Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [189]
Yet another Sundance production was already in progress, this time Van Wagenen’s version of The Giant Joshua, a fictional story based on a dissertation about Mormon polygamy by Maurine Whipple originally published in 1941 and developed by John and Denise Earle. Van Wagenen’s initial idea was to produce the movie, with Redford directing. It was clear the dynamic had changed between Van Wagenen and Redford, though, at first, few words were spoken. “I was trying to build a new ethos in those June labs,” says Redford. “But we were in danger of becoming an assembly line.”
Briefly, Redford went along with the board, endorsing the founding of a new company poised between Wildwood and the Sundance Production Fund, called North Fork Productions, specifically designed to make small-budget movies with Garth Drabinsky, chairman of Cineplex Odeon, an exhibitor with fifteen hundred screens at his disposal. Van Wagenen then announced his plan to direct The Giant Joshua himself. The entire process slammed to a dead stop. Van Wagenen felt he had been hijacked. “Bob took the reins from me, without any apology. I was all set, and then suddenly I found myself doing other assigned work.”
There were certain things Redford could not compromise on. “He didn’t set up the institute to make money,” said Hume Cronyn. “I asked him one day, ‘How would you like people to remember Sundance in a hundred years?’ And he told me, ‘Like Walden Pond. A place where some kid, some student, came up with a great idea that changed some lives.’ ”
Redford used his boardroom-majority prerogative and canceled the Production Fund. Preserving Sundance, he decided, meant doing it his way.
Within Redford’s grasp was a project that corralled many of his interests. The Milagro Beanfield War was a magic realist novel, the first part of John Nichols’s New Mexico trilogy about Hispanic life, myth and history, that exemplified the sanctity of place and the importance of avoiding the machinations of big business. Redford had first encountered it in the seventies, at the time of its publication. Ever since, it had haunted him. Before Out of Africa, he had driven impulsively to Taos, where Nichols lived, and discovered that Mocte Esparza, one of the Sundance labs’ greatest supporters, owned the rights. Redford approached Esparza and they made a handshake deal to coproduce the film.
Redford admired all the distinctive oddities of Milagro (Spanish for “miracle”). Here was a David and Goliath story, where a humble farmer poaches a big developer’s lands to access life-sustaining water and, in doing so, stirs an entire community to resist the behemoths. Here, too, was a yarn of ecological wisdom that rang loudly for Redford in the din of Reagan’s trickle-down economics, which nudged free enterprise toward an unlegislated free-for-all. Here also was a story of cultural uniqueness, populated with poets and ghosts, all in service of the mythic themes of right and wrong. It seemed like a sparkling expression of Sundance-like ambition.
For Berkeley-born Nichols, the journey to Milagro began when he experienced “a conversion to humanist values” during a hiking trip in Guatemala in the sixties. The result was an evangelistic belief that national redemption lay in “securing the integrity of southwestern culture as a foundation for common ethics.” Out of this epiphany, the New Mexico trilogy and Milagro were born. Nichols and Redford had much in common, including being inspired by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where the trilogy was set. Redford felt “an anthropological contact” with them, and a feeling of rightness. “That landscape brought me back to the long, long ago and all those lost wisdoms. You cannot be there and not feel the need to reevaluate. Nichols felt it. I felt it.”
Nichols’s experience with film was a staggered one. In 1966, at the age of twenty-five, he published a college romance, The Sterile Cuckoo, which was made into a movie by Alan Pakula. By the late sixties, he says, he had run dry, his writing suffused with political rage. He exiled