Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [163]
For Ebert, as for many critics, Pollack’s strength was in “orchestrating” the Redford-Fonda chemistry. Like the directors of Bogart, Hepburn, Gable, Colbert and others, said Ebert, Pollack understood “that if you have the right boy and the right girl, all you have to do is stay out of the way of the horse.”
The success of the movie, however, did little to mend the rift between actor and director. Many observed “the formula” at work—where Pollack relied heavily on the romantic cipher—and, given Redford’s radical mind-set, predicted a further breach.
“Dad wanted to direct movies to express his own way of telling a story, without any compromise,” says Jamie. “He really wanted to get away from Sydney for a while.” Still, while angling for his own directorial debut, he was amenable to acting in another film for another director.
Three years before, as he immersed himself in Native American issues for The Outlaw Trail, Redford had been prompted by author-activist Peter Matthiessen to follow the case of Leonard Peltier, a thirty-two-year-old Sioux on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The charges against Peltier arose from the deaths of two FBI agents and one Native American shot during an incident of public disorder in Oglala. Peltier claimed his innocence, and the evidence against him, as Matthiessen demonstrated, was tenuous. But in April 1977, Peltier was found guilty and sentenced to two consecutive life terms. Fonda and Brando were among Peltier’s supporters, but Redford virtually adopted the case as his own. He met Peltier in prison, campaigned for his pardon, even took the matter to the White House, where successive presidents considered, but rejected, a pardon. “You start to look twice at the institutions you take for granted,” says Redford. “It’s a healthy state of mind to reach. It’s not enough to drive a car, you ought to know something of what makes the car go.” The possibility of a gross miscarriage of justice in Peltier’s case started a train of inquiry that was echoed in a script from producer Ron Silverman that landed in Redford’s hands during The Electric Horseman.
Brubaker, based on the writings of Arkansas prison reformer Thomas O. Murton, portrayed a corrupt justice system. Murton’s story was every bit as sinister as Peltier’s. Appointed by Governor Winthrop Rockefeller to revamp Arkansas’s jails in the 1960s, Murton posed as a prisoner at Tucker Prison Farm and unearthed scandalous abuses and the covered-up murders of three inmates. As the bodies were disinterred, Murton demanded full disclosure in the national media. Instead, he was vilified and fired. His subsequent memoir, Accomplices to the Crime, attracted sympathetic attention, but it was ten years before Silverman acquired rights to the book and sealed a deal with Twentieth Century–Fox, with Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson’s friend and business partner, directing.
In hindsight, the odds seemed against Brubaker succeeding. All the principals—producers, screenwriters and director—had variable, television-oriented careers. Silverman’s background was in series like Stoney Burke and The Wild Wild West. Screenwriters W. D. Richter and Arthur Ross were also television writers, though Richter had done well with John Badham’s recent adaptation of Dracula. Rafelson was, perhaps, the most controversial component. He had cocreated The Monkees, and he developed the Monkees’ movie Head, which he directed. Rafelson admitted to having made Head heavily under the influence of LSD and in homage to the French New Wave, which was the film form he most admired. “I liked that complete disrespect for the film itself,” he said, “the idea of handling it roughly and not aiming for perfect lighting.” Though Head failed, Rafelson’s follow-up with Nicholson, Five Easy Pieces, won four Academy Award nominations. But he was still widely regarded as a wild card.
Two more different artists, two more different Hollywood outsiders, than Redford and Rafelson would be hard to conjure. Redford is polite about their disagreements. In his version, Rafelson was working on a deep