Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [188]
“It was an issue of linearity,” says Van Wagenen. “We were coaching independent-thinking young filmmakers to make films, and at the same time we had a presentation forum up the road at Park City. There was no contradiction, in my mind, for anyone in the Sundance fraternity to get involved in actually making films.” Redford’s absence while preparing for Out of Africa and Van Wagenen’s impatience would cause the first serious philosophical rift to unhinge Sundance, the effects of which are still felt today.
Under pressure from Van Wagenen, Redford agreed to commit to Desert Bloom, a first feature by a newcomer, Eugene Corr, honed in script at the labs, then coproduced by Sundance with funding from Columbia and launched at the festival. Redford knew nothing about Corr, other than that he had directed some long-forgotten PBS drama. Desert Bloom was an extremely ambitious film in that it strung a woman’s emotional life story together from a series of vignettes, but it also reached beyond, searching for some parallel symbolism between the woman’s blooming in a coming-of-age fated romance and the blooming of mushroom clouds in the fifties at Las Vegas bomb test sites, the locale of the story.
All this new development came courtesy of the Production Fund, an executive innovation funded to the tune of $1 million by the NEA, about which Redford maintained the highest suspicions. “There was a philosophical tension,” admits Van Wagenen, “between the radicals and the conventionally minded. Bob was a rebel. But the NEA and the Ford Foundation wanted a conventional board, with logical strategies. Gary Beer, acting as business ‘brain,’ felt the same. To us, the Sundance Production Fund made perfect sense. But Bob was ambivalent, so from my perspective he was green-lighting things and at the same time undermining them with equivocality.”
Redford thought Corr’s movie was awful. “Corr had talent,” he says. “He wrote a very nice script, but he had no experience to make a full-blown feature. After the first two days he handed the movie over to his assistant director. He couldn’t watch the dailies.” Redford prepared himself for confrontation with Van Wagenen and Beer. “I felt we were overextending at a cost to the filmmakers, and ourselves,” he says. “The central principle of Sundance was to give the aspirant filmmakers room to explore and develop their ideas. It was not supposed to be about generating box office. I called up Sterling and told him, ‘I have concerns. The institute is a lab, not a preproduction office.’ But he was thinking differently.”
Van Wagenen was also shepherding a second feature for Sundance, The Trip to Bountiful, which was to be directed by Pete Masterson. This was an immaculate Horton Foote script about an elderly woman’s determined scheme to escape senile immobility and return to the homeland of her youthful bliss in Bountiful, Texas. It moved forward nimbly with Van Wagenen producing. Both movies would premiere at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival. They faced polar fates. Desert Bloom was recut and lambasted. Bountiful went on to win a best actress Academy Award for its star, Geraldine Page. That, however, did not please Redford. Resurfacing after Legal Eagles, he found a Sundance that felt disembodied and dangerously off-kilter. Recently, the programs had been run by Susan Lacey, of whom he was wary and who supported Van Wagenen’s view of Sundance as a production entity. In one Sundance staffer’s view, “Bob came back from Africa to discover that Sundance under Sterling, Lacey and Beer was a different business altogether. The accent was not on the students and the debates in the meadows. The accent was on Hollywood production, and the speed with which Lacey and Van Wagenen