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By Root 625 0

Management Group offices on Avenue of the Stars in Los Angeles or in Calistoga or Utah—joyful. “I’d never really paid attention,” says Redford. “Reg handed me summary sheets of my outgoings and I asked no questions.” There were sensitive areas, on reflection, where Redford should have asked questions. He did not, for example, query the stock purchases advised by Gipson’s brother’s brokerage in New York, or the details of the six major mortgages on properties stretching across the country, from Manhattan to Trancas Beach. “I would go out, make a movie and call Reg and say, ‘I like New Mexico. Buy me a property, or take a lease.’ ” Now, when the review results were in, Redford was staggered by the accumulated exposure of his mortgages and the size of his personal debts. He saw the error of his ways.

Immediately, he instructed Gipson to sell off all his properties except in Utah. He was, he admits, “tailspinning.” His film business lawyer since the seventies—originally backing up Hendler and at the fore since Hendler’s demise—was the esteemed, expensive Barry Tyerman. Redford consulted Tyerman, passing on Gipson’s records. The men met in Tyerman’s office in Century Park in Los Angeles. Redford recalls Tyerman’s sharp intake of breath. “You need to declare bankruptcy,” said Tyerman.

Redford knew the wisdom of Tyerman’s expertise but could not bring himself to accede. His track record of stubbornness and winning—from defying Paramount over Blue to helping defeat the Republicans’ rollback wilderness initiative—bore him up. “Of course I probably should have taken Barry’s advice and laid down my hand. But that would mean walking away from Sundance. That was never going to happen.”

Redford rolled up his sleeves once again.

23

The Actor in Transit

The original design of the Sundance Group was radically modified, out of necessity. A new, edgier version of Sundance Productions, headed up by former MGM executive Jeff Kleeman and capitalizing on the marquee value of the Redford connection to produce movies made either independently or under the auspices of South Fork Pictures, a Wildwood-allied company managed by Michael Nozik, was launched. It coproduced a number of Sundance-developed features, such as Ed Burns’s She’s the One, with the urgent goal of buttressing Sundance’s finances.

It wasn’t to be. And neither was the salvation package that hung on Microsoft’s cofounder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions, the seemingly perfect cash-rich partner to plug the gap left by the collapse of General Cinema. With Allen’s cash, Redford intended to buy out his cable partners and rid himself of what he saw as “the boardroom compromises” that dogged the institute’s history. He came close, but Vivendi, the French conglomerate, undercut him, purchasing Universal (the Sundance channel’s co-owners) and, says Redford, scared Allen off.

Being tested as never before, Redford relied on his quirky attributes of self-sufficiency, instinctive reasoning and sheer will to keep him on track. “He was never good at self-pity,” says Jamie. “Because he was a man of action, every crisis he saw, in the Chinese way, as an opportunity. So, perversely, he was wildly motivated when things hit the bottom.”

Redford saw the remedy as a mixture of introducing new blood and, at the same time, reinstating old concepts. He retained a Salt Lake City adviser, lawyer Tom Jolley, and two young accountants, Kyle Pexton and Tye Davis, who immediately took charge and redirected his energies. Within a very short time, new initiatives for the Sundance Institute were announced to steer it back to its arts-purist roots. These included the establishment of the International Documentary Fund, a scheme to underwrite fifty indie documentaries over five years for the Sundance Channel, aided by $4.5 million in grants from the Open Society Institute.

But the best efforts of Jolley, Pexton and Davis couldn’t counter the damage of years of financial overreaching. In 2002 Bruce Willard, founder and president of the apparel catalog The Territory Ahead, acquired a controlling 50 percent