Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [87]
For background research, Salter moved to Grasse, not far from Grenoble in southern France, where the Olympic teams were based. Redford gave Dick Barrymore, a young ski photographer, the job of shooting the crucially important Olympic footage. Then he asked sportswriter Dan Jenkins, a neighbor in the Redfords’ Manhattan apartment building, for assistance in soliciting the support of the American Olympic skiing team. Jenkins persuaded the national skiing coach, Bob Beattie, to allow inside access at the off-limits areas of the Olympic Village. “This footage was, in reality, ‘test footage,’ to show Bluhdorn we could do it,” says Redford. “So it had to be excellent. We gave $18,000 to Barrymore and $2,000 to Salter.”
It started well. Beattie was a gentleman; the Olympic team was generous with time and advice. But then, three-quarters of the way through filming, Barrymore left for other projects, presenting Redford and Gregson with twenty thousand feet of 16 mm film. “Suddenly it was chaos,” says Redford. “In order to get the movie green-lighted for the fall, we had to present our footage to Bluhdorn urgently.” Redford reorganized his schedule, taking time out from Willie Boy and editing the footage himself. “Then I saw a problem. We had lots of shots of slopes and snow and skiers. But we had no shots of me in this show reel. By now it was high summer in L.A. and suddenly I was obliged to create a winter ski scene. That became the first directorial challenge of my life.”
Redford went to Shelby’s Sporting Goods store in Westwood, where he’d worked briefly in his teens, and borrowed a motorcycle helmet, silver duct tape, a Windbreaker and goggles. A replacement cameraman, John Bailey, was summoned. Bailey was twenty-three, a recent college graduate whose ambition was to make big movies. Together they drove to Mulholland Drive, with a couple of wooden boxes as props. Mulholland is in the hills, with a high skyline that overlooks Los Angeles. Bailey set up his camera while Redford pulled on the phony ski gear. “We’d painted stars and stripes on the helmet, and that was all we needed. John lay down in the grass to shoot skyward, like I was the skier in action. I kept taking drags of a cigarette, the smoke of which replicated my breathing in icy weather. It worked. Cut into the Grenoble stuff, it looked authentic.”
In July, Redford showed Bluhdorn eighteen minutes of tightly edited film. “It was all straightforward after that. He liked it. He trusted me. We had our green light to start shooting after Willie Boy.”
Redford found a newcomer, Michael Ritchie, to direct on the strength of an NBC television pilot, The Outsider. It starred Darren McGavin in a Dashiell Hammett takeoff, full of moody grayness and long silences. “I wanted an iconoclast, so I called him. We met. We had a meeting of minds, and I said, ‘Let’s go!’ ”
Tying down the script became the central focus. Revisions at Wildwood were daily affairs. Everyone contributed, even Natalie Wood, who was now Richard Gregson’s constant companion. The main problem was establishing the nature of the central character, the jock David Chappellet. Redford emphatically did not want an old-style hero. Salter had thought the American ski champion Billy Kidd would be the perfect template. “He was tough—from a poor part of town, I imagined, honed by years on the icy