Robert Redford - Michael Feeney Callan [98]
The first media preview in San Francisco, as Goldman described in his memoirs, was “disastrous.” Then came the nationwide opening later in September. “It was the strangest opening I ever experienced,” said Hill, “because it started really ‘up’ at Yale, and then it plunged down. It didn’t go to plan. Goldman and I went to a midtown Manhattan theater to watch, and the audience yawned. I told Bill, ‘Well, we tried.’ And I did my best to forget it, which was tough, because I had thrown everything into it.”
The print reviews mostly were poor. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael’s lambasting review was titled, “The Bottom of the Pit.” Hill was deeply offended and wrote personally to her, in a letter that began, “Listen, you fucking cunt.” “I thought she was unkind,” said Hill. “Her way was to be snide when she personally disliked you, and it’s unfortunate, but a lot of very smart people get away with appalling crudity because they’re articulate and witty. I especially hated self-serving wit, so I answered her with the crudity and tastelessness she commanded.”
Audiences nationwide rejected the critics’ consensus. Within months box office receipts exceeded $40 million. The movie had cost just $6.5 million. “It moved by great word of mouth,” says Redford. “People saw it and told their friends. It was an instance where the critics meant little. The audiences made up their own minds.” Hill was stunned, “because I’d decided, Okay, it didn’t work.” Newman was more phlegmatic. “Movies are like kids. They’re always surprising. Butch Cassidy was just one of those brats that races past anything you hoped for.” Redford believed inserting the Bacharach song made a huge difference. “How bad can a guy’s judgment be? I hated the song, and suddenly, for the next six months, I had to listen to it everywhere I went. I mean everywhere: cabs, restaurants, stores. There was nowhere to go to get away from it, and it was at the top of the music charts for half a year.”
The effects of Butch Cassidy were far-reaching for Redford. In February 1968 he had been sleeping in hotel hallways in Grenoble with James Salter to save money. Two years later, in February 1970, he was a national icon on the cover of Life magazine, labeled “New Star Robert Redford: A Real Sundance Kid.” The magnitude of the hit, believed Michael Ritchie, helped the recut of Downhill Racer. “We were sometimes a little down about recutting, and I think it helped, if only to remind us how great an actor Bob was and how good his instincts were.”
Universal, too, was encouraged and finally released Willie Boy, which had been sitting on a shelf, a month after Butch Cassidy. Eight weeks later Paramount officially released Downhill Racer.
“I really cared about Downhill Racer,” says Redford, “but Paramount distribution threw it away. First, they wanted to open it big, like another Butch Cassidy. I, of course, resisted. I said, ‘It’s a small film, not a blockbuster.’ So they said, ‘Okay, we’ll change tack.’ But they opened it, of all places, in Kitzbühel, Austria, playing it like an après-ski treat. I later learned what really happened. Charlie Bluhdorn had moved back to his sugarcane operation. The honeymoon was over in terms of his intercession, so we were back in the hands of the so-called distribution pros. I learned they used small movies like Downhill Racer as an expenses dump. People ran up lunch expenses on other productions and attributed them to costs for our promotion.” Redford earned not a dime—not even a salary—from Downhill Racer. But the sad fate of the film did nothing to diminish the level of stardom he had now achieved. By year’s end he was a daily staple in the gossip columns in newspapers, and the networks were rescheduling the forgotten TV shows he starred in. Richard Schickel, who knew him well, wrote a long feature on him in Time magazine in December. Lorillard, the tobacco company, launched a Redford