Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [155]
But money he needed, and a remarkable opportunity fell into his lap. The British actor-director Richard Attenborough had been trying for years to mount a film on Gandhi. When the project stumbled for the umpteenth time, a producer friend, Joe Levine, offered him an alternative. Levine was a onetime garment maker who started his Hollywood career distributing Italian musclemen movies before producing significant successes like The Graduate and The Lion in Winter. While neither as prolific nor as discerning as Sam Spiegel, Levine had sound instincts and was happy to package Fellini’s 8½ for American distribution alongside Steve Reeves’s Hercules, despite the fact that he personally considered Fellini “as phony as a glass eye.” Whether the barons of established Hollywood yet took him seriously, Levine was undeniably a force in maverick moviemaking and was known for his clever marketplace footwork. He had earned more than $30 million from The Graduate and pushed much of it back into his company, Avco Embassy. When it stalled, he set about establishing a new venture, the Joseph E. Levine Presents company, whose flagship, he decided, would be a prestige classic.
During a conversation in a bar in Los Angeles, seventy-year-old Levine explained to Attenborough his passion for A Bridge Too Far, Cornelius Ryan’s posthumously published book detailing the Allies’ attempt to foreshorten the war in Europe in September 1944. Attenborough saw immediately that the project was as complex as any potential Gandhi, and that though Levine constantly invoked another Ryan opus, The Longest Day, which had been a triumph for Fox in 1962, the dramatic dynamics of the stories had little in common. The Longest Day concerned the success of D-Day. A Bridge Too Far was the account of Operation Market Garden, a story of failure. During the fated mission, nine thousand airborne troops had slipped behind enemy lines with the objective of taking the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem; only six hundred survived to dig in and fight two elite panzer divisions with small arms. Unquestionably the event was laden with tales of individual heroism, but the campaign was defined by its gross mismanagement.
“You can fool all of the people all of the time,” Joe Levine famously said, “if the advice is right and the budget is big enough.” And he was ready to throw countless millions into A Bridge Too Far. Attenborough was impressed by Levine’s stated desire to make a tribute to fallen heroes. “We’ve had three decades of lousy noisefests like Midway,” Levine told a journalist in 1977. “All those movies were self-congratulating. Operation Market Garden couldn’t be like that. It had to be honest and compassionate because it was about the self-sacrifice of forgotten men.” Attenborough was persuaded by the sentiment, the star-studded vision Levine had—and the $20 million budget, part pledged by United Artists, a company then cruising on its James Bond profits. UA was in for distribution, though only on condition that Levine could supply more than a dozen high-profile stars in the style of The Longest Day. Levine instructed Attenborough to go out and find the biggest names around. It was then agreed that Bill Goldman would be the screenwriter.
In a matter of weeks, and without a script yet, Attenborough had secured the services of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Dirk Bogarde, Laurence Olivier and a number of other notable British stars, many of whom were friends of his. “Once we had that ring of quality,” said Levine, “we went for Hollywood.”
The offer to Redford came during the height of the excitement about All the President’s Men. Attenborough was in Holland assembling a demi-army and wanted a name to fill the lead role of Major Julian Cook. Steve McQueen had been offered the part and was procrastinating. At first Redford demurred. He had made his commitment to lobbying, family and Sundance. Hendler, though, saw a golden moment.