Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [186]
As Redford strove to project apt Englishness of manner opposite Streep’s sharply Danish Blixen, Pollack pushed him to “reduce, reduce, reduce.” Redford interpreted this as Pollack falling back on the easy option, substituting Redford the romantic icon for a properly realized characterization. In his view, Streep was “encouraged to fly,” while he was restrained: “I felt I was a symbol, not a character.” By the time the filming ended, Redford and Pollack were hardly talking.
In truth, Redford’s iconography was the director’s best asset. In what would end up to be a long, digressive two-and-a-half-hour movie, it is Redford’s quixotic Finch Hatton—not Streep’s virtuosity—that dominates. Once Finch Hatton begins courting Blixen, insistently inviting her to join him as he scouts for a camp base in the Mara for his soon-to-be safari tourists, a dull drama becomes engaging.
The southwestern premiere benefit for the Sundance Institute was staged at Redford’s behest in Provo a week before Christmas 1985. Already there was talk of awards. The box office boomed, grossing $250 million—surpassing Redford’s best earner to date, The Sting—and, duly, the Academy Award nominations came in copious measure, equaling those for Steven Spielberg’s contender, The Color Purple. Pollack went on to win best director, and the movie won best film and five other awards.
The movie’s one casualty was Redford. Not only was he overlooked on the awards circuit, but the critics were unkind. Pauline Kael once again singled him out: “He seems adrift, lost in another movie, and Pollack treats him with unseemly reverence.” David Denby was harsh, too: “He is so far out of his league that at first one feels sorry for him. But only at first. Whether he can’t do it, or won’t do it, we’re disgusted with him by the end.” Vincent Canby in The New York Times understood the heart of the problem: “It’s not Mr. Redford’s fault. There is no role for him to act.”
Mike Ovitz felt he had a radical recipe for recovery. The package Ovitz put together with his clients, director Ivan Reitman and Top Gun writers Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr., was a fluffy thriller called Legal Eagles, which he urgently pressed on Redford. Alan Pakula, when he heard it, cringed: “It was light entertainment. I think Mike believed Bob should get back to Barefoot in the Park, which, given how Bob had strived to evolve, was ridiculous.” Reitman, a Czech-born Canadian and an alumnus of the Saturday Night Live comedy coterie, had produced the crossover comedy Animal House in 1978. His directorial successes with Meatballs and Stripes should have served fair warning: they defined the coarse comedy Redford hated. “When I thought movie comedy, I thought Capra, Wilder, Cary Grant, Tracy and Hepburn,” says Redford. “And when I wanted alternative comedy, I went for George Carlin. But I hated where ‘hip’ comedy went in the seventies. It was a terrible cycle. When I took on Legal Eagles, I didn’t look into the people or the style closely enough. I just felt I should be open to Mike’s advice.”
Reitman’s original choices for his Legal Eagles leads were Bill Murray, whom he’d discovered for SNL, and Dustin Hoffman. But their unavailability, said Ovitz, was Redford’s opportunity. This was also Ovitz’s golden moment. “Mike needed name players and neon lights to lift his own career and I walked into it. And it kind of made sense at the time. Reitman had just had a major success with Ghostbusters, so he was hot. And … it had to be something I could chill out with.”
The script had started life as a documentary project about the battle over the estate of the artist Mark Rothko. What it had become was jokey fiction about rising district attorney Tom Logan’s romantic attachment to a defense lawyer whose sexy client is accused of stealing a famous work of art by her father. The best part of the project for Redford was the financial deal Ovitz made: $8 million up front—most of which, one way or the other, went