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” says Redford. “Temple of Gold and Boys and Girls Together, his novels, seemed very much like J. D. Salinger to me. He had the ability to capture and emulate a style. In this movie he wanted to emulate Gunga Din. But in some of his writing his wit and imitative style became over-blown and reduced what might have been. George was aware of this with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. So he took out many jokes and reordered it to allow the scenes to breathe. He was very ruthless in a discriminating way.” Hill said, “I was always aware that we were exaggerating history. In our movie, Butch and Sundance are lovable because they are polite, despite their mania for bank robberies and their complete incompetence. They fuck up all the time but come back with aplomb. I played off Newman’s history and Redford’s newness. Up till then, Paul was known as the hard rebel loner of Hud or Cool Hand Luke. Bob was a blank sheet of paper. For the movie we made them goofballs, and because that was so fresh in context of what we were doing, it won over the audience.”

Where, though, was the Darling Clementine earnestness or the western veracity Pollack and Redford aspired to? For Hill, the validity was in the symbolism. “The movie was about Vietnam. Not literally, of course, but it symbolized a whole contingent of society that was bailing out. It was, I suppose, in sympathy with the dissenting voice, maybe even supporting it.” Redford preferred to see core truths in the depiction of banditry. “George asked me at one point, ‘What is your motivation for playing Sundance?’ And I said, ‘He’s a killer, a psychotic. So when I’m looking at some guy, all the time I’m thinking, Will I kill him?’ ” Within that subtextual hardness, says Redford, the movie retained a quasi reality that gave it worth.

The movie’s triumph, though, was its wit, concentrating on the dynamic contrast of characters: Newman’s Butch is the thinker, fast and calculating; Redford’s Sundance the traditional, silent westerner. They don’t take their lives seriously, but now and then they show moments of perception that hint at the inevitability of a tragic demise (they die in Bolivia). “Damn it, why is everything we’re good at illegal?” Butch asks. Such self-referential irony both softens and enriches, and even the most casual, throwaway exchanges are joyfully charged: During the chase, Butch says to Sundance, “I think we lost ’em. Do you think we lost ’em?” Sundance says no, to which Butch replies, “Neither do I.”

Hill credited “the magic” between Newman and Redford with the movie’s success; Redford says it was Hill who made it tick. “None of us felt we were making the landmark western of the late sixties. But the ground did move. It wasn’t like Willie Boy, where there was a feeling of emotional disengagement between actors and director. George kept us tight. On Butch Cassidy, I remember laughing a lot and thinking, This is just too much fun, which means it’s either shit or gold.”

Mike Frankfurt and Stephanie Phillips had collaborated on Redford’s Fox contract, which was for a flat fee of $150,000, considerably less than a quarter of Newman’s fee with percentage, but still the best of his career. They had hoped for a back-end percentage—a cut of the profits—but Redford was happy. “He had other fish to fry,” says Phillips.

At Thanksgiving, while Redford was dubbing in Los Angeles, Lola and Ilene Goldman discussed establishing a health and consumer activist group. Their talk arose from a chance comment by Suzanna, the Goldmans’ five-year-old daughter, about “the bad air” in Manhattan. On the phone, Redford supported the decision to set up a biweekly roundtable discussion forum at their Seventy-ninth Street apartment. Businesswoman Cynthia Burke and Carlin Masterson, the actress wife of theater actor and director Pete Masterson, joined to formulate the first team, whose task it would be to research health and consumer issues. Twenty other friends, mostly women, also joined, and the group named itself Consumer Action Now (CAN) and pledged to establish a portfolio to tie in with the