Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [203]
When Havana opened around Christmas 1990, even the well-disposed critics pasted it. Peter Travers in Rolling Stone reported no chemistry at all between Redford and Olin. “Not a glimmer.… Nothing. Nada. And without it, you don’t have a love story. Some fundamental things still do apply as time goes by.” Peter Rainer in the Los Angeles Times wrote, “However much we might want to re-experience Casablanca, we can’t go home again using the same old road map.” Citing The Way We Were as Redford’s “most impassioned work,” Rainer concluded that the actor was now “armored in impassivity.” The movie, which cost $40 million, earned $9 million, making it by far the biggest failure of all the Redford-Pollack collaborations.
Toward the end of Havana, Redford was increasingly concerned about Jamie’s worsening health, especially because he was so far away. This worry, added to the tensions with Pollack, made him uneasy. “Bob really needed comforting,” says Bernie Pollack, and he found it from Bernie’s new costume assistant, Kathy O’Rear, a thirty-five-year-old Californian of Irish descent. Bernie had known Kathy since the mid-seventies, when she’d worked as a tour guide on the Warners lot. Bernie gave her a break into costuming on Police Academy 2 and also assigned her as costume assistant on The Milagro Beanfield War, where, he says, she showed no interest at all in Bob. “But she had an attribute that Bob finds sexiest of all in women: wit. She was the kindest person, but also one of the most witty.” Between takes and through the wardrobe sessions, the co-workers became intimate friends. “And so something important ended on Havana, and something began,” says Pollack.
Sonia Braga visited twice during the filming of Havana, but Kathy O’Rear would shortly replace her as Redford’s full-time live-in partner.
Things were changing at Sundance, too. In 1989, Fox’s Suzanne Weil replaced Tom Wilhite as director of programs. Joyce Deep, once a senior adviser to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, became Redford’s new spokesperson and all-purpose troubleshooter. He first employed Deep to tackle a delicate labor crisis on the Arizona desert set of the Wildwood-produced The Dark Wind. The Tony Hillerman novels had been introduced to Redford by the Canadian-born former Goldcrest producer Jake Eberts. Redford had taken Eberts’s advice that a James Bond–type franchise was possible, optioned all the books for Wildwood and, with Eberts, made a funding deal with Columbia. The deal also involved complex product placement sponsorship for shortfall funding, where individual commodities are promoted by being featured in the movies. It was hardly worth the bother. Errol Morris, maker of the award-winning indie The Thin Blue Line, was assigned to direct the first movie, and Lou Diamond Phillips was cast as Officer Jim Chee. The decision to shoot entirely within the Navajo and Hopi reservations of Arizona for authenticity immediately mired the production. There were accusations of cynical cost cutting by engaging lowest-salaried extras and exploiting Native American resources without payment. Redford was forced to interrupt work on Havana to intervene. “But his real mistake,” says Wildwood producer Patrick Markey, a friend of Redford’s since Brubaker, “was that he didn’t insist on actually directing the movie himself. Bob had the Indian sensibilities; Errol did not. I tried to fire Errol in the first week, because his attitude to the Native Americans was all wrong. We got sunk, financially, morally, in every way, because of Errol’s patronizing attitude. We called in Bob because we had to rebuild faith quickly before we lost the extras, the backgrounds, everything.”
Joyce Deep was summoned to stem the rebellion. Her reward was an invitation to join what Redford now decided was Sundance’s “second team,” whose environmental crusade, locally and