Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [85]
Frankfurt was about to turn in late one night in New York when Redford called from Utah. “I got the magic name,” he said. “I want to call it Bougainvillea.”
Frankfurt said, “Forget it, Bob. Not only will no one remember the name, they’ll never be able to spell it. Think of something else.”
Ever since Lewis and Clark ventured west, settlers had struggled with the parallel joys and dangers of the New World. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales condensed the experience, introducing Natty Bumppo, the adventurer, and his alter ego, the native Chingachgook, each inhabiting a wilderness of extraordinary contradictions. The dime novels published by Beadle and Adams half a century later brought the scout, the cowboy and the outlaw into American life. Thereafter, actors like William S. Hart and movies like The Great Train Robbery in 1903 rounded off a stratified universe where Indian attacks, cattle rustling and mail robberies defined survival. By 1940, of the 477 movies released that year, 30 percent were westerns. Of the 178 movies produced in 1967, just 11 percent were westerns. What remained of the western fantasy was a bloodbath in the hands of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. Choreographed violence dominated; nuance of cultural or historical exploration was rare.
Still, Redford’s interest was historical investigation: “I knew I was ignorant. I had a clear picture of myself as an undereducated American. What I’d learned from Tot was the tradition of the mountain man, of self-sufficiency. What I’d educated myself about was the arrogance of easterners settling the West. As the years went on, I developed a need to understand the Native American dispossession. Curiosity drove me to seek out ethnic projects at that time, and I narrated the Blue Lake documentary about developer exploitation of Navajo resources. But I wasn’t an activist. I felt maybe I could contribute something by trying to find western movies of insight.”
Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here was promising. It was based on Harry Lawton’s carefully documented 1960 novel, Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt, the theme of which was the victimization of the Native American, explored in the true story of a Las Vegas Paiute, Willie Boy, who “captures” for marriage a Chemehuevi girl. In 1909 the real-life tribal dispute became a national scandal when Willie Boy shot dead the father of his bride-to-be and went on the run, pursued by Sheriff Wilson, Constable Ben de Crevecoeur and a posse dedicated to the idea, prevalent at the time, that “a good Indian is a dead Indian.” The story’s significance, as Harry Lawton wrote, was “not just in the fact that this was the last great manhunt in the Western tradition, but in the nature of the Paiute, who was the protagonist of the hunt.” The Paiute tribe’s problem, Lawton stated, was its refusal to conform to modern American life.
Writer-director Abe Polonsky, like Carol Rossen’s father, had suffered badly at the hands of McCarthyism. A committed Socialist harassed into exile, he continued to ghostwrite Hollywood scripts, none of which matched his 1947 masterpiece for John Garfield, the boxing story Body and Soul. During the sixties he lived in France, spending almost five years developing Willie Boy. In the mid-sixties a liberal-minded executive at Universal, the former agent Jennings Lang, was intent on green-lighting blacklistees’ projects. Polonsky’s Native American drama accordingly became a personal mission that finally took wing with the Paramount loan-out.
Polonsky’s original plan was to faithfully reenact the 1909 incident with Native Americans. Universal management flatly refused. Later Polonsky