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chase in which the CIA agent code-named Condor attempts to dodge assassination as he unravels an internal coup designed to cover up a heroin-trading cabal—into three. Despite Semple’s verbal dexterity—and his evident artistic growth in his recent adaptation of Papillon, combined with impressive work for Pakula on The Parallax View—he failed to produce the paranoia Redford hoped for. Pollack once again turned to David Rayfiel to layer the script. “Bob’s instincts were spot-on,” said Pollack. “It was a Russian dolls scenario, and it had this tremendous personal story of Joe Turner, the guy who trusts his organization, then wakes up one day to see that everything he believed in has turned on him and everyone’s out to get him. The story then unfolds like a Hitchcock film, with the audience pulling for Joe as he moves through this bewildering world just one step ahead of a bullet in the back. All the time he’s homing in on a criminal cover-up. But it was not an easy adaptation to film, and I saw Lorenzo’s problem very quickly. The action, ironically, slowed it down. There needed to be a lot more humanity, and I saw that in terms of romantic engagement. I have been accused of playing that card too often, but I make no apologies because it engages people. How human beings connect, how they embrace and trust and love, engages people. And once you have that connection, the audience is paying attention and all the rest works.” It was Rayfiel’s ultimate job, said Pollack, to bring “breathing and feeling” into the story. Finally, after ten collaborations with Pollack, Rayfiel was on his way to earning his first formal screen credit. “A lot of the humanizing was in building up the girl role, Kathy Hale,” says Rayfiel. “She’s the innocent bystander, a photographer Turner kidnaps and holes up with and talks to. She becomes his dialogue with us, the audience, and with her we share his tension.”

At the end of the summer, as they worked at a Connecticut house Redford rented close to Rayfiel’s, important new elements were introduced by Redford, including substituting oil for the heroin cover-up in Grady’s novel, which Redford thought more apt, especially in light of the environmental stance he was taking in Utah. It was also his idea that Turner, having exposed Atwood and Joubert, the CIA villains, should turn his information over in final retribution to The New York Times, a symbolic salute to the best of the Fourth Estate. “I worked hard on Three Days of the Condor,” says Redford, and Rayfiel attests to his “really vivid insights, not just lines of dialogue, but overview. I was impressed by his intuition for drama, for when a scene should start and how vulnerable the hero should seem—just so much, not too much. He had a writer’s eye and ear more than any actor I ever worked with.”

Redford also collaborated on the casting, approving Max von Sydow for Joubert, Addison Powell for Atwood, Cliff Robertson for Higgins, the CIA’s deputy director, and Faye Dunaway for Kathy Hale. The movie was then relocated from the novel’s Washington to New York, and a tight schedule was honed to facilitate the hoped-for winter start of the Woodward-Bernstein movie.

Redford felt he was focused; Pollack sometimes didn’t. For him, too often, “Bob’s attention was divided. He was into patrolling Washington with Hersh and McGrory a little too much. We started shooting in October, before we lost the light [of the early winter evenings], but it got quite stressed from time to time. I remember complaining to him, ‘Excuse me, can I get five fucking minutes of your time, please?’ I was also uptight because Dino [De Laurentiis, the executive producer] had a tough reputation, and my neck was on the line.”

Redford feels that Pollack was unfair in his judgment, and also dismisses the crew rumors that he and Dunaway did not get on. He very much liked Dunaway, he says, though he felt at that time she “existed in a bubble emotionally” and seemed intensely distracted, perhaps by events in her personal life. “Those rumors might have originated from one incident, where she had