Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [108]
Redford refocused again. Hendler and Frankfurt were polishing their plans to expand the Sundance business model, but suddenly he stopped showing up for meetings. Calls went unanswered, letters ignored. Stan Collins saw panic among the partners: “They wanted a business planner, a practical guy. He went artsy. There was an arena on the Sundance property that was an open-air theater. He decided that would become the children’s theater, and that’s what he gave his attention to. He didn’t want to talk about condo building or new potential partners with cash. He only wanted to talk about the obstacles to creating an arts community.”
By 1971, Redford had slowed down the expansion of the Hendler-Frankfurt venture partnership. “It came to a head,” says Redford, “be-cause I saw that the bottom-line philosophy from the partners was, ‘Let’s sell the hell out of Sundance.’ Gary said, ‘Let’s put in water, power and development and cultivate a small city. We can take $15 million out of this in three years.’ I, of course, wouldn’t have that, so they all got to rethink and became magnanimous about saying, ‘Well, you have the vision, so maybe we should sell back our shares.’ And they were saying that because they saw the danger of their exposure. Then there was the problem of the alternative sidebar investments they wanted. I could not be involved in investments that were not emotionally led. Finally, their message to me was, ‘The way we see Sundance is different from you. You see some airy-fairy preserve.’ Gary’s message to me was, ‘Don’t push your version of Sundance. It’s a diseased dog.’ But to my thinking, I was just starting. I didn’t care how diseased it appeared: I was going to nurture it. I realized something had ended, that Sundance wouldn’t succeed the way Gary’s business group was headed. So I bought out everyone except Stan, whom I kept in for 10 percent, because he was a longtime buddy.”
Frankfurt was not surprised by Redford’s U-turn: “I sensed that the sole architect of Sundance’s future would be Bob. Only Bob. The mom-and-pop aspect of developing the canyon was always more attractive to him than the corporate version. I knew where he was going, and for the next seven years, nominally supported by Collins and I, it was really just Bob cutting the course.”
Few of the studio offers coming in now inspired Redford. There were several in the brew—projects in development with Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Arthur Penn—but the movies currently dominating cinema fare were potboilers. He especially hated the “yearbook” disaster films, so called because of the strips of star photos flanking the promotional posters. Stephanie Phillips believed he saw himself essentially as a hero figure, but Redford contests this: “No, I did not. People on the outside might have made assumptions on those lines, but I was interested in the individual who is overcome by outside forces, the suppressed or flawed individual. I did not want one-dimensional heroism, and that is why I avoided those blockbuster movies.”
Some tantalizing, worthy projects came close. George Roy Hill was keen to adapt J. P. Donleavy’s novel The Ginger Man, then playing on Broadway. Hill had befriended Donleavy and the real-life Ginger Man, Gainor Crist, in the fifties in Dublin and introduced writer and actor. Redford made several walks around Woodlawn Cemetery with Donleavy, but little substantial progress toward a film was made. He loved the writer’s eccentricity but, like Hill, lost interest in