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the stump. “He was the lifeblood of my campaign,” says Wilson. “Hatch had the fiscal advantage, raising $4 million, against my $1 million. But most of what I raised was thanks to Bob. He drove it, and he didn’t do it from behind a desk. He did it just like those scenes in The Candidate, joining me at street-corner rallies in places like Ogden and Provo. He was tireless.” When they traveled together, says Wilson, all they did was scheme. “His objective was symbiosis,” says Wilson. “Central to my politics was environmental review and new control mechanisms for the energy industry. Bob saw my election essentially as a tool for his own aims.” Though Wilson failed in his bid, he saw Redford’s objective harden: “He told me, ‘At some point soon there will be a conservation crisis. As a nation we’ll be forced to face the consequences of bad energy policies. We need a better information system to get ready for that day.’ There’s no two ways about it: he was visionary regarding energy and environment.”

The previous spring, the National Committee for Air Quality had filed a shocking impact report that triggered marathon congressional debates about the enforcement of environmental laws. Then the NRDC launched the first coordinated scheme of legal actions against industrial polluters under its own Citizen National Enforcement Program. Redford joined the battle, seeking meetings with energy companies, landowners and local authorities all across the Southwest.

By 1982 America was deep in recession, with unemployment above 10 percent and interest rates sky-high. Beer observed Redford extend himself even at this time of economic downturn, digging deep into his own pockets, working with Indiana congressman Phil Sharp, another environmentalist, and drifting away from the world of movies and art. In his only major magazine interview of the era, Redford told journalist George Haddad-Garcia that he might direct another film, might star in two more.

But in truth the grip of the movies was unshakable. It was a calling to do with storytelling and polemic, with making people ruminate and infer and choose. It pressed upon him all the time, in his long insomniac nights of obsessive reading and now in the Sundance Institute, with the student labs bustling with activity at the end of his garden. After months of finance meetings and political rallies he found himself, once again, lured back to a movie. The previous year Barry Levinson, director of the recent Diner, had come to assist at the June lab and asked Redford, in return, to consider a role in his follow-up project. Sharing a flight to Los Angeles after a second lab session, Redford suggested Levinson forget the work he was developing and look instead at a script by Roger Towne, based on Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, The Natural.

Redford had never forgotten the joy Tiger and Charlie found in baseball when he was a small child, or his own teenage fascination with Ted Williams, the left-handed (like himself) Boston Red Sox great. “I loved his individualism,” says Redford. “He had no time for the media. His business was hitting, period. When I watched Ted, I saw a man with a mission.” Redford’s occasional fantasy of portraying Williams in a movie came alive when he read Towne’s adaptation. Over the years he had poo-pooed the baseball movies he’d seen. None, not Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees nor James Stewart in The Stratton Story, touched him at all. “Because I was a baseball player, I saw all the flaws, none worse than Tony Perkins in Alan [Pakula] and Bob’s [Mulligan] Fear Strikes Out, which was a poor depiction of the Red Sox’s Jimmy Piersall.” Apart from technical inaccuracies, no baseball movie had ever reflected the grandeur of the game for him. The Towne script, however, was onto something new.

Redford believed Malamud’s source novel had a Swiftian dimension. It told the story of Roy Hobbs, a gifted midwestern kid who heads off to Chicago to try out for the Cubs, armed with Wonderboy, the bat he carved from a tree felled by lightning. En route he is seduced by