Marc Hom

The war is over, the good guys won, and Los Angeles is less a city than a string of small towns stretching from the Pacific to the Sierras. Hollywood, sure, but orchards, too — plenty of green and two-lane roads. No TV, just movies at the Aero, sandlot baseball, an ocean a quick walk away. His neighborhood is lower working class, far more Mexican than Anglo, but everyone gets along. A fine time and place to be a kid.

He's a milkman's son, a lad who checks the box scores to see if Ted Williams got a couple of knocks yesterday, a boy with a paper route. He's on the corner at six in the morning, groggy, when the truck dumps the bale of the Santa Monica Independent. He folds up his papers one by one, stuffs 'em in his bike baskets, and off he rides. He hates getting up so early, but no one's around barking Slow down or Walk, don't run at him. He doesn't want to slow down. He needs to run.

He's a good ballplayer. And smart. Not a good student, but a thinker. He thinks about war slogans and about his uncle — his dad's younger brother — killed in Germany. Thinks about "It's not whether you win or lose that matters, but how you play the game." Baloney, he thinks. He thinks about Richard Nixon running for senator, his dad's dinner-table contempt for the man. Wednesday nights, he walks to the library and borrows a book — one book a week. That's how he falls in love with Greek mythology and cracks a window on a world beyond the mountains and the ocean, a world bigger than both.

Even then — before the flood of real estate money fills the green space and the two-lanes with concrete and freeways; before hell breaks loose and the Anglos and Mexicans start knifing one another; before he learns to love girls and Beat poetry and jazz and booze; before he ever paints or takes acting seriously — he's already prone to ditching school to hit the beach, already dreaming of the day he finally slides himself behind the wheel of a car and mashes the gas.

I'm going to get out of Dodge. I'm going to get out of here. I'm going to drive into the mountains, I'm going to drive to the desert, I'm going as far as I can and as fast as I can and as far away from here as I can.

"Then I hit the road and left," says Robert Redford, grinning. "What else would you like to know?"

Marc Hom

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969

Every human blessing is a curse. Consider Robert Redford's face: Not only once upon a time — in 1967, say, in Barefoot in the Park, in which Jane Fonda, all legs, bouffant, and sexual torque, seems downright unpretty beside the banked flame of Redford's physical perfection, unforced and unalloyed — but somehow even now, seventy-six years old, sun-baked and wind-whipped and ungorgeous at last, he's a handsome sumbitch, a rugged harmony of pure American manhood, from the dirt-blond impasto of his mane and his surprised blue eyes down to his half-grifter smile and still-square jaw.

Not his favorite subject, the face. The car got him out of Dodge; the promise of a baseball scholarship got him to the University of Colorado, where the booze helped get him tossed; painting took him to Paris and Italy, acting to New York City, where he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and began working on Broadway and television. But it was that face that made him a matinee idol and held him hostage.

"This constant reference to me being the way I looked, it made me crazy, like I was being put into a cage. Something locked in that kind of locked me in. You struggle — you say, 'No, I'm an actor.' I came into this because of the craft of acting. I began by doing a lot of character work on TV, just fun acting parts. I played rapists. I played crazies. That was me developing my craft, and it was a matter of pride to sink into a role and be convincing in that role. But instead, when it happened, I'm hearing about my blond hair. That was sad — I found out that I wasn't going to be let out of that cage. I think a lot of people thought my career started with Butch Cassidy."

When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was released in 1969, Redford was already an up-and-coming star who had no trust in stardom. He'd already turned down ten grand a week to star in a TV series and was producing a film of his own, Downhill Racer, which he hoped would be the first link in a trilogy of pictures about winning and losing in America. He had long since paid $500 for his first two acres of Utah, in the twelve-thousand-foot shadow of Mount Timpanogos, and he was adding more land each payday. He was a serious student of Native American and environmental issues. He also had been married for ten years to a Utah girl; had endured the loss of their first child, two months old, in 1959; and had three more children. No ingenue — just a working actor unbedazzled by his hometown.

Marc Hom

Barfoot in the Park, 1967

"There was nothing at the end of the rainbow for me here. Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood — I was born next door."

Paul Newman was on board to play Sundance; Newman wanted Jack Lemmon for his Butch, but Lemmon loathed horses. The studio hoped to land Marlon Brando or Warren Beatty or James Coburn. Then the director, George Roy Hill, met Redford and liked him well enough to introduce him to Newman, who liked him well enough to switch roles with him and sell the studio on the idea. The rest—the lifelong bond between Redford and Newman; the $100 million box-office take, more than the combined take of Midnight Cowboy and The Love Bug, the second- and third-highest-grossing movies of 1969; above all, the iconic, ur-American images of virility and indelible cool — is Hollywood history.

"No one was expecting that success, least of all me. It was a wonderful experience. We had fun. I got to do a lot of my own stunts. I got to ride horses. Paul and I became friends. But when I saw the rough cut, I said, 'What the hell is that song doing in there? "Raindrops"? It's not even raining. On a bicycle?'

"It was such an enormous shift in my life. Literally overnight, there was no longer any privacy. People were reacting to me in ways I wasn't expecting. It felt good — it felt flattering. But that soon evaporated when I realized my privacy was gone. I had to start thinking about having a life of my own — my kids might have to go underground and stay away. I became publicity shy around that time, but then you found out it wasn't going away."

There's no note of drama in his voice, much less self-pity. He's a matter-of-fact guy anyway, and he's not feeling well. It's a couple weeks until the Sundance Film Festival opens, he has a million things to do, and whatever he came down with over the holidays is hanging on. We're sitting in his office in Santa Monica — Wildwood Enterprises. The reception area's walls are hung with movie posters — his movies — and it's a snap to trace the arc of his stardom by the size of his face: As they march forward in time, it gets bigger and bigger.

"I got really sick over Christmas. The temperature went down to 10 degrees and I was skiing, and I was wiped out because I'd been doing stuff in Madrid, in Istanbul. But it'd take that to slow me down. I've been able to carve out spaces for myself. At Sundance, I'm in the mountains — my property is private. I get on a horse and ride for three, four hours. Sometimes five. I get lost. But when I'm in, I'm in. I have this office because I have to. I come here if I have to."

How often?

"As little as I have to be. I'm never here more than two, three days at a crack. I get itchy — traffic, freeways, out-of-control development. There was never a land-use plan. This was a beautiful city once, and it isn't anymore."

Matter-of-fact, nothing sour in it. Blue jeans, denim shirt. "Bob Redford," he said when he came out of his office to greet me, and when I thanked him for making time, "Don't be silly." And when I use the word legacy, he says "God, no" and shakes his head.

"It was just one foot in front of the other and don't look back."

Probably a good thing.

"Well," Redford says, "that's just the way it is. There's no profit in it."

Continues on -->...

Marc Hom

Downhill Racer, 1969

Marc Hom

Easy for the cowboy to say. May even be true. But for a man of a certain age writing about Redford, looking back is a natural pleasure, and something more. There's a one-liner batted back and forth by Butch and Sundance while they're tracked by a relentless posse assembled by the owner of a railroad they've robbed one too many times: Who are those guys? Forty-odd years later, for the man of a certain age who came of age when Butch debuted, that same question applies to Redford and Newman and to the characters they embody, the sweet goof of their buddyhood, all that jazz. No murderous swagger, Peckinpavian cruelty, or existential lament: Men, including me, loved them — women even more. Who in his right mind would prefer Ratso Rizzo and Joe Buck drenched in Midnight Cowboy's human sewage? Who but an adolescent riven by rage and hormones could find a pulse of honesty in Easy Rider's self-righteous sociopathy?

They aren't rhetorical questions — not when it comes to how Redford was judged as an actor. The blessing of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came with a curse: Pauline Kael, the most influential critic in the history of American cinema by several orders of magnitude. Kael was reviewing movies at The New Yorker then — her tenure there ended in 1991 — and her review of Butch was titled "The Bottom of the Pit." She wasn't the only critic to dislike the movie — Roger Ebert was no fan—but Kael was oddly dismissive of Redford, who had caught her eye in a good way earlier in his career.

Marc Hom

The Candidate, 1972

"Redford, who is personable and can act, is overdue for stardom, though it will be rather a joke if he gets it out of this nonacting role," she wrote. The joke grew bitter: When Jeremiah Johnson was released in 1972, she compared him to Lassie, unfavorably, and lied — there's no other word for it — about the movie's last scene, claiming that Redford was flipping off his Native American foe rather than returning his salute. All this, though, was mother's milk compared with her savaging of The Sting, the reunion of Redford and Newman and George Roy Hill: "I would much rather see a picture about two homosexual men in love than see two romantic actors going through a routine whose point is that they're so adorably, smiley butch that they can pretend to be in love and it's all innocent."

Truly a hideous money shot, and Kael was also bitch enough to note that Redford "has turned almost alarmingly blond — he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth."

Kael's contempt is hardly mysterious. For all her talent and insight, she was often a bully, and she begat dozens of film critics whose notion of homage to her frequently amounted — and amounts — to pleasuring themselves and one another by sneering at mainstream movies and bemoaning the awful appetites of the ticket-buying public. And if her viciousness did no harm to Redford's matinee-idol status, it nonetheless taught her sycophants that anybody taking cinema seriously ought to revile him.

Jeremiah Johnson is a worthy picture by any reasonable standard, as are The Candidate, Downhill Racer, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here — all released in the four years between Butch and The Sting, all testament to his faith in film as truth-telling and his refusal to be imprisoned by his image.

"I started to get uncomfortable. I felt I wasn't free to do other things. So I'd go to Warner Brothers and say, 'I'd like to make a film about the election process — about how we elect somebody based on cosmetics rather than substance — and call it The Candidate.' They'd say, 'If you do this larger film, we'll let you make it.' That allowed me to make small films within the studio system."

Redford grasped the deeply personal nature of Kael's vitriol only when he met her in the 1970s.

"I'm at a restaurant with my wife and some friends in Santa Monica, and a waiter comes up and says, 'Mr. Redford, Mr. Newman is in the next room.' By this time, Paul and I had a wonderful thing going, playing gags on each other, so I said, 'So? I'm busy here.' I blew him off. We finish our meal, we're on our way out of the place, and this woman comes running toward me and lunges at me. She grabs both my hands and she says, 'I'm Pauline Kael. You must hate me. But you have to understand something. You let me down.'

"There was so much nervous tension coming at me, I couldn't put this thing together — I thought it was a gag. My first thought was Newman's paid somebody a fiver to come out and pretend to be Pauline Kael. But then when she said 'You let me down,' I was confused. She said, 'I'm here for the stupid Academy Awards — if you'd like to talk, I'd be happy to see you.' I was so thrown that I said, 'Let me call you.'

Marc Hom

The Way We Were, 1973

"I realized it really was her, and then I saw it all. That's where a critic goes over the line — they want to own you. They want to dictate your path. I called and she said, 'Are you going to come by for a drink?'

"I said, 'I don't think it would be appropriate. I appreciate the invitation, but I don't think I should.' And then she really got pissed. Everything I did from then on, she just tore into me."

Kael, of whom Woody Allen once said, "She has everything a great critic needs except judgment," died in 2001. George Roy Hill passed in 2002. Redford lost Paul Newman in 2008, four months after the death of Sydney Pollack, a close friend for almost fifty years who directed Redford in seven movies, including Jeremiah Johnson.

"We're all heading to the same station," Redford says. "There's a great line by T.S. Eliot: 'There's only the trying. The rest is not our business.' Just keep trying. Do what you can, but don't stop, and particularly don't stop at that sign that says success. Run that light. Run that light."

Still a Porsche man?

"Oh, yeah."

Still go fast?

"You bet. I'll have breakfast in Napa Valley at my place and I'll drive straight through 720 miles to Salt Lake for dinner."

Quick.

"I'm moving 120, 130 miles an hour on an open highway."

Shit. Seriously?

"I don't want to talk too much about this. I just love movement. I get really antsy if I can't move."

He's moving. His new film, The Company You Keep (out April 5) — Redford directed and stars in it — is a thriller and a rough history lesson about old Weather Underground members coming in from the cold to face murder charges stemming from a botched bank robbery back in the 1970s. Later this year, he's a cast of one in All Is Lost, written and directed by J.C. Chandor, whose Margin Call was a hell of a nice piece of work. No dialogue, no other actors, and, as far as I know, no horses — just Redford lost at sea and fighting to survive.

Continues on -->...

Marc Hom

The Sting, 1973

Rob Greene, 1959

Winter travel tip: Utah in January gets mighty frigid. Pack a toque, but not your knit cap with the Obama logo. Romney won 73 percent of the Utah vote — his biggest margin in any state — and judging by the scowls that started when I deplaned in Salt Lake City, Utahans took his loss hard. I understood why they were all shooting me the stink-eye only after a parking valet was kind enough to enlighten me, Utah-style.

"That hat's quite a statement," he told me when I got out of the rental car.

Thanks, pally. Say, where are all the mountains?

"Inversion."

Whatever the hell that is, all I can see in the far air is something like smog, and I know goddamn well that there are goddamn mountains buried in it, but I can't discern any until I'm fifty miles down the road and exit I-15 onto State Route 52 and proceed a few miles pocked by stoplights and chain stores before taking a left on 189, which is where the fog clears, and all at once the sky fills with mountains, white and jagged and so holy-shit sudden that steering the car no longer feels possible or necessary. The face of the planet — its upthrust mass — will simply pull me and the Chrysler 300 onward, upward into the blue heaven above.

"I know," says Redford when I get to Sundance and try to describe what the drive felt like. "It's almost biblical."

I mean, it's foggy the whole way — it could be Los Angeles....

"Or Beijing. When we get in an inversion, which is the hot air keeping the cold air down, then all the fumes from traffic, all the pollution just sits there — and then you rise above it. It's a wonderful feeling."

We're in Redford's office at the Sundance Resort; the festival films show in Park City, about thirty miles north. The five-thousand-acre resort, packed with Saturday skiers, sits on the slopes of Mount Timpanogos. Redford's office, a creaking one-floor affair hung with icicles, is a far cry from Santa Monica.

Redford has homes in Napa Valley and Santa Fe, but here is where, long ago, he fell in love hard with Timpanogos.

"Before I got kicked out of college, I would drive from Colorado home to Los Angeles, and I always loved taking different routes. There was a canyon road, a little shortcut. I looked up and, Whoa — I saw the back of this mountain. It reminded me of the Jungfrau in Switzerland. Its strength and its gruffness are masculine, but it also has an embracing shape to it. If you sit at the base of it, you're going into the womb of this mountain.

"That's how it started. I bought two acres in 1961, and I built a cabin in 1963. Some part of me was in search of a place I could make my home. I knew that my heart was in the West. Who I am, what I am beyond just being an actor — that part of my life started here. Here is my real home."

This, too, came with a curse of sorts; crazy love always does. First you're thrilled just to own a piece of the womb, but sooner or later you can't live without the whole thing.

"Whenever I had a few extra bucks, I'd buy some property around my house just to protect it. Then in the late 1960s, tax laws changed. The West became wide open, like a Gold Rush for developers. So I could smell the hunter coming into the forest, and I made a deal with a sheepherder—"

A sheepherder?

Marc Hom

All the President's Men, 1976

"A sheepherder, yeah — the only owners prior to me was the Stewart family, who homesteaded this land. Originally, they were government surveyors who became sheepherders. They owned about three thousand acres. I went to the family and I said, 'I want to buy this. I promise to protect your heritage here. I'll give you thirty acres to hold in perpetuity, but I want to buy it, to protect it.' "

This was 1968, mind you — pre-Butch. Redford had to borrow money and find other investors to swing the deal. Then he had to figure out how to pay the note.

"Boy, was I naive. I was thirty years old. Innocent about business. There was nothing here but a little J-bar ski lift and a tiny shack, a restaurant called the Ki-Te-Kai. The sheepherder was Mormon and had been on a mission someplace where ki-te-kai means 'come and get it.'

"I had partners at that time who were going to help me develop Sundance to get revenue. I wanted to protect it, and they thought it was stupid, but they figured they could humor me in the beginning and then convince me we should develop real estate here. They had estimated they could pull about $15 million out of it, but when they realized I was serious, they freaked out. They bailed. So I took on the whole load in 1970.

"I suddenly realized, God, I can't produce revenue. I had to do something. I built a restaurant with two other guys for $19,000. I did the stonework, and it felt great. I felt like my life was expanding to have some meaning to it. Not only did I have a career that was developing, but I was sculpting in a way, and so it was great fun."

He had less fun fighting a consortium of utility companies planning to build a coal-fired power plant on the Kaiparowits Plateau, a piece of land in southern Utah that eventually became part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Redford joined the battle in 1975, fully aware that plenty of Utahans were sold on the proposed plant and the jobs the utilities promised it would bring.

"I paid for that victory, paid for it because it's an area of Utah I've loved. Did a book called The Outlaw Trail, where I rode it with Ed Abbey and a bunch of people. They weren't having any public hearings, so I thought the only way to get attention was to go on 60 Minutes."

Redford called Don Hewitt, the show's creator. Hewitt sent Dan Rather. The piece drew six thousand pieces of mail. "People even sent money," says Redford. And before long, the utilities abandoned their plan.

"I got fried. Threats to my life, my family's lives. I was the villain."

The carpetbagging movie star.

He laughs a dry laugh. "Oh, boy. Was I ever."

I don't mention it to Redford, but one of his resort's parking-lot guys still hasn't forgiven him — not for the Kaiparowits plant, but on account of the forty-five thousand festival attendees harshing his mellow. He lives in Heber City, about halfway between the resort and Park City, and traffic in the canyon is brutal.

So I try it out on him: Every human blessing is a curse.

"Nice hat," he says. Drier than Redford's laugh.

Redford himself seems flummoxed by the whole thing.

"It's become a happy monster. I just never dreamed it would get to this size. I never dreamed it would take that much of my time."

No master plan: It truly was one foot in front of the other, starting with Redford's first directing job, Ordinary People, in 1980. He bought the novel, looked for a studio willing to make the movie, and got a green light from Barry Diller, the chairman of Paramount.

"The rest of the people at the studio — Michael Eisner and some of the others — they didn't want to do it. Barry said, 'Let him go away and do it.' I went to Lake Forest, on the north side of Chicago, and made the film. Nobody bothered me."

Marc Hom

Ordinary People, 1980

No one bothered Redford because his budget was $6 million. The movie grossed $55 million, won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, left Pauline Kael unimpressed ("It's earnest, it means to improve people, and it lasts a lifetime"), and gave Redford long pause.

"I thought, Wait a minute — success has a dark side to it. This is a high point, and it should be a cautionary time. Don't just roll off this. Stop, take a year off, go back to zero. Where do you want to go with your work?

"I thought I'd like to put something back, because I had been taken with a Native American policy: When you take something out of the land, you want to put something back. So I decided to think for a while about what I could do that might generate some opportunity for somebody else.

"Another thing happening at the time was Hollywood moving toward being centralized. The money was in the burgeoning youth market — big cartoons, Superman and Dick Tracy, high-budget cartoons. They were great, but it didn't interest me. It was no longer a place where I could do the smaller work. They weren't making those films anymore.

"I thought, Uh-oh, we're going to lose this opportunity to give voice to new work. Okay, there's a space here where we can take new artists who are independent — who have skills but need help. We can provide mentoring and help them develop their skills to the point where they can get their films made. So that's how it started."

It wasn't a film festival for years; it was the Sundance Institute, and Redford started it in 1981 with a $25,000 NEA grant and fifty grand of his own.

"I was able to start the lab program. I'd contact my colleagues — accomplished screenwriters, accomplished actors, directors, cinematographers, and editors—and I said, 'Would you be willing to volunteer time to help new filmmakers?' And I was lucky — they came.

"A few years later, we were succeeding in developing some filmmakers accomplished enough to have their films made. That led to the idea of a festival — a gathering place where we can bring them together and we'll share their work and they'll share their work with each other, a home where they can come—and if we're lucky, somebody else will come."

Lord, yes. Sundance hits like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Reservoir Dogs, and Clerks came to define independent film as genre and product, offering both an alternative to Hollywood and a chance to cross over into mainstream commercial success.

Which proved, naturally, to be something of a curse.

"Suddenly the merchants started to come," says Redford. "The agents came, the managers came, the publicity people came, the paparazzi came, then the fashion houses came. It's not as much fun for me as it was in the beginning. It's time for me now to go back and focus more on what I love doing and what I was meant to be, the artist at work or the director. That's where I want to be now. It's the endeavor — the joy for me is in the struggling, the not knowing. It's the climb up the mountain."

Continues on -->...

Marc Hom

Out of Africa, 1985

Marc Hom

To judge by the photos taped to Redford's office wall, old age confers one profound blessing, at least: freedom from beauty's curse. Each is a shot of his face, bruised, battered, swollen, bandaged, taken during the shooting of All Is Lost.

"It was ego, just ego. I used to like to do my own stunts, and I thought at this age I could still do it. The director said, 'No, no, I just want you for close-ups. I have two doubles.' I said, Okay, but then when we got there and things started moving, I thought, Well, maybe I can do that.

"Once I started doing stuff, he got excited — and the next thing I knew, the doubles were gone and I was getting the shit beat out of me. Turned out to be a mistake."

Redford's grinning, delighted, anything but sorry. Who the hell do you think taped those snapshots to the wall?

Still like acting?

"I do. I do. I do. I think a lot of people think I don't do it anymore."

Maybe because you've taken so much time off.

"Well, I've gone and done other things. Not so much time off as focused on Sundance. Too many hands to be shook, too many sponsors to thank. I'm very happy about that—I'm not going to turn a cold shoulder to success — but I'm not comfortable doing it. It's taken me farther away from what I love — to be the artist at work. That's what this last year was about, with The Company You Keep and this film. That's where I want to be now."

That line from Butch— "Can I move? I'm better when I move" —that's you.

"Spring-loaded. The way to deal with arthritis is you keep moving. As long as I can play hard tennis, as long as I can ski or ride a horse — all kinds of things can come your way. But as long as you can, do it. People who retire die. My dad retired and died shortly after. Just keep moving."

Marc Hom

A River Runs Through It, 1992

Someplace far down the road, someone else can write Redford's elegy; just pray it's no spiritual heir to Pauline Kael. It's not too soon to say that Sundance alone — the labs, workshops, and festival — embodies a bequest to the act and art of moviemaking more selfless, vast, and lasting than any single actor's or director's in Hollywood history. It is a matter of fact that nearly twenty-five years ago, Redford hosted the "Greenhouse Glasnost" at Sundance, bringing scientists from the Soviet Union and America together to discuss the issue of climate change before climate change was even an issue. As for his movies, no mainstream actor, director, or producer has examined for so long, or with such intensity — from The Candidate to All the President's Men and Quiz Show to The Company You Keep — the state of his country's soul.

None of that matters right now. There's a Sundance trustees' meeting and he's late for that already — and nature is calling, as nature will.

"Hold that last question," says Robert Redford, rising from behind the desk. "I'll be right back. I've got to take a leak."

The last question is about A Walk in the Woods, the Bill Bryson book about a couple of pals walking the Appalachian Trail. Redford talked about doing it back in 2005 and hasn't given up on it yet.

"That's the next project we're preparing. It was initially set up for me and Paul."

That would've been perfect.

"Good guy."

He was some tough interview.

"Was he? Very good guy."

How come you didn't get the movie made?

"It was hard for him," Redford says. "And for me."

Newman turned eighty in 2005, and never acted again.

"He wanted desperately to do it," says Redford. "It's just tough."

What a blessing it would've been to watch them again together on the screen — to wonder once more after all these years: Who are those guys?

The last of their breed, and the best.

Marc Hom

The Company You Keep, 2013

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io