Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [114]
While Redford worked on The Hot Rock through the summer, he and Larner jogged or played tennis when they could in Central Park, all the time massaging the script. When Redford’s shoot wrapped, they holed up at Larner’s home in Massachusetts. The first of what would be seven drafts of The Candidate was finished by summer’s end. Redford found it “delightful, but too windy” and set about fierce editing. Larner, at first, took offense.
“He wouldn’t allow the dialogue I’d written for Bill McKay’s mistress,” says Larner. “He told me his public would not accept the mistress as a personality. I questioned this, the historical reality, the Kennedy brothers’ mistresses, all that. I was stunned by his concept of his personal image. It was annoying, I suppose, but you had to credit his clarity.”
As the movie came together, Ritchie delighted in what he saw as “another Pyrrhic arc” story line, similar to Downhill Racer, where an objective is sought at huge personal cost, the war is won and the audience is left to meditate on the putative rewards. When we first encounter McKay, he is consulting with autoworkers, sleeves rolled up, a high-minded lawyer without guile or venality. Then he is manipulated by his campaign manager, Marvin Lucas, into tackling the incumbent senator, Crocker Jarmon. McKay agrees because it allows him a podium from which to state what he truly feels about social problems. When McKay’s openness elicits a strong response from the electorate, the party pros step in to repackage him. To his astonishment, McKay, the rank outsider, ends up winning the senatorial campaign. When Chappellet wins on the ski slopes in Downhill Racer, a reporter asks him, “What will you do now?” to which he mumblingly replies, “I don’t know.” At the end of The Candidate, McKay faces the same conundrum, asking his campaign manager, “What do we do now?”
Ritchie, whose capacity for intellectual theorizing was impressive, be-lieved that form followed function in film. His prize example was Hitchcock, who thematically loaded interwar movies like The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes with national paranoia but never lost sight of paced storytelling. In The Candidate, said Ritchie, the trick was reversed. “I know it might be said of me, in my earlier days, that I was a ‘form’ director. But that’s not how I approached it. I was a story guy. So was Larner. But it was to Bob’s eternal credit that the form, the theme, if you like, of this movie was the center. Very few productions I’ve been involved with developed with such evaluative power. I remember reading what Larner and Bob came up with and saying, ‘If we get the beats right, we really have something amazing.’ ”
Unlike Pollack’s, Ritchie’s career had hardly leaped forward in the last few years. His current film with Lee Marvin, produced by Joe Wizan, was another studio-less production, but Ritchie was comfortable. “I liked finding the oddball script. I liked finding unknown actors. I liked being the outside guy. And this fit in with the radical Bob. I often thought we were like fugitives on the run. It put great pressure, in a good way, on the imaginative process because, in every department—design, costume, all of it—we were always improvising.”
In choosing actors, Redford and Ritchie collaborated closely. Peter Boyle was selected for Lucas, Don Porter for Senator Jarmon, Allen Garfield for Klein and for Nancy, McKay’s wife, Karen Carlson, a twenty-seven-year-old Louisiana-born Miss America runner-up. Natalie Wood and Bill Bradley had walk-ons. “Those were impromptu situations,” said Ritchie. “Someone would drop by the day we were shooting, and Bob’d say, ‘Okay, you’re in.’ ” Natalie Wood became a McKay fan in a jostling crowd; Bradley a bus driver. Actual ABC and NBC anchormen covered McKay’s campaign in the film.
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