Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [187]
Despite Redford’s obvious marquee value, Reitman worried about his appropriateness for the role of Logan. As soon as they started, though, he says, he was won over. “I had very little sense of who Redford is. He is known as a fine, upstanding man who has a strong social conscience, which was great for the part of an assistant district attorney. But I was wondering where the comedy would come from. In time, he started telling me stories about himself, about his sense of humor, about his now-and-then bemusement, about his clumsiness.” The redrafted version of Logan was a divorced man with a teenage daughter who skips lightly through life’s trials. In Reitman’s eyes, he would be “a kind of Spencer Tracy sparking off Debra’s tough, sassy Kate Hepburn.” Redford embraced this with open arms “because it gave me something concrete to hook up to, something to shape these very unreal lives.”
But it was plot, not character, that drove Legal Eagles, and no amount of redrafting could salvage it. When the sexy client, played by Hannah, comes to Logan’s apartment in the middle of the night and gives a silly performance-art recital to a cacophony of cracking fire, bells and whistles, then asks him rather aimlessly how he feels, Logan responds, “Uncomfortable.” That, says Redford, encapsulates his escalating emotion during what he increasingly saw as a no-hope production.
Legal Eagles offended Debra Winger, a CAA client like Redford, because she felt Ovitz’s “packaging” mania removed all integrity and opportunity. After filming, Winger split with CAA, vowing never to work with Ovitz again. The movie opened with the usual summer vacation razzle-dazzle in June 1986, was slaughtered by critics, made its money back and faded away.
19
One America?
In the disarray of failures—of marriage, friendships and films—one constant remained for Redford: Sundance. Here the ground stayed beneath his feet and the frontier air unfailingly reminded him that all was still possible, that endurance was what mattered most.
When he was away making movies, he was dependent on his sidemen at Sundance. Sterling Van Wagenen proved the most reliably staunch, and his job was to manage an entity in constant flux. There seemed no end to the inflow of youthful talent, and Sundance grew, aided by benefactors like Irene Diamond, whose foundation injected an annual $150,000 for the first couple of years. When Sundance began, Redford’s alleged vision was simply for an arts retreat in the mountains where novice filmmakers could be tutored toward making new movies. By the mid-eighties, Sundance had expanded beyond the two-week June lab to encompass a producers’ program, a screenwriters’ lab, and a dance and theater workshop styled by Merce Cunningham, Michael Kidd and Twyla Tharp. Van Wagenen helped mold these labs but maintained a close focus on the showcasing of films in the shape of the U.S. Film and Video Festival, which had shifted from Salt Lake City to Park City in 1981, then surrendered its operation entirely to Sundance management in 1985. Both Redford and Van Wagenen recognized in the film festival the shopwindow to the world that might elevate the canyon-based arts experiment to something of wider significance. Both collaborated on refining it, and Redford came up with the notion of moving it from September to January ski season, the more to signify its uniqueness.
Redford’s declared aim with Sundance was independence for the artist and the avoidance of commercialism. And yet there were painful, obvious paradoxes at play. Sundance, the mother ship resort, was a commercial entity on whose survival the institute depended. Also, the survival and viability of the experimenting artists depended on finding recognition beyond the idyllic glades of the canyon. Wasn’t