Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [90]
“After that I decided I wanted him for Sundance,” Hill recalled. “It was that simple. You’ll read press pieces about me wanting Marlon and all the rest, but it’s garbage. Fox wanted Beatty. Paul wanted Jack Lemmon. But I wanted Bob. Then I had to go to Paul’s apartment and set about winning him over.”
Newman had little or no interest in Redford’s progress: “I’d seen him onstage in Barefoot, and I’d seen Inside Daisy Clover, but I had yet to be convinced.” Personally, Newman said, he felt a sense of “ownership” with the Butch Cassidy film, since it had first been proposed to him in the fall of 1966, ironically, by Redford’s friend and neighbor, Bill Goldman. “He flew all the way down to Tucson, where I was filming, and dished it all to me, this marvelous story about the real Wild Bunch gang he was developing on spec. He said, ‘This is going to be the best cowboy picture ever made.’ Then he disappeared, and the next I knew, [Steve] McQueen called me and said we should make this thing called ‘The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy’ that somebody had shown him. I collected the script from McQueen’s house and read it overnight, and the next day I called Steve and suggested that the two of us should buy it outright from Goldman. He said no deal was available because Goldman’s agent was playing the auction game. So that was the end of it for McQueen and me. I forgot about it. Then, out of the blue, Dick Zanuck had it and Hill was offering it to me, with no Steve attached.”
Newman had no problem relinquishing the role of Sundance. Hill informed him that the movie’s title could easily be reversed and, anyway, the character of Butch was a perfect fit for him. Despite the ongoing grumbling from the studio, Hill took Redford to meet Newman and Newman was won over. “George was probably right,” said Newman. “I’d wanted Lemmon as the costar to return a favor. But he hated horses and said no. When I met Bob, I liked him. After that, you go by instinct, and you go with the flow. It was an exceptional piece of writing anyway and, under George’s direction, I knew it would be a fine movie. So when George said, ‘Trust me, it’s Redford as the Sundance Kid,’ I said, ‘What the hell.’ ”
Advised of Newman’s blessing, Fox agreed to Redford as Sundance. “It was humbling,” says Redford, “because Paul and George were obvious artists. I was the kid, and they went to bat for me with Zanuck. Was I sure the movie was something special? Yes. It was rich with humor and texture. I liked Goldman’s work, though I thought the script had too many jokes. I had the highest admiration for George. When I was told I got it, it was a relief because I felt, Okay, if I make a mess of Downhill, I might still have a career. It was Paul who made the decision. I will always be indebted to him for that—taking a chance on a comparative unknown.”
Late in August, still preparing for Downhill Racer, Redford joined some Broadway friends—Penny Fuller, an understudy from Barefoot, and production manager Bill Craver—for a weekend of sitting in the sauna and riding at Timp. On the first evening, says Fuller, he was preoccupied with “the immensity of the changes going down with the purchase of the canyon lands and the contradictory objectives of all these new movies.” They played jazz and sat late into the night under the tall windows of the A-frame. Redford outlined his plans. He would preserve the canyon for