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pursuing benefactors, forging friendships with studios, and generally building up a machine that empowered independent filmmaking. Biskind may have forgotten that we were dealing here with something no one had ever attempted before.” One of Biskind’s sharpest swipes was at Redford, who, he claimed, maneuvered undeserved tax relief against resort expenses. Redford admits only to “some really dumb errors of judgment in the power I entrusted in people. There’s no question that there were mistakes, but they weren’t of the sinister caliber that was implied. They were mistakes of inexperience, maybe of overambition.” Still, the core indictment was a cruel one: that Redford couldn’t or wouldn’t run Sundance himself and, in the words of an anonymous staffer, “wouldn’t let anyone else run it either.” Redford doesn’t disagree: “Much was true, and it was painful for me as the years unfolded and the true nature of some of my senior management people emerged and the skeletons came out of the cupboards. Our problem was the relative size of Sundance. It was not a little arts colony by the Provo River. It was always meant to reach out, and by the nineties, with the festival booming, we had affiliates in Cuba, Russia and Japan. That’s a lot of people moving in a lot of directions at the same time, and that means it’s going to be hard to keep track. I made a mistake with Gary Beer because he worked for his own interests. He didn’t relate to the junior staffers, and I saw the rifts, but ignored them. I also made a mistake with Reg Gipson, whom I allowed too much latitude.”

As public scrutiny of Sundance went on, Redford redrew the lines. Among Wilhite’s innovations was the Great Movie Music symposium, a black-tie fund-raiser staged at Lincoln Center that mustered many of Hollywood’s scoring luminaries and their families and supporters. It raised $600,000, with Redford hosting. Redford canceled subsequent fund-raisers, proving to some that Biskind was right in his accusation of “schizophrenic leadership.” In Redford’s mind he was reestablishing the tactical position he had taken back in 1981, when the institute began. “I told Gary, ‘Do not use me as the flag carrier in this way. I will help. I will meet people and state our case. But I do not want to become the calling card. If the institute’s principles are good enough, it is destined to work. If not, so be it. So no more black-ties.’ ”

The consolation of moviemaking remained impervious. For several years Redford had been circling one project, an adaptation of Norman Maclean’s elegiac novella A River Runs Through It. Its resonance of times past, of the joy and dilemma of family and the mystery of origins, lured him first in 1981. Now it assumed an urgent relevance, and by a series of fortuitous events, the rights came his way.

Maclean, a University of Chicago professor, published the pithy, part-autobiographical book shortly after his retirement in the 1970s. In 1981, while visiting Tom McGuane in Montana, Redford found himself debating the authenticity of the concept of the western. “We were discussing the essence of the western experience—living it, as opposed to loving it,” says Redford. “We started talking about authors who caught the truth: A. B. Guthrie, Vardis Fisher, Wallace Stegner. Then Tom told me about this amazing little story by a retired professor. He said, ‘Trust me, read it, it’s the real thing.’ ” Redford says he was overcome by the last line in the book: “I am haunted by waters.” “I thought, Whoa, this cuts to the heart all right. This connects environment, family and the immutable nature of destiny. This is the western I want to see.”

In the mid-eighties, Redford invited the reclusive Maclean, who still lived in Chicago, to Sundance to discuss a possible adaptation, but before he could conclude a deal, the rights were snatched from him by Annick Smith, a lab student who’d established a homestead ranch in Montana’s Blackfoot River Valley, the locale of A River Runs Through It. Smith developed her adaptation at Sundance but failed to win studio backing. Others before