• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 769 0

himself to New Mexico “because [it] seemed to resemble a colonial country where political struggle could be as clearly focused as it was in four-fifths of the rest of the world.” The five hundred pages of The Milagro Beanfield War, written over the winter of 1972, was a manifesto that said institutional power begets misery. Over the next five years, a number of players, including CBS, Tony Bill, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, were attached, but the movie failed to take off. The trip wire, says Redford, was its panoramic scope, since the novel had two hundred characters. “But Mocte and I saw it more simply. It could never have been the huge production with the multicharacter viewpoints that John tried. It had to be a reduced ensemble piece cast with Hispanics. Mocte was wary about giving it to me, but when I showed him Ordinary People, he said, ‘Fine, it’s yours.’ ”

Esparza started the auditions, interviewing two thousand Hispanic actors and videotaping the best one hundred. Nichols’s seventh draft of the script, reworked from the single viewpoint of the central character, the impoverished, agitating farmer Joe Mondragon, still did not please Redford. To hone it, he called David Ward, The Sting’s writer, whose career had progressed into directing and producing. Ward fashioned a Capraesque story of the homespun hero who takes on the fat cats; Mr. Smith here became a Chicano. “But there was also,” says Ward, “the magical realism of the angel Coyote counseling Amarante, the village elder. Amarante says, ‘People have forgotten how to speak to angels,’ and that summed up the second strand, that greater forces were at work here than small farmers, big developers, lawyers and sheriffs. That’s what I took hold of: the double strand. And that’s how, finally, the Milagro movie began to work.” Ten years down the line Ward found Redford more committed than ever. “I was intrigued to see how he had changed, because ten years at the top is ten years in a madhouse. But he was the same, even more so. He was the perfectionist. Social life, family life, everything came second. He was there 200 percent.”

Just before his final business separation from Redford, Gary Hendler negotiated a last great deal with Universal for The Milagro Beanfield War, delivering a $10 million budget, which was negotiable upward should Redford agree to star in the movie. Redford demurred, insisting that nothing should detract from Hispanic heroes and the integrity of a provincial fable. To appease the studio, he offered compensatory bankable costars in the non-Hispanic roles. But his first choice, Melanie Griffith, whom he thought ideal for Flossie Devine, the seductress wife of Mondragon’s land developer bête noire, refused even to audition. “I made an approach but lines got tangled and she probably thought, Who needs that arrogant bastard?” says Redford. Griffith, to her credit, rethought the invitation and agreed to meet at Wildwood’s new Rockefeller Center suite, not to audition, she says, but for a one-on-one get-together. Recovering from a bout of drug dependency, she was unsure of herself but, says Redford, disarmingly honest. “We clicked. She was kooky and wild but very full of originality.”

Original, too, was the idea to cast Christopher Walken as Kyril Montana, the agent assigned to end the bean field dispute. Redford’s thinking was that “this would be a great chance for him to play against type. Because, if you take away the zany haircuts and the weirdness he likes to portray, he’s quite WASPish. I wrote to him, explaining, and he responded. So we had casting that pleased Universal over one layer of the movie, and that gave us time to tackle the trickier Hispanic casting.”

As Esparza screened his audition tapes, Redford was aware of “subcultural aspects one needed to be careful of. The Hollywood style of generalized ethnicity often destroys movies, but compromises are essential. What I wanted to do was minimize compromise. The challenge was that the pool of talent is so small and diffuse.” Seventy-four-year-old Mexican Carlos Riquelme was cast as the