Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [258]
Of the ten projects chosen in the first year, records of nine remain on file. After the first year, projects were chosen from a wider pool of random submissions, which, within ten years, numbered in the thousands. Among the first season’s projects were El Norte (Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas), Learning to Fall (Ann Beattie), St. Elmo’s Fire (David Shicklele), The Giant Joshua (John and Denise Earle), The Trials of Daniel Boone (Steve Wax and Steve Channing), The Man Who Killed the Deer (Larry Littlebird), Ghost Dancers (Barry Pritchard), Gestation in the Tombs (Pablo Figueroa), and South Bronx Drama (Jon Alpert).
3 By the standard that would shortly develop: Interview with Robert Redford, June 9, 1999. The theater lab program was always of equal importance in Redford’s eyes. “I’m so glad I was in theater in the fifties, in that fading era when it was all about storytelling and bodies in the space,” he says. “You learn so much about telling the tale, and that’s critical, of course, for movies. At Sundance, I saw theater workshopping as a key activity. It bled into the film work, and that was as I wanted it.”
The theater labs, running through July of each year, became very productive. Over a five-year period at the start of the millennium, twenty-five projects nurtured at the July labs went into full theatrical production across the country, including Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
4 “The trouble with Bob”: Interview with Reg Gipson, September 16, 1995.
5 Shortly after the first lab, Brent Beck: Interview with Brent Beck, September 11, 1995.
6 At the time, Pollack reported himself uplifted: Gerald Peary, “Sundance,” American Film, October 1981, 47–51.
7 Redford had already engaged Hope Moore: Interview with Gary Beer, October 18, 1995.
8 The IRM was officially launched: John Aloysius Farrell, “Westernizing with Robert Redford,” The Denver Post Magazine, December 1, 1985.
9 A flood of creative ideas flowed: Interview with Barry Levinson, March 6, 1999.
10 Wells had been shot in the back of the head: Kirk Mitchell, “Celebrity Link Drew Global Attention to Killing,” The Denver Post, March 16, 2008.
11 Only the heroic acts of four passersby: Provo Herald, March 9, 1985.
12 Redford’s aim with the rewrites: Sidney Lumet, Making Movies (New York: Vintage, 1996), 39.
13 But it was Judith Thurman’s 1982 biography: Judith Thurman, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982).
14 Blixen’s personal writings suggest otherwise: Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa 1914–1931, ed. Frans Lasson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 103–430.
15 Kurt gathered enough from Judith: Errol Trzebinski, Silence Will Speak: A Study of the Life of Denys Finch Hatton and His Relationship with Karen Blixen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
16 Reitman worried about his appropriateness: Interview with Ivan Reitman, conducted by Francis Feighan, June 1988.
19. One America?
1 Recently, the programs had been run by Susan Lacey: Interview with Sterling Van Wagenen, September 29, 1997.
2 For Berkeley-born Nichols, the journey to Milagro: John Nichols, A Fragile Beauty (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1987), 1.
3 New meeting rooms for lab students: Interview with Ian Calderon, June 17, 1996.
4 Redford’s greatest ally in this redesign: Interview with Jamie Redford, December 16, 1998.
5 At the following Canyon de Chelly conference: The New York Times, June 25, 1984.
6 “The U.S.A and the U.S.S.R. are the two largest