Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [42]
Richard Altman, like Mastrogeorge, believed Redford could have found little of value at the Actors Studio: “He was past the point of tricks. The kind of acting breakthrough he made with The Seagull has to do with self-realization. Years later I watched him play a scene with Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie Up Close and Personal, and I was blown away again by his honesty. Superficially, one might reduce the key acting element to composure. But that’s understatement. There is a place beyond that where all great players go, which is just truth. Bob hit on that at AADA; others learned it at the Actors Studio.”
The Actors Studio might not have been an option, but opportunities were opening up for him nonetheless. A few days after his performance of The Seagull, he received a cable from MCA, the leading actors’ agency, proposing a meeting with a view to representation. Redford says he had never heard of MCA.
MCA started as a modest Chicago management company in 1924 under the directorship of a former eye doctor, Jules Stein. By the 1950s it had become a business phenomenon within the emerging television world. Led by Stein’s lieutenant Lew Wasserman, the agency had sidled from artist representation into television packaging, delivering to producers an all-inclusive package of creative talent, including writer, director and star. From there, it was a short step to launching a television production company, MCA TV. MCA thrived, acquiring the Universal Studios lot in 1958 and, later, Paramount’s movie library. Most significantly, it had been responsible for breaking the studio salary mold and obtaining for actors a percentage of movie profits. The deal brokered by Wasserman for James Stewart when the actor quit his MGM contract in 1944 still resounded through the industry and lured clients to MCA. At the time Maynard Morris, a senior executive at MCA, cabled Redford, the agency’s client roster extended to more than five hundred Hollywood actors and three hundred Broadway performers.
It was one of AADA’s instructors, Mike Thoma, who set the ball rolling for Redford with MCA. In a term report, Thoma, who was also directing and producing on Broadway, had noted that “Redford shows a flair for comedy.” So impressed had he been, he recommended to MCA agent Stark Hesseltine, a friend, that he see The Seagull. It was Hesseltine who had advised Morris that Redford was a desirable client.
Redford approached this important opportunity naïvely. His friend George Oakes, an AADA classmate who was already working on Broadway, told Redford that MCA would pay him $140 a week, whether he was working or not. “I badly needed cash, and I believed him. So when I sat down with Hesseltine and Morris, that’s what I asked for.” Redford would later re-create the scene that unfolded in Quiz Show, where the network suits put the squeeze on Columbia professor Charles Van Doren (played by Ralph Fiennes), bullying him into accepting their questionable operating principles. Redford had done some homework and knew that Maynard Morris had discovered Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck, Lee Van Cleef and Marlon Brando. Morris was clearly a good talent assessor, but he was also used to getting his way. “I was a babe in the woods, knowing nothing about the rules,” says Redford. “What I depicted in Quiz Show is how it went for me. These guys were slick. Very slow, like a choreographed pitch, Stark got up from his table in the corner and sat at the edge of Maynard’s desk. Maynard came around to perch on the other side, all very smooth. I was the lamb in the middle. Right away I said, ‘So, wait a second. You will rep me, but you won’t place me on a retainer and you cannot guarantee me work? Well, that’s a weird scenario. I’ll have to sleep on it.’ But Stark wasn