Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [95]
“But in the end it didn’t work,” says Redford. “We misread the campus spirit and got no further than the package we distributed to the University of Pennsylvania. At face value, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and those Chicago Seven guys were winning the war against Vietnam and right-wingism. What we saw was the weeklong takeover of the Columbia campus, and the antiwar rallies. But Nixon was smart and he was lucky. He fought back, and the triumphalism that came with America winning the space race and putting a man on the moon helped him no end. The pendulum was swinging and the appetite for counterculture was uncertain. It surprised me, but the students didn’t want radical film. They wanted to see Doctor Zhivago like everyone else. They were conditioned to want Doctor Zhivago. EYR lasted seven months and lost $250,000. Mike Frankfurt had told me, ‘Don’t worry, at least it’s a good tax-deductible investment.’ It wasn’t even that. But it started something rolling.”
PART THREE
Life on the Mountain
To get to art, one leaves experience—the simple living of life, the following of one’s nature.… Art […] is a journey into thin air, a walk into whiteness, where you lose everything but yourself.
Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism
12
Fame
In January, while Butch Cassidy was in postproduction, Downhill Racer started shooting. Briefly, it felt cursed. Redford was tired, after twelve weeks in the saddle on Butch, and unfocused. While attempting a shortcut at the resort, riding over a ridge on a snowmobile, he crashed. His knee went into the motor and was sliced up. He was hospitalized, and it suddenly looked like he wouldn’t be able to do the ski sequences in Switzerland. “In the movie I look uncomfortable in those early scenes because I was in agony,” he recalls. “But I had no time for recovery. It had come to a point where there was no turning back.”
Michael Ritchie, who felt he was just getting to know Redford, carefully watched him work. Ritchie, Harvard educated and a magpie for literature, found a friend in Redford. “But the intellectual rationalizations peter out,” said Ritchie. “We were at the point where I had to step up with the proverbial bullhorn and say, ‘Act!’ And when that happened, I was surprised. I’d seen Bob’s work on TV and film. I felt I knew his technique. But I saw that he had changed post–Butch Cassidy. He was a different actor.”
It was true. Prior to Willie Boy, a rhythmic theatricality informed Redford’s performances; playing Coop he introduced laconic understatement, and playing Sundance refined it. “Bob rolled that on into Downhill Racer,” said Ritchie. “He found something in the spatial power of silence, and that became his reference point for Chappellet. I’d take something Salter had written and say, ‘Hey, Bob, you know what we could do here?’ And Bob would say, ‘We do nothing.’ I’d say, ‘Maybe we could use some effects or music,’ and he’d say, ‘No, nothing.’ The end result, with Chappellet as with the Sundance Kid, was that audiences had to reach out to find Bob.”
Redford’s theory about Chappellet, honed with Salter, was that he was a team skier in name only; in fact, dazed by the hunger for personal victory, Chappellet is disconnected from the world, from his father, his coach, his life. Ritchie thought this brave, that Redford was disdainfully anatomizing the sacred place of the jock in society. Redford felt impelled: “I’d been sold on the wondrous jock since childhood. Sports was the glory business. But in my lifetime it changed. The way the old guys conducted themselves—Jack Dempsey, Joe DiMaggio—was a whole lot different from the guys of the sixties. The outspokenness started with Muhammad Ali. And by the seventies, the bad behavior of guys like [Olympic swimming gold medalist] Mark Spitz became de rigueur. It was cool to be a jerk. Winning was everything, bad behavior now excused. That was what I wanted to plumb: Chappellet the asshole. He isn