Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [123]
When Hill called Redford to tell him of the great new script he’d found, Redford laughed. He had already read it, and approved. “But the truth is, I didn’t see it as the massive project it became. I saw it as a modest, tricky little thing,” says Redford. Then Hill told Redford he wanted Paul Newman for the role of Gondorff. “I was surprised,” says Redford, “because Peter Boyle was already there. So I said, ‘Okay, I trust you. I love Paul, and if the studio will go with him …?’ ” The problem, however, was that for Universal, Newman’s star was on the wane. This shocked, then amused, Redford and Hill. For seven years through the sixties Newman had ranked in the top ten of box office earners. He had been nominated four times for an Academy Award. He had won a British Academy Award, for The Hustler in 1961, and a New York Film Critics Circle best director award for Rachel, Rachel, made just before Butch Cassidy. Hill thought the situation laughable. Freddie Fields called to propose a resolution: Redford was being offered $500,000, with 15 percent of the gross. Newman was being offered a fee, but with no points—a proposal he immediately refused. The only way Newman could be fit into the deal, said Fields, was if Redford conceded his percentage points to him. Redford was unhappy. “But I felt obligated to Paul, for what he had done in supporting me at the start of my career. I gave in. Paul got my points, and that turned into a considerable fortune of earnings, millions and millions of dollars. I told him later that it pissed me off, but I forgave him.”
In Ward’s story, Hooker steals illegal gambling money from Illinois mobster Doyle Lonnegan, who kills Hooker’s partner and issues a death warrant. Hooker flees to Chicago, where he schemes with Gondorff, a friend of Hooker’s dead partner, to lure Lonnegan to town and fleece him in a racetrack scam. When the Feds close in, it appears that the con will be curtailed, but Hooker and Gondorff conspire with the Feds to round off a coup.
For Newman all this was “just brilliant, really the best twist I’d ever read. It was also a better drama than Butch Cassidy, because of the equality between the characters of Gondorff and Hooker. There was no star role. That, in turn, brought out the best in Redford and me, because the invitation was there, and we were competing. But I won. I took the audience sitting down. Redford spent the whole movie running.” Sure enough, Redford’s sole complaint about The Sting was the physicality of the film. “I knew it the minute I read it. That movie starts with me and ends with me, and in between I’m the one on the run from the mobsters and the Feds. I’m the one carrying the plot to the audience and dodging around corners.” In acknowledgment, Hill presented him with a plaque inscribed ROADRUNNER, which became his nickname for the duration.
In January, a week after The Way We Were wrapped, Redford and Newman were making The Sting on the Universal back lot. Just before shooting got under way, George Roy Hill stormed into the office of the Phillipses with press clippings of another Universal movie, The Mack, which appeared to have an identical story line. Michael Phillips remembers that Hill was frantic: “ ‘Let’s can this,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth the trouble if we’re making a movie that’s already been made. I don’t want the grief, the injunctions, the lawsuits.’ But I calmed him down. The other movie had a different background, a black cast; it was a whole other universe. I said, ‘George, get a grip. We have Newman and Redford, an incredibly smart screenplay and the wittiest dialogue either of us has ever read.’ I gave him a lot of warm reassurance, and so he went out on the soundstage and started working.”
Hill first painstakingly rehearsed the movie, theater-style, then “let the actors go.” On Butch Cassidy, said Hill, Redford never talked back. By now he’d learned the knack. “A couple or three times I had to tell him to shut it or I’d kill him,” said Hill. Newman remembered only “sharp, theater-type ensemble work that seemed to go unusually well, in that