Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [132]
The Great Waldo Pepper, a period piece, was the fruition of that promise. “I couldn’t have turned that one down even if I wanted to,” says Redford, “because it was George’s obsession and I was in his debt.” Unlike Redford’s relationship with Pollack in which “Sydney intellectually dissected things,” his relationship with Hill, Redford says, was more intuitive. “The friendship was father-son in a most intersupportive way. I had the highest regard for his spirit. And when something was totally his, like Waldo Pepper, the joy of just being around him was contagious.”
Like Butch Cassidy, Waldo Pepper dealt subtextually with the pathos of myth. By now, Hill, Redford and Bill Goldman had an almost family empathy, so it was no surprise that Hill chose Goldman to write his dream story. Though Goldman wrote the script, the concept, plot and resolution were Hill’s. “I got a little of Huck Finn into it,” said Hill, “and a little of Holman. I wanted to start it the way it starts, with the camera lovingly tracing over the scrapbooks of my childhood, my flying heroes, the great barnstormers, and showing their dates of birth and dates of death. And then the story of Waldo commences, the story of a man defining himself only against his self-set challenges, a man who connects with the dream, who can make a friendship, or make love, but who never touches the crowd. He is a circus freak. He entertains everyone. But he is alone inside a fantasy. And he will live and die like that, which is both his glory and his tragedy.”
After a period of friction with Hill (“about Golman’s inclination to talk too much,” said Hill), Goldman delivered a script that Hill felt “had a lot of good things, though nothing too remarkable.” The production was pressured into moving forward, however, by the brief window of Redford’s winter availability.
Casting was coordinated by Bob Crawford. Scores of actors were interviewed, especially for the co-leads of Waldo’s girlfriend, Mary Beth; his barnstorming rival, Axel Olsson; and his flying idol, the German wartime ace Ernst Kessler. For Hill, much of this casting was trickier than usual because he was measuring the aspirants against the heroes of his childhood, men like Ernst Udet, the second-ranking German ace after Manfred von Richthofen, who on numerous dogfights saluted and spared the lives of disabled airmen and who finally committed suicide when called up for service in Göring’s Luftwaffe; or Jimmy Doolittle, the daredevil who first achieved the miraculous “outside loop” maneuver that Waldo attempts in the movie. “I felt some duty to those men,” said Hill, “because they were like astronauts to me. They were the aviation pacemakers.”
Hill’s notebooks attest to great ambition in the casting. Among those considered to costar with Redford—“or to substitute [for] him if Gatsby runs ridiculously over as The Way We Were did”—were Jack Nicholson, George Segal, Donald Sutherland, Sam Waterston and Warren Oates. Bo Svenson and Bo Brundin were cast as Olsson and Kessler, with Susan Sarandon nudging out Patti D’Arbanville to play Mary Beth. “For the women the issue was the type,” said Hill. “Here I wasn’t affected by the history, but by the aerial movies I loved, like Bill Wellman’s Wings or Hell’s Angels. Those castings were spot-on, great