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’ve played, “but Redford stands for the industry itself, in all its California dreaminess.” As such, no variation of the gilded icon was permissible. Sydney Pollack, estranged from his old sparring partner since the filming of Havana, spoke of the difficulty of separating “acting” from “megastardom”: “It’s an impossible conundrum because that kind of stardom has invested the actor with the audience’s preconceived needs. Look at Elvis. He was this phenomenon who satisfied everyone’s dream of rebellion, and then he settled down to make cozy movies. He was never forgiven. Take Stallone. He tried comedy and he made a good fist of it, but they threw it out. Take Woody [Allen]. He’s allowed to make a certain kind of movie, but dare he move out of the box? Same with a star like Bob. It’s a deal with the devil. He will always be thirty, blond, perfection. There will be moments when smart critics will cut through it, but even the best of them want the idealized actor. They want the continuance, because no one wants the death of fantasy, no one can stand too much reality.”

Redford’s personal realities, however, were unavoidable.

24

Jeremiah’s Way

Tom Jolley and the young Salt Lake City accountants proved a godsend, but they couldn’t reverse the damage of years of less than efficient managerial control at Sundance and the overhiring and overspending that arose from bad deputizing. Redford accepted their verdicts with aplomb, but he was adamant about the importance of preserving Sundance.

In May, shortly after the delayed release of An Unfinished Life, he announced the relaunch of the Sundance Cinema Centers, this time in partnership with Paul Richardson and Bert Manzari, described by The Hollywood Reporter as “stalwarts of the independent theater chain business for more than thirty years.” On its heels came another IRM-style venture, the Sundance U.S. Conference of Mayors Summit, staged with the United Nations–funded International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, for the purpose of reactivating debate about global warming. The conference, attended by forty-five mayors, was a success, but its collateral value was as an expression of Redford’s never-say-die stubbornness in the face of overwhelming doubt. A twelve-step resolution committed 170 cities to a new pact for pollution reduction independent of national policy, and Redford again felt stimulated, even optimistic.

Sundance, however, needed more than initiatives. It needed cash. A quick fix offered itself in Paramount’s animated Charlotte’s Web, a version of E. B. White’s children’s classic directed by Gary Winick, which Redford did as a favor to Winick and in which he lent his voice as the ornery Ike the Horse. The movie was useful, but it was the project he wanted to do next that he thought could earn him big dollars. Lions for Lambs was written by Matthew Carnahan, brother of Joe Carnahan, the director of the successful cop thriller Narc, and originated with Paula Wagner, the long-term production associate of Tom Cruise. In 2005, Cruise’s life and career had taken a turn with marriage to Katie Holmes and a series of ill-judged promotional appearances that allegedly offended the executive of his old studio, Paramount, and caused the termination of his contract. Cruise and Wagner’s partnership with Paramount had lasted fourteen years and spanned several major blockbusters. In November 2006 it was announced that they had become effective controllers of the relaunched United Artists, a studio division of MGM that had served only as a boutique name since its collapse in the early nineties. In its new incarnation, MGM remained majority owner, but Cruise and Wagner took control of development and the creative rebirth of a studio that had been made famous ninety years before as a venture partnership between Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith.

The two projects the new UA planned to relaunch with were the wartime Valkyrie, which would star Tom Cruise, and Carnahan’s Lions for Lambs, which Lourd proposed to Redford to direct and star