Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [135]
Goldman was offended that Bernstein had even attempted a script, and when Redford started to plead with him to rewrite his version, he resisted. “It was a predicament to be in, since we were losing ground, given the time frame of topicality,” says Redford. By this stage, having briefly considered Michael Ritchie and Pollack as potential directorial collaborators, Redford had made a handshake deal with Alan Pakula, who was fresh off another journalistic conspiracy movie, The Parallax View, and whom, he says, he had “fully forgiven for any perfidy on Daisy Clover.” When finally Goldman handed his reluctantly reconstructed new script to Pakula, utter despair set in. “All hope was lost,” says Redford. “Alan hated the script, and we immediately made arrangements to rewrite it ourselves, since we learned Bill was tied up already, writing Marathon Man for John Schlesinger. I was furious, but to what purpose? The friendship was gone—that made me sad—but there was a movie that had to be made.” Redford booked rooms at the Madison hotel across from the Post offices for one month, and he and Pakula repaired there to redraft the screenplay. About one-tenth of Goldman’s draft remained in the end. “Bill gave the start point and the ending,” says Woodward, “and those never changed.” Goldman would win an Academy Award for the script, but his participation was by now finished.
With the publication of their book, Woodward and Bernstein hit the promotion trail while Redford, in Washington, did additional research. He called on his CAN and NRDC contacts. The allies made in his previous fund-raising work for Wayne Owens and Tip O’Neill opened doors to congressional staffers with tales to tell. Joan Claybrook, the lawyer and lobbyist for Ralph Nader, served as a navigator. “Basically these people gave me insight into the universe of Washington—how it operated, who depended on whom, who knew the inner workings of whomever else.” He also talked with reporters Mary McGrory, John Chancellor, Dan Rather and Sy Hersh—“all of whom had their own spin on what really happened with Watergate, why burglar James McCord blew the whistle, how Nixon masterminded the evasion, where the rot began. You couldn’t talk to any of them without new insider information on Cox or Mitchell or Liddy raising its head,” says Redford. “It had a snowball effect, which helped the fine detail of what Pakula and I were doing with the new screenplay.”
In the weeks that followed, Redford and Pakula divided the background research objectives, with Pakula’s finely detailed political research led by his Harvard graduate assistant Jon Boorstin, and Redford’s taking the form of “character study,” which was achieved by spending long hours driving around with Woodward and Bernstein as they continued their investigation of Chuck Colson, a Watergate conspirator who was not yet charged but in the process of plea-bargaining for his role in smearing Daniel Ellsberg. “This was exactly what I’d wanted Bill Goldman to do,” says Redford. “We needed to get in there with those key figures, to dig into the life. Goldman did it before on other projects, but he wasn’t there for this, which I knew would be one of the most tricky films I’d ever make.”
The mood of the nation, sated on treachery, soaked fast into Hollywood. By 1974, there were several worthy conspiracy movies, including The Conversation and Chinatown. The monumental industry change of Steven Spielberg’s all-out pop diversion Jaws was months away but, for a moment, a new, different, more discerning age seemed to be dawning. For Pakula, this was a crossroads moment in American cinema. With ten years of producing behind him, ranging from To Kill a Mockingbird to Up the Down Staircase, Pakula had long predicted a maturation of audience appetites. His own directing began in 1969 with The Sterile Cuckoo, a stagy,