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By Root 724 0

was in an unassailable position, having raked in fortunes with successive megahits over fifteen years and won three Oscars. His latest nostalgic notion was to remake the 1943 Spencer Tracy movie A Guy Named Joe, a love story set among firefighters in national parks. Spielberg and Redford met at Spielberg’s home, which was filled with amusement park items like gumball machines and arcade games, and watched the Victor Fleming–directed film in the den. But Redford was uncomfortable and found “no reason to remake a movie that was pretty average to begin with.” (The movie was finally made by Spielberg, retitled Always, and starring Richard Dreyfuss.) An alternative was offered by Disney. Frank Wells, now Disney’s president and chief operating officer under chairman Michael Eisner, liked and trusted Redford and let it be known he wanted him under contract. Maybe Wildwood could nominate some mutually interesting projects that would unite Redford and Disney?

Redford’s hesitation reflected his recognition of the importance of choosing the right project after such a lengthy fallow period, but also his awareness of the changes in cinema. Soderbergh’s breakthrough seemed a signal moment not just for Sundance, but for moviemaking in general. By the end of the eighties, the status quo as it existed in the twenties still prevailed. The industry still functioned as an elite club, whose membership was never more than twenty-five thousand. The eight major studios (Columbia, Disney, MGM/UA, Orion, Paramount, Twentieth Century– Fox, Universal and Warners) still monopolized distribution and the box office, their takings amounting to 80 percent of all movie earnings. Their required packaging and slick marketing-cum-distribution had become far more expensive. Gary Lucchesi, the new president of Paramount, defined the working model: for the average movie, $3 to $7 million was spent on the star name, about $2 million on the director and $1 on the script. Then untold millions were invested in marketing. When the humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount for the theft of an idea that became Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America, Paramount argued that the movie, even though it had earned $350 million, had yet to show a profit. Such profligate extravagance was bound to run aground, and it did when reform-minded David Puttnam became Columbia’s chairman and refused to support the overweight Warren Beatty movie Ishtar. Puttnam further offended Ovitz by stating emphatically that his studio would no longer have anything to do with star packages. By the dawn of the new decade, Ovitz’s brief shining moment was past and studios were in the process of redefining themselves. Disney, under Wells and Eisner—who imported Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount to manage the movie and TV divisions—was now, unthinkably, earning its way with a fair smattering of R-rated movies, such as Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills. “It was a different playing field then,” says Redford. “Home video loosened it up, and investigative journalism shook out the fat cats, as when Begelman was busted for fiddling his clients’ checks. What we had in the early nineties was a jerky period of culture growth that meant more was possible in the mainstream than had been for years.”

Briefly Redford contemplated Manny Azenberg’s offer of a return to Broadway in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which, wrote Azenberg, “[Mike] Nichols believes you should do, and has agreed to direct for virtually nothing.” When Redford finally refused, Azenberg came up with the idea of Redford and Pollack in The Odd Couple. “I don’t recall that as anything other than a joke,” says Redford.

Redford found himself having supper again with Pollack and discussing a new project, the Universal-funded Havana, to be set in Batista-era Cuba. Jamie, who, among the family, was closest to the Pollacks, was stunned by what he called “the volte-face,” believing the friendship had “irrevocably ended with the breach of trust during Out of Africa.” Alan Pakula saw things differently: “No one ‘read’ Bob like Sydney. The eighties had not