Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [222]
To satisfy Disney, fifty minutes of cuts were made, but the film still came in at almost three hours. Redford sought more cuts, and Rolf steered him to an early hospital scene, which, said Rolf, ran long. Rolf proposed to cut what he deemed an unnecessary verbal exchange where a doctor tells Annie that Grace has had half her leg amputated. Once the information is related, said Rolf, the scene is over. Redford objected. When the doctor delivers his line, LaGravenese scripted Annie’s response as “Which leg?” Rolf says, “I said to Bob, ‘Please, it’s redundant. We can save three minutes here.’ ”
Redford refused emphatically. “For me it was the Chekhovian element,” he says. “The obvious cut was the commercial way. But Chekhov would always present the surprise beat, the wrong reaction that drove right to the heart of the meaning. So I said to Tom, ‘To hell with Disney. To hell with time fixations. Do it this way.’ ”
By Christmas, assembly work on the film had shifted to Skywalker. Tom Newman had started scoring the music; the final vocal dubbing was in train at Todd-AO in Los Angeles. Then, in March, the marketers flew to northern California with their distribution projections and pasteup designs for billboards to be used as far away as Sydney and Tokyo. Predictably, the template poster featured a smoky close-up of Booker and Annie poised for a kiss. Redford would have none of it. “I’m trying to present this as a story of some metaphysical power,” he told the ten-man team gathered around a boardroom table at Skywalker. “I don’t want the cliché.”
Redford came out of the Disney meeting furious—and very significantly troubled. “I was expected to do Oprah Winfrey and Larry King and Barbara Walters and bang the drum all over the planet. I saw the ‘me’ they wanted to package, the commodity. I said, ‘No, I don’t wish to do this again. It’s a story, a movie story, that’s all. Let the audience decide its value. Take it or leave it.’ ”
The Horse Whisperer had cost $80 million, making it the biggest budget Redford had handled for a directorial feature. His slice was $10 million, with a 10 percent profit share. When the movie opened in May 1998—with a galloping horse dominating the poster—its success around the world was instant. It made its money back in eight weeks and went on to gross more than $120 million.
But the damage was done with Roth. “I heard he hated it,” says Redford. “But he never had the guts to confront me directly.” Calls went unanswered, and it became clear that Lourd’s dream of a multipicture deal with Disney was dead.
What was most significant about the play-out of The Horse Whisperer, however, was the intransigence of Redford’s marketing response. Much as he conceded to the nobility of playing iconic heroes, and to the public’s expectation of him, his greater need was newness and discovery. His nature was always stoutly independent. And there is a paradox in the fundamental ideals we associate with individuality. We expect the individual to remain faithful to their essential character, but we also expect rebellious renewal. Redford conformed: he was ready for change again.
22
The Edge
Studio connections would come and go, but the resolution of independence was permanent. So, too, was Sundance, in Redford’s mind. But that commitment would be put to the test once again.
Sundance’s finances had, ironically, been at their most fragile since the start of the nineties. The exponential growth of the entities (defined as arts, corporate and activist departments) following the 1989 film festival breakthrough looked good on paper, but the greater exposure meant greater demands on resources. The Sundance Institute, the arts lab beating heart of the empire, began the decade $1 million in debt. The