Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [113]
Redford early on employed spin doctor David Garth, a Lindsay ally, as technical consultant. Larner immediately saw a central character in his fiction come to life. Klein, the head of Bill McKay’s media campaign, he decided, would be a version of Dave Garth. “Klein/Garth was vital in my story,” says Larner, “because he would be the Greek chorus in the whole fictional campaign. He would be credibility. He was the guy who would say, ‘You are X points behind in the polls and you need to do such and such.’ I knew this breed of hustler—like Dick Goodwin also—who believe they can direct history as much as any candidate.” Larner’s first meeting with Garth was electric. “He told us that he was personally going to see to it that John Lindsay became the next president of the United States. He said he knew how to do it, that he would send Lindsay out in the primaries to do it the folksy way, the non-Republican way, by staying in people’s houses and not the big hotels. I thought this was horseshit, because in my time with McCarthy I’d heard all this magic elixir stuff from every type of hustler—including myself—and most of it was nothing. It was horseshit but it was sensational because I thought, If we can base our media hustler on Dave Garth, and then give a little of Lindsay to Robert Redford’s McKay, we’ll get attention and get our point across.”
Within days, Redford called to say Garth had had words with his lawyer and had withdrawn from the film, “in case it impinged on his legitimate political work.” He had wanted $200,000 to advise.
No matter. Larner still wanted to “keep it real.” Redford, however, seemed keener on the poetry than real-life role models. The men verbally sparred, says Larner, and he realized that despite the triumph of the Sundance Kid, Redford still didn’t have the clout to drive the movie as radically as he wished. “His power with the studios was fragile, and he was still beholden to the deal. Maybe that’s the grand illusion of Hollywood star power. Maybe it always comes with a begging bowl.”
As for the deal, it was Redford’s good fortune that Richard Zanuck, riding high on Butch Cassidy, had moved to Warners. Redford was yet to experience the annoyance of Warners’ lame distribution of Jeremiah Johnson and was content to make a deal that was as lean as Downhill Racer. The budget, drawn up by Ritchie and production manager Walter Coblenz, was agreed to at a rock-bottom $1.5 million, with no off-the-top fee for Redford. “I accepted because I wanted to get on with it, and Mike and I decided we’d do it tight and in documentary style, with the camera frame jumping around.” Redford was also amenable because he liked the new regime at Warners, with Zanuck in the driver’s seat and Frank Wells serving as production chief. “It was a brand-new dawn for them. They were up against it as a working enterprise, and suddenly hungry for risk. We had a lot in common; we were idealists and we made good partners at that time.”
The scriptwriting for The Candidate was unlike what Redford calls his “fireside collaborations” with Pollack. To begin, Larner and Redford created index cards on which were written pertinent headlines concerning the campaign as Redford