Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [70]
Rosenberg pressed Redford about maximizing his situation. Monique James reminded him that Louella Parsons was already formally announcing his arrival on the Hollywood star scene in the New York Journal American. His name, suddenly, was vying for space with Steve McQueen, Rock Hudson, Marlon Brando. The Brits were currently the toast of the town, with Sean Connery’s James Bond and the Beatles dominating the media, but there was plenty of room for new Hollywood stars. Redford still dawdled. Then Wood informed him that she and Stark were in discussion with several interesting directors, among them Arthur Hiller, John Frankenheimer and Clive Donner, though none had been confirmed. Redford thought of his friend Sydney Pollack. Pollack had just completed his modest movie directorial debut, The Slender Thread, and had an option contract with Paramount.
Wood frowned. “Sydney Pollack? Who’s he?”
“He’s the new hot guy. You don’t know about The Slender Thread? Have they been hiding him from you?”
Wood called in Pollack for an interview.
Pollack’s progress in Los Angeles and New York had been as serpentine as Redford’s, but he had won an Emmy for television directing, and The Slender Thread, a true-life story of a suicide hotline made for Warners, was gathering good notices. “We were butterflies emerging together,” said Pollack. “There was this dark, depressive state we shared when we got together, and we were getting together a lot at that time. Night after night we drank and debated. We drove back and forth to Provo in his Porsche. We never stopped talking. A lot of the people around us were intellectuals. But we were autodidacts; we did it ourselves. We loved drama. We loved fantasy. We liked the idea of the Method but we hated the fad. For me, Kazan was king. But, like Bob, I hated all the pretentious existential heaviness. Basically we were on the same page and so all the time we shared seemed productive.”
“Long before Sydney directed me,” says Redford, “the director-actor dynamic was in play. It was a dialogue that could switch either way, real productive interactivity based on our curiosity about the world and a desire to put new spins on conventional platforms. Out of that bond came This Property.”
On Wood’s say-so Pollack was assigned the job. While James Bridges labored on a new script and everyone waited, Rosenberg found the perfect project to fill the gap: Sam Spiegel, the producer of David Lean’s hit Lawrence of Arabia, wanted Redford for Columbia’s The Chase, to be directed by one of New York’s most eminent emerging television directors, Arthur Penn. Spiegel, well educated in Europe and exiled by Hitler, was on his way to establishing his reputation as the world’s most successful independent producer, maker of On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Suddenly, Last Summer. Spiegel’s reputation was founded on the literacy of his stories, his discernment in casting and the sheer size, ever growing in scale, of his productions. The script for The Chase was by Lillian Hellman, who had adapted Horton Foote’s fifties play about mob rule. Redford read it and couldn’t put it down. Superficially about a redneck murder hunt, it was layered with character insights and strong on metaphor. The story revolved around small-town Texan Sheriff Calder, under pressure in his community to find Bubber Reeves, who has escaped from prison. The oil-rich Val Rogers controls much of town life, and his son, Jake, is on edge because he has been having an affair with Anna, Reeves’s wife. Calder attempts to bring Reeves in unharmed, against the will of Rogers as the scurrilous mob instincts rage.
Redford felt the script had the same power The Treasure of the Sierra Madre possessed. It was, clearly, less an entertainment than a commentary