Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [160]
In the story, Sonny Steele, an ex–rodeo rider, is employed by a multinational corporation called Ampco to promote Ranch cereal, riding a doped show horse around at entertainment spots. Anesthetized with alcohol, Sonny goes AWOL. The original story went only as far as Sonny’s flight from the venality of Las Vegas to the great outdoors and leaned heavily on symbolism. It then fell on Pollack to create and shape a full-length movie. “I saw we had problems even when I commissioned the first script,” said Pollack. “The story ended after the first act. I scrambled around for more. I like that part, wringing out a film story. The redemption, I decided, must be in a romantic relationship. Sonny needed to be saved by love. And so we invented the character of Hallie Martin, a television journalist who has a good feeling about Sonny’s integrity and follows him into oblivion to get his side of the story.”
Pollack commissioned Bob Garland, a writer he knew from television, to develop the screenplay, but, Redford says, the resulting work was “spaghetti junction. It was just so many unresolved incidents sitting there. I thought it was ironic that Sydney abandoned the Robert Penn Warren because it was so tricky, and then we ended up with this mishmash.”
They soldiered on. Redford requested that Jane Fonda take the co-lead when Pollack’s first choice, Diane Keaton, was allegedly blocked from participating by her possessive boyfriend, Warren Beatty. “Quite simply, Warren wouldn’t have Diane kissing Bob Redford, the most desirable star in the world,” said Pollack. “He wasn’t dumb. He wouldn’t want the competition.”
The previous year Fonda had lambasted Redford in an article in The Village Voice. “I’ve known two Robert Redfords,” she’d said. “When we made Barefoot in the Park he was a young man full of interests, sensitive to the problems of the time, politically and socially involved. But now he’s perfectly integrated, and an instrument of the star system. He is, and remains, a bourgeois in the worst sense of the word.” Redford stayed silent. He was sensitive to the tumultuous changes she had been through. In 1966, when he’d last worked with her, Fonda was approaching what she calls “the psychological metamorphosis” that steered her toward the leftist campaigning that branded her Hanoi Jane. Her marriage to Roger Vadim ended and she turned to leftist activist Tom Hayden, head of Students for a Democratic Society and author of the “Port Huron Statement” (the group’s manifesto calling for participatory democracy), who would become her husband and crusade partner through the seventies. Today, analyzing her espousal of extremist activism, she expresses regret for excesses. “Everyone now understands it: it was a transitional time for most thinking Americans, and for me personally it was a painful and exploratory time.”
When they reconnected, Redford was pleased to find he still had much in common with Fonda. She had worked with Alan Pakula in Klute, for which she won an Academy Award, and was about to receive her second, for Coming Home. Hayden, who had been indicted with the Chicago Seven for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention, had been appointed to the Solar Utilization Scheme of the Southwest Border Commission by California governor Jerry Brown. Hayden and Fonda’s broad-issue group, the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), was also currently lobbying for rent