Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [225]
Redford still saw perceptual difficulties with his core determination for Sundance: to create opportunity for artists. “I saw the problem of my personal fame and the association with what attempted to be an egalitarian colony. I began to wonder was that problem ever answerable. Was it best, in order to get a night’s sleep, just to step out of the equation?” In his journal he wrote: “How can I express what Sundance is? I seem to have found something in taking the value of the old, and integrating it in the new. A third eye for a new third way. But it’s a sonofabicth to make people get it. I have to get it so clear that I can pass it down as an axiom. A word. An icon. An acorn.”
Whatever the criticisms, whatever the difficulties, the public had a stubborn appetite for Sundance. “People wanted it,” says Gordon Bowen. “Bob always spoke of inclusiveness, of the validity of a forum that allowed all American filmmakers a good chance. He wasn’t overly political or philosophical, and that’s what brought so many people in. Marginalized people, minorities, whoever, could have a shot at it. One forum for all. Speaking as a product promoter, I thought this is noble, decent and secure.”
Security, though, was the real problem. After two years, Redford was depressed to learn the Sundance Channel was reaching just six million subscribers, compared with the IFC’s ten million–plus. He was losing ground. A series of emergency task force workshops was arranged to review the overall executive management of the group. Initially, it looked hopeful. Progress with the cinema centers seemed assured. Building was already under way at the University of Pennsylvania and in Portland, San Francisco, Dallas and Boston. Sites in Europe, China and Cuba had been visited, surveyed and short-listed. Media reportage was positive, even enthused.
But at a time of millennial recession, when yet another severe stock market tumble chilled the world, four of the six leading movie exhibitors went out of business. In the summer of 2000, to Redford’s astonishment, General Cinema Corporation, the partners in the Sundance chain, filed for Chapter 11. Within a short time, Bowen, Harbeck and Freeman were gone. Sundance was, again, in executive free fall.
In November 1998, shortly after completing a new political thriller, The Devil’s Own, with Brad Pitt in Ireland, Alan Pakula died in a car accident near Melville, New York. Redford was upset by the news, doubly so because he’d just returned from a visit to another dear friend, the environmentalist Margaret Owings, who lay dying at her home at Big Sur. He wrote an emotional eulogy for Pakula in Time. Just weeks before, Pakula had mused on his old collaborator’s durability. Sundance, Pakula opined, was a kind of Camelot that “has worked long enough for people to start debating independence in filmmaking, which in itself validates it.” And yet, he felt, Redford’s most enduring creation must be his screen persona. “He has disappointed me at times, and yet, in terms of a romantic icon, no one holds a candle to him. He assumed Clark Gable’s crown, and they will both be remembered for the complexity under the surface. They were glamorous, but there was always the threat that romance is dangerous.”
But Redford’s screen persona, if it was to be solely encapsulated in The Horse Whisperer, provided a personal