Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [210]
For Sheila Andrews, Redford’s friend from high school, this new movie was nothing less than encyclopedic. “I felt A River Runs Through It was his meditation on American values beyond Jeremiah Johnson or All the President’s Men or anything else,” she said. One early line of Norman’s narration—“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us”—explained a great deal for Alan Pakula. “I read an article that said that what he and Sydney had in common was that both liked to make the kind of movies they’d enjoyed watching as they grew up. But River was unlike anything Bob saw, or anything Sydney could have made. Brad [Pitt] speculated that Bob was trying to outdo what Sydney had done with Out of Africa, that it was arty competition. But of course it wasn’t. There had been plenty of romantic biopics like Out of Africa before. There had never been a movie like River. It wasn’t autobiography, but it was a unique meditation about heartland Americanism that grew from his and Maclean’s experiences. It was also an amazingly delicate construct that deserved the award nominations, and then some. It ticked all the boxes of all-time classic.”
Within twenty-four hours of the completion of editing of A River Runs Through It, Jake Eberts had sealed a distribution deal with Columbia. Thereafter, the movie’s marketing was cofunded by his own company, Allied Filmmakers, an affiliate of Pathe that had started five years before with Sean Connery’s The Name of the Rose. “The point is, we remained independent,” says Eberts. “My objective had been to preserve Bob’s vision, as Bob’s was to preserve Norman’s. It was undiluted, which is all he wanted.”
Ovitz had made a good deal for Redford on Sneakers: $8 million against 10 percent of the gross, which was $2 million more than current hotshot Sylvester Stallone was earning. All the usual perks and sidebars were in the contract, including the critically important casting approvals. But Redford was still unhappy. He confided his unease to one of CAA’s rising stars, Bryan Lourd. “He talked to me confidentially,” says Lourd. “He didn’t want to go the direction Mike was pushing him. He said he wanted significant movies, not significant checks, as a priority. There were changes in the zeitgeist and he acknowledged that and was ready to play to that, which all intelligent performers must do, but he also wanted to keep his attention on the long term. He wanted a substantial body of work to look back on.”
Making Sneakers for ten weeks on the Universal back lot, in Simi Valley and around San Francisco was no great strain. River had brightened him greatly. Things were going well with Kathy O’Rear. Bernie Pollack considered him “unusually cheerful.” Redford also found himself comfortable with the director, Phil Alden Robinson. There was also the element of fun. The tricky conspiracy plot helped educate Redford about the computer age. And though much play was made in the press of the fact that the story line was skewed toward the new, youthful pinup River Phoenix, Redford ignored the barbs. “You have to keep reminding yourself you are not working for the critics.”
Forty-two-year-old Robinson, whose modest baseball movie Field of Dreams had done so well, shared the kind of devotion to script that endeared him to his lead actor. The cover of the script given to Redford read, “Based on 27 man-years of drafts by Phil Alden Robinson, Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker.” It was Parkes and Lasker who’d pitched to Universal the notion of “a high-tech Dirty Dozen” as a follow-up to their 1983 computer-age War Games; but it was Robinson who, he says, “went on to write the forty million plot variations.” Robinson first saw himself as the screenwriter of the project only and refused Parkes’s initial entreaties to direct Sneakers, despite the career boost of Field of Dreams. According to Parkes, “we finagled Phil, and as soon as we had him, it seemed, we got Redford. Then Redford was the