Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [206]
Redford kept up a constant correspondence with Maclean and visited Chicago repeatedly. “I was fatalistic. Norman was idiosyncratic. If his views and my views corresponded, then it would work. I confronted him like that. I said, ‘I will tell you what I’d like to do, and you tell me straight if you like my thinking or not. When it comes down to it, I’ll give you the draft script. If you dislike whatever it is I want to shoot, you be the decider: you pull the plug. If you say stop, I’ll stop.’ ”
Ovitz could find no studio backing for the project. Wildwood persisted, with Redford funding development from his own pocket. Redford had chosen as the screenwriter the relatively inexperienced Richard Friedenberg, who had written a moving script for a James Garner television movie called Promise that Redford liked. When Redford had first sent Friedenberg a copy of Maclean’s book, the screenwriter’s response was negative: “The piece was just 104 pages long, and there was no story,” says Friedenberg. “It was lyrical, with a clunky 55-page section about fly-fishing in the middle. I told Redford, ‘Jews don’t fly-fish.’ ”
A rapid correspondence began between Friedenberg and Redford. But Friedenberg refused to sign a contract. “Because I had been in situations where promises were made, and then I, the writer, could not deliver. There were other issues. I understood this book had immense appeal for Bob, but he is primarily a visual person. His concepts seemed entirely visual. I worried about that. But then I accept, as the screenwriter, my responsibility is to find the story line. So that is how we progressed. The deal was, I would go off, meet Maclean, research and invent some film story line that reflected the book.”
Maclean was in his eighties and ailing. But Friedenberg’s friendship with Maclean’s daughter, Jean, established the bridge of understanding between author and adapter. “The old boy was in the last days of his life, so I’d ask the questions and Jean would communicate them and then write down Norman’s answers,” says Friedenberg. “What I got in Montana was the feel for the period. But talking with Jean in Chicago, I saw the dichotomies between the book and the reality. The thing was, Norman left out a lot. It was in those gaps I found the invisible story Bob wanted.”
A River Runs Through It is a short generational history of the Macleans leading to the rite-of-passage boyhood story of Norman and his failed attempt to save his self-destructive brother, Paul. Friedenberg discovered that Maclean’s sweetheart, later wife, Jessie, a central character in the story, was not the uptight Scot that Maclean described; in Friedenberg’s definition, she was “a flapper, more like wild boy Paul than straight-and-narrow Norman.” This liberated Friedenberg’s fictionalizing of the Maclean family story and allowed him, after three years and numerous drafts, to write a filmable narrative. “The breakthrough came on the plane to Montana,” remembers Friedenberg, “after I’d learned all about Jessie from Jean. I saw that the problem of the novella was the balance between the competing brothers who reflect different values in a changing world. In the book, Norman is in his thirties, and he describes the tussles with his father and his brother, Paul. But because he is recounting events, he himself never matures as a character. It is all told from the thirty-year-old perspective. What I realized was, I had to find a Norman who grows. What I did was fix on the moment he returns from college, intending to join the Forestry Service, and discovers his younger brother has somehow assumed seniority as the star journalist and general high achiever in his absence. So the elder became the younger and the movie dynamic of raw competitiveness was set up.”
Friedenberg wrote a ten-page summary in longhand and mailed it to Wildwood. Redford immediately had a personal connection with Friedenberg’s blueprint: here was an essay about the interconnectedness