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to roles of bad character?’ That pissed me off. Three years later Jack Kroll did a personal interview with me and I said, ‘Can we go off record?’ And he was a nice man and said, ‘Sure.’ Then I laid it out for him. I told him what he said was bordering on the unethical. The implication was that I was in some way shortchanging people because I played heroes. I told him, ‘You want me to play the psycho? I did that in my apprenticeship, did it for years. An actor learns by experiment. I have been there and back. Now I play the hero, but one who has earned whatever he has to give by way of some sacrifice, some study. If you want me to play the Arnold Schwarzenegger hero, I cannot do that. I cannot be the stuntman. But I can do the guy in Electric Horseman, I can do Jack Weil. There’s no disgrace in playing to your strengths.’ ”

After Quiz Show, says Bryan Lourd, “he confused me utterly, because he was marching to a different drum. The projects that seemed right he avoided. For example, because he wanted to stretch and because he liked to sing, he told me he wanted to do Phantom of the Opera. Andrew Lloyd Webber was interested in meeting him. But then every time I tried to set up the meeting, Bob cried off. I’d say, ‘You need to meet him, to sing for him.’ And all he’d do was say, ‘Sure, no problem at all.’ But he just wouldn’t see it through.” The only project that came close to realization was The Hot Zone, a story of runaway viruses that might wipe out life on earth, based on a book by Richard Preston. “I got the impression that he was more interested in the documentary, social value of the story line, and not entertainment,” says Lourd. “And that was the abiding mood: he accepted his position as an iconic pinup and he wanted to stretch but his course was undefined.”

Bit by bit Redford came to accept that the dilemma within himself was best resolved by making movies that played to his core audience while reserving formal experiment for Sundance and its programs. Accordingly, Lourd tried to encourage the new, entrenched relationship with Disney and its affiliates. After the death of Walt Disney and some lean years, the company under Michael Eisner was building new amusement parks worldwide that complemented its new movies. During the first five years of Eisner’s reign, the studio’s audience share had grown from 3 percent to 20 percent. In 1992, Eisner welcomed Joe Roth, the cofounder of Morgan Creek, under the Disney umbrella with a newly created division, Caravan Pictures, and the following spring Disney bought Miramax, the indie distribution company of brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, for $60 million. Lourd felt Redford had a double advantage at Disney, since Frank Wells, who was still very much part of the management equation, was so fond of the actor. Indeed, late in March 1994, as Quiz Show began filming, Wells had invited Redford to join a helicopter ski trip in Nevada. Redford had to decline the invitation and thus was spared the tragedy that followed. Flying home on April 3, the helicopter carrying Wells and his party crashed into a mountainside, killing all on board. The death of Wells created a feud at Disney when Eisner refused to give the vacated executive post to next-in-line Jeffrey Katzenberg. After a flurry of lawsuits, Katzenberg quit Disney to join Steven Spielberg and David Geffen in the founding of DreamWorks SKG. One of Katzenberg’s last projects within the Disney organization, Jon Avnet’s Up Close and Personal, was offered to Redford. He accepted.

The movie was featherweight but its antecedents were intriguing. It was based on the life of Jessica Savitch, a television broadcaster briefly famous for her rise at NBC at a time when men dominated the news. Drug addiction unhinged her and she came unglued on air during a live prime-time broadcast in 1983. Fired from the network, Savitch drowned shortly after in a bizarre car accident in New Hope, Pennsylvania. The rights to Alanna Nash’s 1988 oral biography Golden Girl were acquired by John Foreman, the producing partner of Paul Newman, who commissioned