Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [121]
In November, as The Way We Were was being filmed, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide. The blow for Redford was softened somewhat by his friend Wayne Owens’s congressional victory, but he still felt agitated. “I really hated Nixon. It went back to that ‘pinko’ incident with Gahagan Douglas. I felt he was a dirty fighter, and we didn’t need him in high office.” In December, Lois Smith called to say Woodward would meet Redford, not formally, but at a Democratic Party fund-raiser at the Motion Picture Association hall in Washington, D.C.
The meeting seemed secretive, “with Woodward hiding in the shadows and giving me snatches of information.” It emerged that he and Bernstein had a book deal with Simon and Schuster and were about to embark on writing their account of Watergate. “I told him I wasn’t interested in any book. But I was interested in them, and in what was unfolding on the national stage. I said, ‘There’s a movie in this.’ He said maybe—maybe he’d be interested in taking that further—and then he disappeared.”
The idea of a strategic political follow-up to The Candidate, an assumption many make about Redford’s Watergate project, was not the prime motivation. What appealed, in the first instance, was a commentary on the state of journalism. Not much more than a hundred years before, Thoreau had queried the essential worth of communication from one village to the next. What is edifying for us to know? The question was lost in the nineteenth century when press objectivity was diluted by advocacy journalism. The selective view, the vested interest, became prominent in American publishing. Radical changes in the twentieth century fundamentally changed the Fourth Estate. Investigative journalism, its worth proved by Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair, took precedence throughout the media and made stars of journalists. The emergence of New Journalism, and the literary elevation of news, further complicated the transmission of printed information to a point, Redford believed, where it was often impossible to unravel the value of the “straight news” story. Since Redford himself was being regularly interviewed and evaluated in print, the notion of interpreting the interpreter was very provocative to him. “I was asking, Who were Woodward and Bernstein? What motivated them? Had The Washington Post board decided to take down Nixon? Who was the front-runner here?”
These issues of anatomizing principles were on his mind as he addressed a dilemma facing Sundance. As part of an incremental growth plan, he had now commissioned an on-site cinema and more recreation annexes. Was it possible to keep extending—indeed, to even hold on to—this vast acreage with only the small income generated by a short ski season and a restaurant with twenty tables? The simple answer was no. His earnings were increasing—he got $400,000 with a 12.5 percent deferred slice of the net profits for The Way We Were—but the money was being gobbled up faster than it came in. “I knew it wasn’t sustainable, and I knew my lifestyle was so peripatetic that Sundance often seemed a luxury, but it still boiled down to the question, Am I prepared to see this canyon go to tract house development? And the answer was no.” Brent Beck, the resort manager, saw disaster looming in the collision of Redford’s possessiveness with business reality. “We, the staff, thought