Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [125]
The movie, which Universal opened confidently on Christmas Day 1973 with simultaneous New York and Los Angeles premieres, garnered ten Academy Award nominations in most of the main categories, including for Redford as best actor. Oddly, Newman was not nominated, though Hill felt there was aptness to this. “Bob delivered a lot more. There was more on him, and he pulled it off.” Redford himself was flattered, but fixed on avoiding the frills. “I just think the movie worked as an ensemble piece, so I took no special pride. Anyway, I always believed that no one participant really wins an Oscar. We’re all in it together.” In the seven winning categories, including for best picture, best original screenplay and best director, Hill certainly felt Redford won out. “His presence was right through it, really. I don’t believe it would have happened without him.” For the best actor award, Jack Lemmon’s performance in Save the Tiger beat out Redford’s.
Such a massive success inevitably drew the brickbats. Four lawsuits were launched against The Sting, mostly from academics who had written books on one aspect or another of Prohibition life, card games or FBI methodology. David Ward had been paid $300,000 to write the movie. By 1979, Universal’s lawyers were demanding the money back in settlement of a Kentucky lawsuit. “Bob, Paul and George came out for me,” says Ward. “They called Universal’s legal department and said, ‘Get real. This guy has given you a huge moneymaker. You owe him. You don’t penalize the good guys. You penalize villains.’ ”
Though Redford benefited enormously through his early career by good patronage—the support of Nichols, Pollack, Newman, Goldman and especially Hill—he remained resolutely his own man. Stephanie Phillips remembers that, despite the power of CMA and Freddie Fields, he was stubbornly autonomous: “He would listen very intently to your advice, then go do it his way.” After The Sting he was once again perceived to be on a run. Both the rebooted Jeremiah Johnson and The Way We Were triumphed, each earning around $22 million. The Sting grossed a near-record $160 million. “There was a positive soar of support,” said George Roy Hill. “I saw him grasp it. He had been viable, but now he had real power. It made it easier for me to plan bigger-budgeted pictures with him, and it made it possible for him to be choosy in what he did.” It was, then, by the most comfortable serendipity that he would be able to sidestep a handful of half-hatched projects—a script about Henry Miller–esque bums by Five Easy Pieces writer Carole Eastman and a version of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee that he wanted to produce—to submerge himself in a classic Jazz Age role he’d long coveted.
One of Hollywood’s hottest recent stories was that Bob Evans had persuaded Scottie Smith, the daughter of Scott Fitzgerald, to release the rights to The Great Gatsby for a remake. For years Sam Spiegel and Ray Stark had chased the project. Pollack had made a bid, too. But Evans wanted to gift the famous role of Daisy, Gatsby’s vaporous inspiration, to his wife, Ali MacGraw. The idea had come to Evans the year before, when MacGraw gave him a leather-bound, personally calligraphed copy of Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams,” a short story thematically linked to Gatsby, for Christmas. Evans’s return gift came too late. During the making of The Getaway, MacGraw fell in love with costar Steve McQueen and decided to leave the marriage. The new movie, however, was too good an opportunity to pass by. Already Evans had partnered with Broadway’s David Merrick to produce, and Truman Capote had been commissioned to write the screenplay. Evans had his work cut out. The first film version, by Herbert Brenon in 1926, was irretrievably lost, and the second, made in 1949 by Elliott Nugent and starring Alan Ladd, was rarely seen. Both had been overshadowed