Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [157]
Sanctuary turned into a circus. “It was worse,” Redford recalls. “The crowds outside the restaurant were insane. Gavras’s wife was knocked to the sidewalk and I tried to lift her up, but Alan Burry, a publicist present, shouted, ‘Don’t do it!’ The paparazzi would just die to get that shot: Redford helping some broad to her feet. In the end we escaped through the kitchen and I had to run ten blocks back to the hotel.” The next day, Burry summoned Century Security, an internationally recognized bodyguard agency. “The guy who ran it knew his stuff,” says Redford, “and he chilled me to the bone. This wasn’t just fan delirium, he said. Century did some digging to find there was a kidnap plot against me. You could have knocked me over with a feather. A plot against me? Why? Who could I have offended so badly? In fact, I had offended the right-wing contingent, the Nixonites. All the President’s Men left a stink, and they had me on the hit list. When I was in Paris all those years before, it was predominantly left-wing. Now it was the other way, and the press had me as the Man Who Took Down Nixon. The security guy literally threw me in the back of a car and took off for the border like he was competing at Le Mans. I thought it was melodrama and, to be honest, I believed none of it. I was wrong. We later learned, from an independent investigation, that it was justified, that those people were real, and their order to get me was real. I read the reports, I saw the evidence and it horrified me.”
A Bridge Too Far was released with great fanfare in June 1977. Redford had seen the rushes of the movie, thought it was fine, thought Hopkins was good, “but overall it was not as good as The Longest Day.”
Back tending to his horses in Utah, he surprised himself with the realization that he’d seen just four movies in a year. Only Buñuel’s Cet Obscur Objet du Désir left a good impression. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall was too parochial for his taste; others were just unmemorable. “I was also not touched by the big new movements in technological and disco films. They seemed hidebound, with nowhere to go in terms of substance.”
With Pollack, he resumed work on the script for Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To; at Wildwood he continued to collaborate on Alvin Sargent’s retooling of Judith Guest’s novel. Pollack believed his friend was suffering burnout. “I knew him well enough to know when the fire was gone. He was a guy with such remarkable discipline. He was up and out jogging at 7:00 a.m. He was playing tennis in subzero temperatures. He was relentless. But when he was tired, he was ornery and not disciplined, and that’s how he had become. We fought a lot over A Place to Come To, and that summed up the problem. He was juggling too many sidelines. He needed to stop.”
Redford continued to blend art with activism. He collaborated with Saul Bass and Charles Eames on a Dalíesque animated short promoting alternative energy, called The Solar Film. Solar energy had become another battle cry of his. Over the weekend of May 3–6, 1978, to help increase awareness of it, CAN mounted Sun Day, launched with a tribal sunrise ceremony on the steps of the U.N. in New York. Barry Commoner, Margaret Mead, Bishop Paul Moore and Andrew Young were among the event leaders, lecturing and giving media interviews. “Earth Day identified the environmental problems,” said Lola. “Sun Day identifies the solutions.” Central among the solutions Redford expounded upon in an interview he gave to his friend Tom Brokaw on NBC’s Today was a national commitment to exploring solar energy for industrial and domestic use along the lines of the Christensen experiment he had committed to at Sundance. This interview incited Mobil Oil to place a large advertisement in The New York Times sniping at the principles of Sun Day and defending the practicality of fossil fuels. Herb Schmertz, vice president of Mobil, went so far as to rebuke Redford personally in a letter to the editor. Redford found this “a real