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collegiate psychological study starring Liza Minnelli, and was followed by the thoughtful thriller Klute, for which Jane Fonda won an Academy Award. “My belief, based on my experiences, was that a vast market was not addressed. Audiences were impressed by the foreign imports, but very few American filmmakers experimented. American theater per se was similar. We had a disproportionate interest in diversion therapy and too little interest in discovery. What came upon us in the Watergate era after a decade of assassinations and dirty tricks was a kind of national enlightenment. Collectively we became cynical. I thought it was healthy. I also thought it was bound to affect entertainment culture, and I remember feeling then, more than at any time before or since, that we were onto our own ‘New Wave.’ Great movies were under way—things like Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Network—and we were suddenly looking for social discussion in film, and I thought this was a breakthrough. And this was my attitude in taking on All the President’s Men.”

For Redford, there were glorious offers abounding—including roles in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and in Superman—but he declined. He was sure he wanted to do something with weight. The meeting point between him and Pakula was their common view that accorded intellect and curiosity to the audience. “I knew Bob wanted Wildwood to gain distinction as a producer of quality films,” said Pakula, “and he wanted signature, personal films. He used all his assets. He had great personal skills with agents. They liked him mostly because he was a money magnet, but also because he was earnest. He was the real deal. No one was going to get him into a Mel Brooks movie.”

As research on the Watergate movie went on, Redford decided to fit in another acting role. With three strong successes behind them, Pollack was more eager than ever to make another movie with his old friend. The fact that Pollack had acquired a cabin at Sundance, ten minutes across the canyon, kept communication open and easy. “We talked about projects all the time,” said Pollack. “We were on the phone daily, always saying, ‘Maybe.’ Then I saw an opportunity during that summer of 1974. I had a deal with Paramount; he had time. I thought, If we can hone the right one down fast, it’s perfect.”

For a while, the two men worked evenings on Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To, an epic, Joycean novel Redford loved. But a workable adaptation, it was agreed, would take years. They pledged to continue, but looked elsewhere. One evening in Utah as he was raking through Watergate research documents, Redford turned again to a script that had come to him with Peter Yates’s name appended. It was written by the former Batman writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. and adapted from a slim, melodramatic novel by James Grady, a twenty-four-year-old assistant to Lee Metcalf, the U.S. Senator from Montana.

“To begin with,” says Redford, “it was nothing I was interested in. It was a potboiler, all set in D.C., and the end had guys parachuting down with Sten guns and big cannons and heroin and the kind of stuff that didn’t excite me personally. But in the middle was a great concept, about a guy struggling to deal with a situation he cannot understand. It was basically about paranoia, and that did grab me.” This, at its heart, was a CIA story. With a simple shift of emphasis, Redford felt, Grady’s book could be moved from potboiler to a postulation of the CIA’s ambiguous morality. Form would then shift from thriller to commentary, the implication of which was a national security system fouled by its own principles, where individual objective and institutional aim were not often, or even necessarily, harmonious. This fit well with the Watergate zeitgeist. Redford pulled on a jacket and crossed the canyon by motorbike to knock on Pollack’s door. “I told him, ‘This one has something. Read it and tell me if you think we can remodel it. I think we can.’ ”

Semple’s redrafted script transformed the six days of the Condor—the duration of the