pollack longed for. Lancaster then offered him Castle Keep, a war movie funded by Columbia, to be shot in Yugoslavia. While Pollack worked on Castle Keep with Columbia’s assigned producer, John Calley, he was also preparing an independent project that Charlie Chaplin’s company had been floating for years, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? a brooding social essay about Depression-era excess starring Jane Fonda that would go on to earn nine Academy Award nominations, including one for Pollack as best director.
For Redford, his friendship with Pollack was more than ever a haven. They sought out each other’s company, kept in constant touch by phone and solicited advice and jokes. “Bob was never ‘work’ in my mind,” said Pollack. “We were coconspirators, really, trying to make sense of Hollywood together. He would share his woes with me, and I with him. I was there for him with advice on Downhill; he was there for me on my movies.”
As scripts piled up at Wildwood, Redford singled out two submitted by the agent Joe Wizan, a friend of Gregson’s from his London International agency days who was trying to become a producer and packager. The projects were “Apocalypse Now” and “Liver-Eating Johnson: The Legend of the Crow Killer,” both written by Wizan’s new discovery, John Milius, a Missouri-born film school graduate from the University of Southern California who had won an award for a short film. Wizan told Redford, “Pick which one you’d like. I can set either up, no problem.” Redford read and liked both scripts. Each had a primal starkness that was revelatory of a raw, frontier Americanism that interested Redford. Over a couple of days, he reflected on both submissions and decided “Liver-Eating Johnson,” a western, was exactly what he’d been looking for. He phoned Pollack and suggested they do it together.
For Pollack, the timing was perfect: “I was in the position to get it moving because I’d made They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and there was a great industry buzz about it. I’d also come in on budget with Castle Keep, so John Calley was happy. And then, just by luck, John was appointed head of production at Warners and he and Ted Ashley, Warners’ president, started looking for something original they could call the next big thing.”
Milius was a lifelong admirer of Teddy Roosevelt’s and a champion of what he calls “the warrior culture.” His early writing had a barbarous intensity, projecting a world where humanity and sanity are constantly assaulted and heroism is ambiguous. Pollack loved Milius’s script, which he described as “a stylish, literary piece about a Paul Bunyan type who ate trees: weird!” But he agreed with Redford that in its present form it was unshootable. Redford turned to Milius’s source novel, Vardis Fisher’s Mountain Man, and decided the gold was in the original. “It was the story of an authentic mountain man,” he says, “based