Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [112]
Hamill’s script didn’t work out. It was too much like Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah. “This was not Pete’s fault, because I hadn’t sufficiently enunciated the kind of satire I wanted. I wanted a snipe at the fallibility of government when it’s based on personality.” When Redford told Bradley of the script problem, Bradley recommended Eugene McCarthy’s speechwriter, Jeremy Larner. Redford learned that Larner—like Michael Ritchie—was steeped in politics. New York–born, Midwest-raised, Brandeis-educated, he was the speechwriter who allegedly pushed McCarthy most to the left. Redford liked the notion and flew to Canada, where Ritchie was shooting Prime Cut with Lee Marvin, to sound out his willingness to direct the as-yet-unnamed project. With Ritchie aboard, Redford summoned Larner to the Wildwood office in the West Fifties, just before The Hot Rock commenced shooting.
Larner approached the meeting, he says, wearing his “alienated novelist” hat. His first novel, Drive, He Said, had been written in 1960, when he was twenty-three. It took him four years to find a publisher for it. A career in sports and political journalism followed, then a first venture in filmmaking with Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, coscripting the movie of his novel, which Nicholson directed. In between came the work with McCarthy and a friendship with Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin that opened up a yearlong teaching post at the Institute of Politics, housed within the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “But I wasn’t professorial,” says Larner, “and I took pride in my storytelling, so I faced Redford and Ritchie as I faced Jack Nicholson, as a story maker, with the attitude of, ‘I bet this is just another Hollywood crock-of-shit offer.’ ”
Redford’s response, he says, was, “Relax, Jeremy. Just say what you feel like saying.”
According to Larner, Ritchie then told him: “We have about ten guys to consider for this writing job, and we have to start shooting in November. If we miss that window, Bob isn’t available.”
“That kind of straightened me out,” Larner recalls, “and I remember replying, ‘I write fast.’ ”
Redford explained his story line: he wanted to make a film about a liberal California senatorial candidate, the son of a respected former governor, who sets out simply to upset the front-running conservative candidate, then gets drawn into the battle and sells out.
Larner immediately challenged the concept. He told Redford, “In my experience, they don’t sell out. They get carried away. It’s like McCarthy, it’s like Nicholson, who are interchangeable. They fix on a belief and are confronted by the Niagara Falls of reality. They hear the sound of the rushing water but don’t see it. Then, before they know it, they are over the falls, and they evolve into something else.”
Redford was not happy with the response.
Larner felt he had not told Redford what he wanted to hear. “I learned quickly that Bob likes to control conversations. Ultimately, I gave in, because it is too disturbing not to. But there and then, at that first Wildwood meeting, I was talking turkey, in effect saying, ‘The problem with you guys—Nicholson, McCarthy, Redford, whoever—is that you fictionalize your own existence. It becomes tough for you to know when you have, in fact, gone over the falls.’ ”
The clash was momentary. In Larner’s view, “Redford got it. I looked into his eyes and saw that he could conceivably be insulted by me, but he wasn’t. He was challenged personally by my concept of celebrity corruption and it did not offend him. He could objectify. That was enough to engage me. And with that sparky energy, we began.”
California governor Jerry Brown came to believe The Candidate’s central character, Bill McKay, was based on him. Others would claim Larner and Redford had satirized Bobby Kennedy or McCarthy, and that the campaign manager, Marvin Lucas, was Dick Goodwin or the Los Angeles lawyer Nelson Rising, an aide to California senator John Tunney. None of this, says Larner, is true, though elements drawn