Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [110]
Ted Zachary, who was Yates’s first assistant, defends both Yates’s and Redford’s work on the movie. “Whatever the script deficiencies, Peter was adept. He’d done Robbery in Britain, which was sharp as anything, and then the in-between American picture, John and Mary, which was sensitive. So he had a wide understanding of drama, and of actors. He never once crossed with Bob. In fact, their relationship was the most harmonious I’ve ever experienced. Then again, Bob was the most ready actor I’ve worked with. I never remember him with a script in his hands. He knew what Goldman had written inside out, and he never missed his mark. For me, he was an education in perfectionism.”
There was an education for Zachary, too, in the kind of stardom that hung about Redford. At East Meadow, Long Island, Yates, Segal and Redford were rehearsing a scene at an abandoned prison. Frank Serpico was visiting and hanging out with Redford in his motor home dressing room nearby. “My job was to control the location,” says Zachary, “but I got no forewarning of mob behavior. I’d never seen it, unless it was on television, watching the kids go crazy for the Beatles. But suddenly these Sundance Kid fans found out Bob was in there, and they laid siege on the motor home. They surrounded it and started trying to rock it off its wheels to get him out. Serpico was horrified. We all panicked. It was a cut-and-run scenario.”
Redford’s image by now was in the hands of the grinders of the media mill. Six years before, Louella Parsons had allowed him a modest quote or two in her columns. By 1971 his opinions were being solicited on everything from lasting marriage to eggs Benedict. He acknowledges his complicity in this image building but says he regretted it even as it happened. The photo images that flooded magazine stands stirred the hysteria. Not since Sean Connery bounded onto the scene in Dr. No a decade earlier had thespian beefcake been so brazenly peddled. These ubiquitous images—usually from Little Fauss—perfectly bridged the gap between the coiffed pinup and the counterculture. In them, Redford is tanned and tufty, a bare-chested, tight-jeaned lothario with a louche, even menacing, gaze. Laurence Luckinbill, writing for Esquire, hinted at the turmoil beneath this gilded exterior. Hanging around at the Redfords’ apartment and chatting about every subject under the sun for several hours, Luckinbill deduced that the actor’s real passion was not for icons, but for losers. The journalist asked what’s next. “And my question lies there like a discarded sock,” wrote Luckinbill. Redford then confronted the interviewer “with the measured concentration of a pole-vaulter. ‘What’s next?’ he repeats. ‘Nothing, just nothing.’ ”
“In reality,” says Redford today, “I was conflicted. On one hand, it was the most amazing time. I was young, celebrated, with plenty of work. On the other hand, it was a Faustian deal. No matter how you try, you are commodified. Whether you are a competent actor, or an artist, is incidental. The main business is, you are product. I had a hard time steadying myself against that stuff.”
It was also hard to stabilize against the vicissitudes of Hollywood business. As The Hot Rock was completed, Redford looked forward to the parallel release of Jeremiah Johnson. Side by side, he felt, these very different movies would demonstrate his substance. It wasn’t to be. Exactly as happened with Paramount and Downhill Racer, Warners’ distribution showed contempt for the finished Jeremiah Johnson, which was ready for release late in 1971 but was left on the shelf. The following spring, to Warners’ surprise, the movie was invited to feature out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The stir it raised prompted Warners to finally release the film properly in cinemas nationwide in December 1972.
Redford was hurt by Warners’ lack of confidence