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and probing script. At the same time, Redford was refining his own deep and probing interpretation. When, just five days after the completion of The Electric Horseman, Redford arrived on location in Columbus, Ohio, however, there were immediate problems. Rafelson had not, for starters, fully decided on casting. Key roles were still unfilled with only days to go until the start of shooting. The set itself, built inside an old state prison, was overmodified and all but unusable. Murton expressed the belief that the screenplay showed evidence of “creative folk [who have been] smoking pot.” Redford felt that Rafelson was absorbed in “hip effect” and his own volatile ego, which was upsetting to the studio. “He was behaving like a martinet, which was not comfortable for anyone.”

Redford stepped away from confrontation with Rafelson by preparing for the Brubaker character in his own way. He found himself internalizing more than usual. “It was an interesting place. My marriage was gone, despite my and Lola’s attempts to save it. When things are failing, you examine them. So I was dissecting human behavior and thinking about social disorder and making connections. This was a fascinating place to work from in terms of relating to Murton’s experience. I liked it that Brubaker was written as a gray character. I always liked that twilight area in projecting heroism, and there was some personal truth that felt hard earned on this one.”

In widely reported accounts, Rafelson decked a senior Fox executive who was summoned to Columbus one week after shooting commenced to determine why the movie was already several days behind schedule. Other reports suggest Redford sought Rafelson’s removal and asked Paul Newman to recommend a replacement. What is clear is that Newman suggested Stuart Rosenberg, the mild-mannered director of Cool Hand Luke, who had also directed Redford for television in The Defenders. Newman believed “Stuart was a far better bet for Brubaker, because his field of excellence was psychology. He was good at close-quarters stuff like prison dramas, that much we all knew.” Redford welcomed Rosenberg and remembers him as a kindly man: “And he had the kind of sound temperament that I thought could salvage this from the brink, since the actors were starting to mutiny.”

Rosenberg flew to Columbus on a borrowed Warners jet, shut down the production for ten days and barricaded himself in a nearby Holiday Inn with the script and a stack of notebooks. “I was absolutely appalled,” he said. “There was an out-of-control atmosphere. I looked at what Rafelson shot and I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, use it. Everything he did was against my style, and some of it seemed plain dumb. For instance, he sliced the roof off the location—which was a real prison—to facilitate studio arc lighting. I thought, What a complete, stupid waste of money! To find the real thing, then try to turn it into a Hollywood studio! That alone multiplied my problems because it restricted me from shooting any wide shots. I also hated much of the script, which was open-ended. Bob says the character was gray. He wasn’t—he was battleship gray. Dull. I wanted a poignant ending to the story, and Redford also wanted some reward for the audience who had to sit through a grim morality tale. First I thought of getting out of there. [There were] just too many problems. All this would take so much time to fix, but Fox gave me ten days.” Rosenberg’s biggest headache was what he called “despair” among the cast. “I had to take each of them aside in my hotel suite and sit them down to shore up their confidence. Then I was landed with the problem of Bob’s contract, which had the notorious ‘star clause.’ The schedule had to be twelve weeks. If I went a day past that, the penalties were so huge as to make the movie commercially impossible. I thought about it. Then I decided I liked what this movie was trying to say. So we started … running like sprinters.”

Rosenberg had known about the Murton book for ten years. “But I always doubted that it would see the light of day as a movie, since it