Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [83]
It was an exhilarating moment—for Frankfurt, Gregson and Redford. “We knew we had an opportunity par excellence,” says Frankfurt. “The way I saw it, Bob had managed to turn a terrible, career-compromising lawsuit into a production company!”
Redford had only just begun to ski. He also lacked production experience, as did Gregson and Frankfurt. “But I knew it was my best option,” says Redford. “Firstly, it represented autonomy. If I could crack it with my own production company, I had choices beyond the studio or the agent. Secondly, I would in principle be in a situation where I could control the integrity of a production. As a producer, I could have my say in what appeared on-screen, like Spiegel did.” Indeed, Redford’s first decision was that the skiing movie would be shot in Europe. “For me, Europe was still the big tease. I’d seen the mountains of Italy and Switzerland. I knew it would all be extraordinary on film. But I also knew the cost would be twice what Charlie was offering if we went the Europe route. It didn’t worry me. It was a chance to build my own film for the first time.”
Redford’s team named their production company Wildwood, after a fork in the road leading to Timp Haven. It was to operate out of the West Los Angeles office of Richard Gregson. “Bob’s confrontation with Bluhdorn took balls,” says Frankfurt. “But this was the sixties, remember, and we took chances. It wasn’t just Bob, it was everyone.” Redford’s courage was fed, says Frankfurt, by the new social circles in which he was moving: “New York was his power pack. He’d begun to hang around with some smart, motivated people. And it struck me that he was quite tactical about these friendships.” Among the Redfords’ new friends were Ilene Goldman and her husband, Bill, a novelist and recent screenwriter, who was just finishing a big speculative script called “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy,” based on folklore surrounding two of the Wild West’s most controversial bandits. Redford also befriended the new liberal mayor of New York, John Lindsay, a friend of Steve Frankfurt’s. “Those were dynamic days,” says Frankfurt. “So much was happening with youth culture, the Brit invasion, black actors like Sidney Poitier finally making the mainstream, Bobby Kennedy championing the poor. There was a feeling of real cultural rebirth, and all our conversations were filled with massive ideas of all the great changes that could be. Bob was at the head of the pack, thinking big.”
Before the ink was dry on the Wildwood shareholding papers, Redford astonished Frankfurt with the audacity of another, grander scheme. Timp had begun to obsess him. It was more than a family hideaway. It was a place of history. Redford told Frankfurt he had become “soul-bound” to the canyon, which to him was “a slice of John Muir’s America.” Lola and the kids used the A-frame during summers and through the holidays. “But for Bob,” says Frankfurt, “it was much more than a vacation home.” The bordering lands were all owned by the Scottish Stewarts, who had staked their claim in 1900 under the terms of the Desert Land Act and displaced the remnants of the roving Ute Indian tribe. The Stewarts first started a sheep farm, then in the fifties the brothers Ray and Paul Stewart