Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [94]
Redford supported CAN but concentrated on different group activism. With Stephanie Phillips’s husband, Richard Friedberg, Mike Frankfurt, producer Gene Stavis and businessmen Charles Saltzman and Marty Keltz, he helped fund a new organization called Education, Youth, and Recreation (EYR). Its purpose was to promote “alternative film” through the university campuses of North America. Redford says, “Stavis was the organizer, Friedberg the theoretician, Keltz the salesman. But the impulse was mine. I loved the nouvelle vague. I loved what was happening in Europe, not so much Swinging Britain, which was just consuming itself in self-parody, but with directors like Fellini, Truffaut and of course Bergman who were giving us another view of the human experience. I wanted to encourage a comparable independent artistry in American film and started it there with EYR.”
The idea was profound. For many, 1967 and 1968 represented a pivotal era in American cinema, as in American life. The Oscar successes of radical works such as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate marked a fundamental change in the institutional view of filmmaking, and Sidney Poitier’s achievement in hits like In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and in becoming 1967’s top box office star signified the progress of civil rights. This seemed to be the fruition of a decade of liberal theorizing that had taken hold among educated youth on the campuses and soaked into mainstream culture. For Redford, the change was an inevitable and desirable social evolution. “I thought we, as a people, were insular and hyperconservative. I thought what Kennedy and those other liberal mold breakers were about was the essential therapy of self-reevaluation. We needed to broaden our knowledge and outlook. We needed social inclusion and attention to the poor, the blacks, the dispossessed. And in our movies we needed the lateral view. It was no good regurgitating Dean Martin comedy action movies forever. We had to have the marginal voices on-screen, so that we could understand how the other half lives. My feeling was that we must explore diversity in our culture and we must find an audience willing to listen.”
The university campus, Redford believed, was a good place to begin. Here were the kids who became the staffers and fund-raisers for Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, and they were now under fire as President Nixon took office. Redford hit the road with EYR. “When I swung a free weekend or two from postproduction on Butch Cassidy, I went out to Berkeley, or wherever I was invited, and pushed the concept. Keltz covered the other bases. The notion was to grab the neglected movies, movies like Billy Friedkin’s The Birthday Party, and offer screening packages from Wednesday night to Sunday night for $450. We had two guiding principles: to promote a different type of cinema and also, as a sideline, to locate and sponsor new talent. I wanted to offer polemic in film in the most democratic, accessible way. What Peter Fonda and Nicholson and Hopper were doing was one way of changing the zeitgeist. I wanted another tack.”
Through Stavis’s efforts, a handful of fledgling filmmakers were funded from EYR’s finance pool, among them Martin Scorsese and Sam Shepard. Scorsese’s NYU short The Big Shave was acquired and distributed, and Shepard, whose play The Unseen Hand Redford had admired at the Yale School of Drama, was personally handed $10,000 to develop a new short. “That wasn’t the best investment I ever made,” says Redford, “because he disappeared to Paris and blew the cash living the émigré life. I didn’t see him for a long time, but he eventually apologized and sent the money back.”
New ground was crossed. Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Gai Savoir was acquired, along with the notable shorts King, Murray