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long hours daily during production). Redford was glad to be moving at last, but impatient with the kind of intrusive photographers and crowds that had dogged him in Holland. According to Fonda, who had her own contingent of noisy fans, Redford was “prodded, tugged, felt, kissed and treated like one of those animal curiosities from Siegfried and Roy.” In his off hours, Redford dined and drank in the privacy of his suite with Pollack and Fonda, or the country singer Willie Nelson, who was cast in his first dramatic role playing Sonny’s manager, Wendell. Mostly, though, evenings were dedicated to work with Pollack on the script. “The thing that kept me concentrated,” says Redford, “was the fear that the movie wouldn’t hold together at all.”

As Fonda spent her free time giving fitness lessons, based on routines she’d learned in Gilda Marx’s Body Design gym, to crew members in her suite—a prelude to the Jane Fonda Workout industry to come—Redford enjoyed the horsemanship. Movie wrangler Kenny Lee had located for the movie a calm, disciplined five-year-old bay Thoroughbred, Let’s Merge, at a dressage school in the San Fernando Valley. Redford and the horse hit it off. “Managing the horse kept me healthy,” says Redford. “Sometimes I talk better with horses than with people.” To Pollack’s surprise, in one particularly tricky scene, Redford refused the stunt double and insisted on riding Let’s Merge down the traffic of the Strip at rush hour. “Secretly I think it was his biggest buzz,” says Pollack. “Very symbolic on a personal level, and a little malevolent, since it screwed up traffic and the business of the town for half a day.”

Fonda became Redford’s anchor, a presence to keep him focused when, he admits, “there were mornings I didn’t want to get out of bed. I was not a pleasant person to be around for that movie. Sydney said I behaved like an uncooperative bastard, and he was right. I didn’t want press around, for instance. [The critic] Gene Siskel sneaked on the set, and I told Sydney, ‘I will not act while he’s here, period.’ I was in a dark place. I later apologized to him. But we forged through it together, as I always performed for him as an actor.”

With weather holdups during the southern Utah portion of the shoot in January and February, the $11.2 million budget overran by $1.3 million. Never missing a marketing moment, Ray Stark circulated the story that $300,000 had been spent filming forty-three takes of the key moment, when Sonny and Hallie kiss. “I justified it as our reward,” said Pollack. “We’d been through a mountain of scripts and finally we got the magic.” For Pollack, a lover of heyday Tracy-Hepburn, utter redemption was in the kiss. “Bob and Jane should be proud. That’s the moment they joined the big leagues, in my book.”

It seemed extraordinary after the million and one script deviations that The Electric Horseman would calmly find its place as a simple old-fashioned romantic comedy. But that’s how it fared. At various stages all of the participants had prophesied doom for it, but it sidled out into the marketplace between Moonraker and Apocalypse Now in the winter of 1979 and took in a very respectable $60 million. To almost all reviewers it was an anachronism, but no less welcome for that. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times summed up Pollack’s triumph of instinct when he likened it to Capra’s It Happened One Night and the other Golden Era romances. The relationship between Fonda and Redford, it turned out, was exactly like Hepburn and Bogart’s in The African Queen, another movie about a mismatched pair sharing the rigors of life on the run. “Both Redford and Fonda have associated themselves with a lot of issues in this movie,” wrote Ebert, listing the evils of corporate conglomeration, the preservation of wildlands, respect for animals, the phoniness of commercialism, and the pack instincts of TV journalists, among others. “But although this movie is filled with messages, it’s not a message movie. The characters and plot seem to tap-dance past the serious stuff and concentrate on human relationships.