Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [138]
When Pollack previewed the first cut for De Laurentiis and friends, it proved a major disappointment. “Every part of it was awkward, every beat was off,” he remembered. To fix it, he instructed Don Guidice, his editor, to “cut every scene. Take the heads off every shot. Take the tails off every shot. Take out reaction shots. Take out establishing shots. Reduce everything by half.”
The effect, says Redford, was stunning. “Sydney had never made a film that moved as fast as a moving train and looked so tense. It was a new style of work for him, and it set the bar for all his later thrillers.”
Pollack was proud. As contributions to paranoia movies go, he knew he had scored. It was now Pakula’s turn.
Sundance, meanwhile, had taken a debilitating body blow. In 1973 serious competition arrived with the opening of Park City, a new resort funded by a California businessman, fifteen miles up the road at a higher elevation, with more organized accommodations and services. Redford’s resort manager, Brent Beck, saw Sundance at a turning point. “We were on our knees by the time Park City opened. When the snows came, our business was limitless. In 1973 we had 122,000 day-pass skiers. But the problem was, the snow often didn’t come till late January, sometimes even later. Hendler was goading me on because I was the chief executive with the responsibility of making it all viable, but the only extra revenue I could generate was from leasing acreage for sheep farming. That amounted to nickels and dimes. We charged $6 a head for sheep, and there weren’t many sheep because Bob didn’t want the area overfarmed. So income from farming was just $1,200 a month. As soon as Park City came on the scene, we knew we were going to the wall, that there was no way to survive unless we went a radical new route.”
Redford had been routinely pumping in a minimum of $300,000 a year from his own pocket. Now it was apparent that not even this annual injection could keep the resort afloat. Compromises had to be made. Stan Collins brought in Bobby Davenport, the Kentucky Chicken King franchise owner, as coexecutive to manage a newly restructured resort. The first priority, with the help of Davenport’s credit line, was to create more accommodations for overnight visitors. Beck went around the canyon to the existing plot holders, like Sydney Pollack, Steve Frankfurt and Jeremiah Johnson set designer Ted Haworth, and persuaded them to put their cabins into a rental pool. “These cabins were second homes for the residents,” says Beck, “so I urged them to join the club. Their silver and tableware and linens weren’t the best. I said, ‘Look, you have to put something in to get something out. If we address this together, we can all make money and we can compete with Park City.’ They went along with it, most of them. We created the rental pool, which Sundance then managed, and we had a chance finally to open year-round business opportunities.”
Redford’s support for Davenport, like for the business partners forced on him before, was never more than halfhearted. “What I didn’t want to happen was covert sellout,” says Redford. “No one was more sensitive than me to the burden of paying a mortgage in excess of a quarter of a million. But Park City becoming the pacemaker for redevelopment was the wrong way to go. Stan and Brent did well, but truthfully I believed we couldn’t compete in the long term. It was an artificial objective we were chasing.”
Beck was critical of Redford’s ambivalence. “You could say Bob was part of the trouble. The environmental politics were getting in the way. Two Utah issues dominated his thinking: the state’s on-off plans to expand the road along the Provo River, and Cal Edison’s plan to build a power plant down the road to supply California’s needs. Bob was no longer doing resort business when he came home, which was rare enough anyway. He was organizing town hall meetings,