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against a comfortable ride on Out of Africa. There was disorder in Redford’s career. Directing Ordinary People seemed to confuse his attitude toward himself as an actor. During 1981, he had been offered a role in The Verdict, a courtroom drama written by David Mamet that Sidney Lumet was to direct. Lumet, who had employed Redford long ago in The Iceman Cometh, was appalled by the actor’s requests for six rewrites. The part required Redford to play a drunken lawyer hustling his way from one low-life client to the next, until he finally finds a case that offers salvation. Redford’s aim with the rewrites, said Lumet, was to “eliminate the unpleasant side of the character, trying to make him more lovable so the audience would ‘identify’ with him.” This, said Lumet, was “a misdirected cliché of movie-writing.” After a year of procrastination, Richard Zanuck and Fox gave the role to Newman, who won an Academy Award nomination for it. “I don’t concede it was about striving for the cliché,” says Redford. “I just found the character unrelatable to me at that time.” Before Out of Africa emerged, there were prospective projects with political satirist Garry Trudeau and with Tom McGuane, projects based on the Leonard Peltier case and the story of Irish nationalist hero Michael Collins—but few moved to the polished-script phase, let alone production planning. Only one, John Nichols’s magic realist novel The Milagro Beanfield War, truly roused him, but he thought this could be a future directing project, and, anyway, the rights belonged to someone else.

Sensing career momentum slipping away and Wildwood teetering on the edge of extinction, Redford changed agents, signing with Mike Ovitz, who was in the process of setting up Creative Artists Agency, based on the Lew Wasserman–MCA model. Redford was wary of Ovitz, a failed law student who had started in the mailroom at William Morris, but he was respectful of Ovitz’s chutzpah. In less than ten years Ovitz had established a client list of 675 leading players, covering all aspects of entertainment. He also admired Ovitz’s CAA game plan, which was to sweeten the Wasserman technique by prepackaging movies in their entirety—concept, script, actors, all key creative personnel—and selling them to the studios. When they talked, Ovitz laid out his vision. He would not only remold Redford’s acting career, but reboot Wildwood. Out of Africa became his first contractual coup.

Ovitz negotiated for Redford a fee of $6.5 million plus 10 percent of the gross, the actor’s best terms since A Bridge Too Far. Some opined that Pollack was jealous that his own deal lagged far behind, but nothing was discussed between the men, who embarked on the project, says Redford, as equals.

The history of the project was convoluted. Blixen, who wrote novels under the name of Isak Dinesen, led the life of a coffee planter in colonial Africa. Orson Welles, David Lean and Nic Roeg had variously tried to mount a film about her life and romances, and a script, partly based on the memoir Out of Africa, had been in circulation since 1975. But it was Judith Thurman’s 1982 biography, which uncovered Blixen’s unhappy marriage and her strange love affair with Denys Finch Hatton, that mobilized the studios. Universal acquired the rights and, having sounded out Redford as a possible director, contracted Pollack. Pollack read Thurman’s biography and loved it: “I thought it was feminist and unusual. I also saw the pictures unfolding in my mind of a landscape no one knew. I’d never visited Kenya, where the story was set. I knew David Lean’s Africa, but this was completely different and therein was the excitement.” Pollack made a handshake arrangement with Redford to star as Finch Hatton and commissioned a screenplay from Kurt Luedtke, the Brown-educated former editor of the Detroit Free Press, who had recently written Absence of Malice for him.

After the comedy of Tootsie Pollack was looking for something cerebral. “Apart from the obvious incongruity of the Jewish guy from South Bend, Indiana, tackling the life story of a Danish baroness