Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [174]
What was certain was that he had embarked on a new road, emerging from the straitjacket of superstardom with a grand new plan in mind.
PART FOUR
Canyon Keeper
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
18
Sundance
Several of the directors who worked with Redford recognized the barrier he had crossed with Ordinary People and speculated about his prospects. Most insightful was Michael Ritchie, who, despite his disappointment at being overlooked for All the President’s Men, continued to cheer his old friend as a film formalist in the European tradition, “more interested in signs and ideas within a movie than plots and actors.” The summary shone a light on Redford’s direction. In the resolution of therapy, Redford himself saw his career as parallel tracks, starting from the same point, but serving separate aims. The acting drew on primitive instinct, with the economy of verbalism and gesture that Robert Pirsig noted, and achieved a solid audience connection. The directing, half hewn in projects like Downhill Racer and now fully formed, reflected an urge to break new ground. He did not see himself as European influenced, nor did he favor heavy intellectualization of his work. He liked Truffaut’s work but was skeptical of Godard and much of the neorealist and New Wave work. All this made him a generalist; he didn’t like to label his endeavor. But it was clear that anarchic ambition was at work. Some aspect of contemporary cinema rankled, and he found himself straining for another approach, another perspective.
Out of such an instinct, in the heady months of the creation of Ordinary People, the transition from Sundance the resort to Sundance the arts laboratory was made. One minor incident, says Redford, set the wheels in motion. Attracted as he was to experimental work, he was interested in the student films shown at the low-key United States Film and Video Festival staged in Salt Lake City by the Utah Film Commission since 1976. Created by his brother-in-law Sterling Van Wagenen and commission chairman John Earle, the festival was supported by Warners’ vice president Mark Rosenberg, by director George Romero and by the actress Katharine Ross. In 1978, Redford accepted the invitation to become honorary chairman, seeing his function, as with similar posts, as that of being a media magnet. But sitting in a tiny theater off Temple Square watching a 16 mm road movie called The Whole Shootin’ Match by Texan Eagle Pennell, Redford had an epiphany. “I got to thinking, No one else is going to see this little gem. It seemed a crime to me. I imagined myself in Pennell’s shoes, the way I’d felt all those years ago in a freezing apartment in Florence. At the time Wildwood was dug into setting up Ordinary People, with all our resources and contacts working for us. I decided, There is an inequity. This guy needs some help.”
He invited Sterling Van Wagenen to Sundance to discuss a radical idea. Sterling recalls being surprised by the summons. He had had little contact with Redford beyond get-togethers at the Van Wagenen family home on Center Street during the sixties but had, he says, grown up idolizing his brother-in-law while remaining mostly distant from the film business. In his youth, says Van Wagenen, “film was for me War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still.” In the early seventies, Van Wagenen encountered two formative influences: critic George Steiner and the British theater director Jonathan Miller. At Brigham Young University, Van Wagenen read Steiner’s Language and Silence, which postulated the value of art in politics. Shortly after, in his early twenties, he fell into the job of assistant to Miller, who was directing