Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [88]
One night over dinner in Grenoble, surrounded by the ski team, Redford pointed across the room. “The racer he was interested in was at another table,” wrote Salter. “I looked. Golden, unimpressible, a bit like Redford himself—which of course should have marked him from the first—sat a little-known team member named Spider Sabich. What there was of his reputation seemed to be based on his having broken his leg six or seven times. ‘Him?’ I said. ‘Sabich?’ Yes, said Redford; when he was that age he had been just like him—vain, rough edged, with a bit of arrogance, and a daredevil.”
Salter’s treatment, dated September 1967, proposed the protagonist as a twenty-one-year-old Vermonter, “like the young Dempsey, hard and not as big as one would expect.” The best of it was the acerbic coach-jock relationship, deftly lifted from Oakley Hall’s novel. And, beyond that, Salter’s poetry: “And now over a sequence that is almost entirely close shots, shots like yesterday’s newspapers, last week’s, last year’s shots that are like Lorca’s Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, like the white Madrid infirmaries of Death in the Afternoon, a virtually silent sequence of a badly injured man being carried into x-ray, his clothing cut away.…”
“I thought, If we can blend Salter’s eloquence with Ritchie’s quirkiness, we’re really onto something,” says Redford. “It seemed a good process: Salter, Ritchie, then me, all contributing differing elements. What we all decided we wanted was something that had a semidocumentary feel, that seemed real.”
Money was a problem. And though foreign location work was more expensive, Redford was adamant that only Europe would do for the location. Gregson flew back to Europe and found the perfect locale at Wengen, alongside the Jungfrau, the highest mountain in Switzerland. The choice was dictated by the Fédération Internationale de Ski races, which were staged on the nearby Lauberhorn and which would form the background of the action. The cost projections soared beyond the allotted $1.6 million.
“On the face of it,” says Mike Frankfurt, “Bob was in clover. It had taken a year, but he had overcome the animosity with Bluhdorn. He had formed his own production company. He had a major movie in Willie Boy. We had even managed to buy the Stewart lands at Timp and set in motion a little recreation industry. But those were the surface realities. In truth, he hadn’t consolidated. The self-produced Paramount picture was potentially an unaffordable juggernaut. Whether he and Ritchie could actually pull off an independent movie—because that’s what it really was—was up in the air. And, also, Universal was not happy with Willie Boy. It was done, but it was languishing on a shelf. He was in clover, but he had a lot to prove.”
His frame of mind was changing, too. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In June, Bobby Kennedy was killed. By August, when the Democrats’ presidential convention in Chicago turned into a bloodbath, America seemed an alien place. “If you had any moral sensibilities,” says Redford, “you were reeling. Personally, as I’m sure for most Americans, it was a time of utter confusion. There was a frantic feeling of, What to do?” Absorption in work seemed the best medicine, and he pushed himself to perfect his skiing on the longest pro skis, 220 downhills. At the same time, in the spirit of a new commitment to social involvement, he raised funds for the Salt Lake Native Culture Center.
“In New York, Bob and Lola attracted influential people,” says Mike Frankfurt, “and they utilized this as a political tool. Both had a clear picture of the divisions in American life, the rich and poor, black and white. They also had a clear picture of the Republican silent majority, and the divisions in the Democrats between the supporters of Eugene McCarthy and McGovern and Humphrey. More than that, they also had a clear understanding of the power of celebrity. They understood there was a direct correlation between the size of the media profile and the audience