Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [118]
“What I was really worried about was the whole concept of basing a movie on Barbra as a serious actress,” says Redford. “She had never been tested. I told Sydney, ‘Her reputation is as a very controlling person. She will direct herself. It’ll never work.’ ” Laurents claims he had difficulty understanding the concerns, since Pollack blocked him from communicating with Redford. Agent Steffie Phillips believed this was “an escalating problem of Sydney’s insecurity on top of Redford’s insecurity on top of Barbra’s inexperience.”
In his memoirs Laurents reports his first clash with Pollack at Ray Stark’s condo in Sun Valley, Idaho. Pollack donned his usual script doctor’s hat, hacking out ideas on his own manual typewriter, a proprietary, authorial posture that set Laurents on edge. Pollack then upset the writer by saying, “You don’t know how everybody in Hollywood is amazed by you? Because you’ve written the best love story in years, and you’re a homosexual.” “What do you say to a man like that?” wondered Laurents. “Do you attack him? Do you attempt to educate him? Or do you just say to yourself, What an asshole!” Pollack’s insensitivity tilted the odds against productive partnership, said Laurents, but he hung in.
Pollack saw events differently. Laurents was composing his characters from a diversity of bits, a little of Jigee Viertel, a nuance of someone else. The consequent fragmented psychology made the romantic story line “too unbelievable by half.” Worst of all, said Pollack, Laurents had not resolved the political story. “It was about a relationship complicated by HUAC, but those vivid subtexts were lost. It’s not that he didn’t understand HUAC, but he didn’t contextualize it properly. There had to be a kind of education curve for the audience, and Arthur was bad at that.”
To fix it, Pollack employed eleven writers, among them Alvin Sargent, Paddy Chayefsky, David Rayfiel and Dalton Trumbo. Offended, Laurents left the production (though he was later rehired).
Trumbo proved to be Pollack’s ace in the hole. He was one of the jailed members of HUAC’s notorious Hollywood Ten, and his prolificacy was dented by the witch hunt, but he recovered in the sixties, writing screenplays for Exodus, The Sandpiper and Hawaii. In a detailed correspondence, Trumbo analyzed Laurents’s story and suggested alternative real-life identities for the characters. He saw one character, Rhea, as a version of Meta Rosenberg, Redford’s former agent “who behaved like most informers when called before HUAC: she gave the names of communists she probably did not like, and withheld the names of communists she probably did like, my name among others, though I was in jail when she testified.” He saw Hubbell as “a good guy who is trapped by the committee into becoming an informer and thereby destroyed.” He could not, however, connect Hubbell with any actual person he knew. Pollack called Trumbo’s attention to the actor Sterling Hayden’s book Wanderer, which dramatized Hayden’s guilt over naming names to HUAC: “The reason I have been so hung up on Hayden’s book,” wrote Pollack, “is that I keep finding tiny character clues within it that seem like starting points for Hubbell. I think the blacklist should be dead center to the drama rather than keeping it to one side. This in turn makes the political material less talky and more dramatic immediately. Secondly, it fulfills the metaphor of Hubbell as America. And, thirdly, it gives him something to do,” which had been Redford’s concern to begin with.
“I was hung up on Dalton’s views,” said Pollack, “because I felt that historical veracity was the way to persuade Bob into playing the role. I thought that this was a huge story—a love story, yes, but so much more in the representation of Morosky