Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [97]
In September, Downhill Racer previewed first. Redford and Ritchie were horrified. Paramount’s marketing people had promised Gregson that the unheralded movie would not be shown after a major feature. They reneged, screening the movie after Midnight Cowboy at a Santa Barbara cinema. “How wrong can you get?” says Redford. “Santa Barbara is a sunshine retirement haven for easterners and the U.S. military. People come to get away from snow. In ten minutes I saw the audience wanted out. People began leaving.” Ali MacGraw, who was attending with her husband, Robert Evans, comforted Ritchie: “She told me it was a great movie, an innovative movie, so fuck ’em all. I took heart from her, because she was a lady of discernment.” Evans, representing Paramount, slapped Redford’s shoulder and told him, “I thought it played very well.” Redford found no comfort in this, since three-quarters of the audience had already bolted the theater. A half hour later, in the restaurant next door, Evans brought in the audience response cards. He was frowning.
“All right. They’re bad.”
“How bad?” Redford asked.
“You can take a look if you want, but they’re all bad.”
Ritchie and Redford set about reediting the film from scratch, taking out the music track and liberally reinstating a “wild track” of natural ambient sounds to enhance the documentary atmosphere. The movie was, says Redford, vastly improved, but the distribution delay suggested a failure from which, receiptswise, the film would never recover.
Meanwhile, the journey to completing Butch Cassidy had been bumpy. The back injury at the end of filming had laid Hill low, and he was forced to edit lying down. But he persevered, delivering a quirky, original movie, laced with sepia-tinged stop frames and stand-apart pop music. The music, all twelve minutes of it, which seemed to amplify the humor, had been an afterthought. At the first rough cut screening in April, the music was a utility sound track, borrowed from existing movies. John Foreman, Paul Newman’s producing partner, had suggested the pop song interlude that accompanies the bicycle montage in which Butch befriends Sundance’s girl, Etta. In April, Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” decorated the scene. After the rough cut, Burt Bacharach was summoned and he came up with “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which bewildered Redford: “I did not know what it was doing there. I knew George wanted to beef up the relationship between Butch and Etta but … a song like that? First of all, it wasn’t raining in the scene. And then, what had any of it to do with their relationship?” Zanuck suggested the song be dropped. Hill refused. The whole editing phase, said Hill, was a firefight.
A pre-premiere screening was held under the auspices of the film society at Yale, Hill and Newman’s alma mater. Redford attended with low expectations. “I wasn’t focused on it. George was, because it was his baby. Bill Goldman was the most excited, because he was obsessed with all the promotional aspects of the business as much as filmmaking itself.” Among the guests was Barbra Streisand, meeting Redford for the first time. “We drove up in a limo with George and there was this milling crowd,” says Redford. “I assumed they were students doing the studenty thing. But when we got out, it was terrifying. Pushing, shoving, screaming. The bleachers were overturned. Joanne [Woodward] was knocked to the ground, and Paul was seriously pissed. Barbra’s dress was almost torn off her body, and I had the feeling we could have been hurt. It was the first time I’d been scared by a crowd. But I also thought it might be a good omen.”
The “star power” of the opening night, with Newman, especially, in attendance, was the intoxicant. But after the screening, when the students voiced their