Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [209]
“The absence of a studio deal didn’t slow us down,” Friedenberg says. “There was not much tension at all.” According to Friedenberg, the one errant aspect was Pitt’s and Sheffer’s tendency to drop in anachronistic improvisations and challenge Redford’s subtleties.
Central to the book was its fishing location, the 130-mile-long Blackfoot River, which wound from the Lewis and Clark Mountains to its intersection with the Clark Fork River near Missoula. For hundreds of years the Blackfoot Indians called the waterway the River on the Road to the Buffalo, and Maclean, as a child, revered it. But Markey found it unusable. “The headwaters were orange and toxic because an old mine, the Mike Horse, had caved into it fifteen years ago. All the residue zinc, lead and cadmium poured down, year after year. It was ruined, and the fish Maclean hunted, the cutthroat, rainbow, bull and brown trout, were mostly gone. Bob was sickened by it.” Markey moved the fly-fishing scenes to the Gallatin and Yellowstone rivers. Redford was immediately receptive to the local chapter of Trout Unlimited, which sought assistance for an awareness campaign about local pollution. “Bob sidetracked once again,” says Markey. “It was, ‘How the hell do we celebrate the sanctity of heritage in this film when the Blackfoot is a cesspool?’ It came right into the middle of his agenda, and he offered to join fund-raisers for National Fish and Wildlife and the American Rivers association, which had the Blackfoot registered as one of the ten most endangered waterways. It wasn’t nostalgia. He worried all the time about what he called ‘capturing the past.’ The loss of the Blackfoot proved his point, and he worried that the movie would not articulate itself properly, that it would not be enough, ecologically speaking.”
In the early screenplays, a voice-over narration by Norman, introducing and interspersed throughout the story, was included. But as the editing began, the voice-over caused problems, exacerbated by Redford’s temporary distraction. Strained finances dictated that he interrupt production to accept a big-budget movie, Sneakers, that Ovitz had put together. In consequence, he was in San Francisco working on the thriller when he should have been on River. Editors often cut from the director’s notes, but here the process failed. The first editor was fired, having cut the movie, says Friedenberg, “in far too modern a way.” Another editor, Bob Estrin, had been summoned to recut at the Lantana facilities in Santa Monica. “I almost lost the movie,” says Redford, “and that’s the price for not paying attention. When I saw the assembly footage, I was horrified. We had drifted too far away from what Maclean wanted. Richard had written an invented opening speech that just felt wrong. I wanted Norman’s words, because that was where the magic was. We scrapped the narration we’d started with and began a brand-new edit.” Also abandoned was Elmer Bernstein’s entire sound track, which Redford felt too “standard.” Instead, Mark Isham was recruited to create something nostalgic and evocative.
For the new voice-overs, Redford asked Wallace Stegner, among others, to try reading the substitute lyrical narration, which was mostly Maclean’s. “I came close with Wally, but he read flat,” says Redford. In the end he opted to voice it himself, “because it felt comfortable. I knew how Norman sounded, I knew his way, I became Norman. So I introduced the story, and filled the gaps, keeping the reflective tone. Norman had died in 1990, but