Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [212]
Lourd now gave Redford an Amy Holden Jones script he had under development with new Paramount chairperson Sherry Lansing for his clients Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson. It was based on New York journalist Jack Engelhard’s hard-edged novel Indecent Proposal, with a flagrantly sexual theme. “It wasn’t drafted with Bob at all in mind,” says Lourd. “But he told me he was a risk taker, and I had an inkling this was just sufficiently outrageous for him.”
Redford recalls reading the script in one sitting and being alternately engaged, surprised and amused by it. The role proposed to him was of a middle-aged billionaire intent on buying sex with a married young woman on a weekend in Vegas. “My gut did the talking,” Redford says. “Finally, it was fun and it was now. I didn’t ask for anyone’s opinions. I called Lourd and said, ‘Yeah, it will work.’ ” Lourd, together with his agent partner David “Doc” O’Connor, takes credit for revitalizing Redford’s career in the nineties. “Unquestionably he needed to find the new-generation audience,” says Lourd. “He was the megastar of the seventies, but tempus fugit and all that. It is the eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds who pay for the tickets. Bob had to shake up that market, and I knew putting him with Woody, who was huge from the TV series Cheers, and Demi, who was very hot, would open up that new audience for him.”
Before the filming commenced, there was some irate discussion about the alterations to the source material. Engelhard, who viewed himself as a political conservative, felt his work was being distorted. He later deplored the choice of Redford: “The billionaire in my novel is not Robert Redford, but an Arab sheik. The husband is a Jewish speechwriter and the wife is a Grace Kelly type. So the novel, obviously, has many layers, political, religious, cultural, which Hollywood won’t touch.” English director Adrian Lyne reshaped the essence and under his supervision the Engelhard novel retained its Faustian theme but became less a study of cultural differences than of sexual role-play. Lyne, who began his career directing shorts in Britain fourteen years before, had stunningly captured the social fallout of sexual liberalism in Fatal Attraction, his fourth movie, which was nominated for six Academy Awards, earned $450 million and was labeled by Time “the zeitgeist hit of the decade.” One of his follow-ups, Jacob’s Ladder, about madness, comprehensively showed his grasp of deviant psychology. “The genius of Lyne was his timing,” says Lourd. “Fatal Attraction was the postfeminist, post–Fear of Flying kickback. Indecent Proposal cautioned against the sex-and-wealth ‘me me me’ nineties.” Redford’s enthusiasm was for “this nexus of energies, the morality tale, the timing, the subtexts.” Redford knew he was catching a wave. In 1992 Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct ingeniously blended Russ Meyer with Dynasty; Lyne’s Indecent Proposal had the same populist targeting, and was as illuminating of the insatiable urges of twenty-four-hour Las Vegas as Peyton Place once was of New England’s deceptive serenity.
In the movie, David (Harrelson) and Diana Murphy (Moore), lovers since high school, run out of money building their Santa Monica dream home and try to recoup at the gaming tables; they fail. Entrepreneur John Gage (Redford) then offers David a million dollars for a night in bed with Diana. In the novel, the characters are shady. In the film, Diana is the dewy-eyed happily married wife who falls for her seducer. David in turn becomes the conscience-stricken sinner, a characterization that owes something to Richard Gere’s role in Pretty Woman. “Of course this was perverse heroism,” says Redford. “But it worked as great entertainment in the Reagan era, when everything was about the cash and the cost and, it seemed, everyone was playing dirty.”
In October 1992, the week Indecent Proposal wrapped in Las Vegas, A River Runs Through It premiered at the Ziegfeld in New