Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [198]
The Soderbergh film brought the desired press attention, but also scrutiny. Redford was forced to face up to accusations of poor managerial skills. According to anonymous sources interviewed for a Premiere magazine story, indecision was Redford’s main failing. The replacement of program director Susan Lacey by Tom Wilhite, formerly of Disney, led to division within the boardroom. One staffer recalled, “Wilhite was Bob’s man, and those of us who were at the coal face for years felt neglected. We were just overlooked about his appointment, or the initiatives. Sundance was supposed to be about democracy and cooperative art, but that’s not how it looked to us.” To add insult to injury, Redford then interfered with Wilhite’s new initiatives and awarded money to established writers who’d decided to change careers, moving, say, from television to film writing, without consulting anyone. “People started to wonder was Redford in control at all,” said the staffer. Cinda Holt, a senior administrator, felt Redford’s personal control was positive and vital but, at the same time, his distractions with projects like Milagro and the unending political activism weighed against a stable future.
The distractions would only continue, despite Redford’s best intentions. The pattern was already established by now. Activism and film had to be parts of his life. Even as Holt and others were raising their concerns, he was producing a documentary about Yosemite with Van Wagenen and director-photographer Jon Else and, at last, a version of the Leonard Peltier story, called Incident at Oglala, with Michael Apted directing. Hume Cronyn spoke with the nascent mutineers but was unsympathetic. “I didn’t agree with all his choices, but the way I saw it, Bob was assembling a delicate picture puzzle at Sundance. That required momentum and great dexterity. Remember, there was no independent cinema movement then. There was just the Hollywood way, then some crazy guys making little movies out in the boondocks. Bob was pioneering, he was laying the ground for a whole new cultural movement, and there was no map for that. He just played it day by day, doing the best he could.” Cronyn especially admired the efforts of Redford, Gilmore and lab director Michelle Satter to extend the awareness of alternative moviemaking to the Latin and Far Eastern markets, persuading Gabriel García Márquez to convene a special lab for South American filmmakers and organizing a mini Sundance Film Festival in Tokyo. “But it was exhausting work for such a small-scale setup. I remember meeting Bob out jogging one morning, and he looked like an old man, so drained. I said all the platitudes and I invited him down to my home in the Bahamas, because I knew he needed time out, but he was just too busy.”
Among the distractions was the decline in Jamie’s health. Though Jamie had effectively diagnosed himself, the years of inaccurate treatment for his ulcerative colitis—where the body attacks the lining of the large intestine—had created other problems. His first major health collapse had occurred in 1981, shortly after Ordinary People. His body went into spasms and he suffered crippling arthritic-like pain that had him bedridden for days. But this wasn’t an aggressive colitis attack, as diagnosed, and it would take many more years before the true extent of his illness became known. By the late eighties Jamie had abandoned hopes of a career in rock music because of his constant collapses. He had decided to return to his studies and move with his CU girlfriend, Kyle Smith, to Chicago, where he would study at Northwestern University Graduate School. “While I was transferring from