Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [105]
David Rayfiel received a sudden frantic summons from Pollack: “He said, ‘Forget you were born in Brooklyn. We have a story about liver-eating frontier savages. Milius has done some good work, Anhalt has done some work, Redford has done some. But I need you to fix it.’ ”
Milius’s script had been gutted by Anhalt, Redford and Pollack and now revolved around the clash of value systems on the frontier between the white man and the Indian. Johnson’s battle against the elements—at the forefront in Milius’s script—was now background. In search of personal freedom, Johnson, an ex-soldier, leaves civilization to pit his wits against the Rockies. Along the way he befriends the regional tribes, the Blackfoot, Flathead and Crow, adopts an orphan boy and wins a gift bride from the Flathead, before inadvertently offending the Crow by helping a team of army scouts traverse their sacred lands. His new family is slaughtered in revenge and Johnson’s harmony with the wilderness ends.
“I never saw movies as theatrical three-acters,” says Rayfiel. “For me, a movie is narrative, like a novel. So what I gave was a clarity of flow and, hopefully, some character-illuminating dialogue that pointed up Johnson’s nature and how he responds to his loss.” As part of his revision, Rayfiel gave Pollack and Redford a five-page essay concerning Johnson’s relationship with his Flathead bride. Pollack found this invaluable. “Some juice in that liberated a lot of the story line for Bob and I,” said Pollack. “That human element was missing in Milius. There was no humanized contact. It was formerly just enmity all the way. But David’s notes turned it around for us. Finally we found a shootable script.”
Pollack’s screenplay file for Jeremiah Johnson is the fattest and most revealing in his script library. It shows what underlay his and Redford’s teamwork. “I was not a front-row political artist any more than I was a visual stylist,” said Pollack. “But I always believed every speck of research was crucial, and the smallest detail must be finessed. Bob was not like that. He had to have a central reality that he could hold on to, and work from there. He was overview, I was detail.” Starting on January 12, 1970, three weeks after the opening of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Pollack recorded his conceptual notes for creating the character of frontiersman Johnson with Redford. He concluded with a quote from a Newsweek article about Redford: “A new movie hero has emerged, often a surrogate [of] the director himself, outside society, alienated by mainstream American values, searching for his identity as he moves across the face of America. These new heroes are often losers whose heroism is measured not in their ability to triumph, but to survive.”
Thereafter, over the next twelve months, Pollack recorded page after page of conversations, source references and ideas, all focused on reducing the gap between Redford and Johnson. Carol Rossen, who was a friend of Pollack’s as well, believes that Jeremiah Johnson “was the fusion of Bob and Sydney and the interdependency of their creativity. Many people have remarked that Sydney really wanted to be Bob, that all he lacked was the blond mane. And there’s truth in that, because, after all, he was an actor, with an actor’s training. But it was also a spiritual transference. They made seven movies together because they were mirror images of each other. The bottom line is, they saw life in very similar ways.”
Uninterrupted filming of Jeremiah Johnson finally began in January 1971. But Pollack and his cinematographer, Duke Callaghan, agonized as the schedule swung with the vagaries of weather: “The snows of St. George in southern Utah were terrible,” said Pollack, “and we were using Cinemobiles [mobile ministudios] as the lifelines. There was no way I was going to let it overrun, and Bob was a superb partner in keeping us tight. In the end it was the greatest way to learn production, because I was playing with my own money. And it worked to my advantage: I beat the clock