Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [74]
According to Penn, he was satisfied when he wrapped the movie in August. He oversaw the first assembly, but while he was fulfilling a theatrical directing contract, Spiegel took the half-cut footage to London to reedit to his liking. Some of Penn’s most beloved scenes were consigned to the floor. “I was devastated,” said Penn, “not because he took the plot, or my work, in a different direction, because he didn’t. The movie was already there. But he selected the wrong shots. There were so many instances where the take he went for was the bad take, the one I would never have used. Cumulatively, it was a disaster.” The film, released in February 1966, was not well received, though Variety liked Redford. He himself felt it had good and bad things in it—“and fortunately the good outweighed the bad.”
Just weeks before The Chase opened nationally, Paramount opened Situation Hopeless quietly. It was just as well. Redford was appalled to learn that Reinhardt, like Spiegel, had botched the editing. Mike Connors had seen the rough cut and liked it but was horrified with the finished film: “Either Silvia or Gottfried changed the vital scene where the airmen who have been incarcerated break out of Herr Frick’s basement and stumble on a movie crew shooting a war movie. They run scared, because they think it’s a real battle. That’s how we, the actors, played it, and that scene played beautifully. What came out in the end was something else entirely, where the airmen realize it’s a movie and laugh it off. It became utterly meaningless, and it busted the movie.”
This Property Is Condemned, meanwhile, was in development hell. Pollack was standing by, but Ray Stark had now brought in John Houseman to rescue the ailing script. Redford saw disaster coming and wanted to avoid it. He wrote in his diary, “I think that if Natalie gets nervous enough, she will say, ‘Hold it!’ and walk, she being a million-dollar property with the million-dollar career who really doesn’t want to blow it. And that will be my out! If she goes, then I’m free.”
In September, before The Chase was released, Redford lashed out. He had been informed that filming would begin in New Orleans in three weeks, but he had yet to see a usable screenplay. Summoned to Stark’s office to review Houseman’s latest version, he railed: “There is no character for me to play!” As a result, James Bridges started yet another rewrite, churning out twenty-five new pages a day, while Charles Eastman, a friend of Wood’s, developed a parallel new script for her. Redford’s diary records the chaos: “Natalie arrives, is furious. She thinks. She wants to know why her character, Alva, has been changed (she hasn’t), why my part is now bigger, why Simone Signoret hasn’t been cast as the mother (she is wrong for the part), or Vivien Leigh (she thinks the movie is a piece of shit) and why Charles Eastman hasn’t been signed as the main writer.”
Pollack stepped in as mediator: “I’d been through enough script crises on Ben Casey. I knew that it’s usually a case of the more writers, the more mess. My feeling was we had to slough off these writers.” Good-paying work on The Fugitive, another long-running series, had rewarded Pollack with a much-loved toy, a single-engine Cessna airplane. He flew to San Jose and locked himself in a motel room with two packing cases of scripts. “I threw out all the furniture except the bed and littered the floor with what we had, which was fourteen scripts. I took scissors, glue and a staple gun and assembled a matrix, which I then delivered to Bridges.” During The Slender Thread he’d engaged the television playwright David Rayfiel to produce a literate script that would keep his stars, Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, happy. Now he asked Rayfiel to save This Property Is Condemned. “David had the task of taking all the elements—mine, Natalie’s and Bridges’s—and blending them with dialogue that worked.” Pollack gave Rayfiel cash