Today, the film industry lost not only one of its brightest stars, but also one of its biggest champions: Robert Redford, who was instrumental to two revolutions that transformed Hollywood.
An iconic face in such films as “All the President’s Men” and “The Natural,” Redford was a key figure of the New Hollywood — the late-’60s creative upheaval that brought fresh life to the film industry, at a time when television was siphoning audiences away and the studios were flailing to identify what the younger generation wanted. The answer: They wanted relevant stories and leading men like Redford, who could take the mantle from earlier matinee idols, and do so with a certain knowing twinkle in his eye that showed he was in on the joke.
Released in 1969, the free-spirited and forward-thinking Western “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” may have made Redford a star, but the Sundance Film Festival made him a saint, launching a near-total overhaul of the film business around writer-directors. Because success came early to “the kid” — a strawberry blond California-born sun god who battled the stereotype that he was just another pretty face — he took the opportunity to reinvent himself several times over the course of his career.
Redford was born in Santa Monica, Calif., but resented the urbanization and pollution that transformed his hometown, connecting instead with Utah’s unspoiled forests, building a cabin there as early as 1961. In the years that followed, Redford wore three hats: actor, the man who calls action (i.e. director of films such as “Ordinary People” and “Quiz Show”) and activist. On the latter front, Redford was known for his liberal causes, including his decades-long advocacy for all things environmental, though it’s the creation of the Sundance Film Festival in the mid-’80s — rebranding the Utah-based US Film Festival — that had the greatest impact on what movies are today.
All my life, critics have praised the golden era of ’70s cinema, of which Redford was a fixture, playing a wide range of iconic roles, from the rugged wilderness man in “Jeremiah Johnson” to the Jazz Age millionaire of “The Great Gatsby.” Two short months after the Watergate break-in, he appeared in 1972’s political satire “The Candidate,” and four years later, he embodied dogged Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” the definitive account of the moment America lost faith in its leaders.
Those movies are stone-cold classics, to be sure, and yet I believe the 1990s were every bit as important a decade, as a direct result of the independent film movement Redford was so committed to supporting. At a moment when Hollywood was again struggling, making star-driven tentpoles and sequels for corporations, audiences were craving originality. Sundance provided exactly that, along with a platform for the little guy: unknown filmmakers and actors, telling personal stories on limited budgets.
Sundance was more than just a festival; it was also an institute, founded in 1981 (20 years after Redford built his first cabin in Utah), committed to developing the next generation of storytellers by partnering them with more established mentors through its various labs. If it weren’t for Sundance — which attracted agents and execs looking for some ski time in its early years, but later became a veritable marketplace for independent movies in search of distribution — would the world have discovered such voices as Steven Soderbergh (“Sex, Lies and Videotape”), Quentin Tarantino (“Reservoir Dogs”), Wes Anderson (“Bottle Rocket”), Ryan Coogler (“Fruitvale Station”) and Rian Johnson (“Brick”)?
Redford worked tirelessly behind the scenes, but it helped enormously to have a star of his stature to serve as the face of such an event, lending showbiz cred to a festival that filled what started as a niche but became an entire sector of the industry: Sundance served as a place for discovery, focusing on fresh talents of diverse backgrounds. If people whom the studios might never have cast or otherwise entrusted to make a film could somehow do so on their own, Sundance became the ideal place for them to be recognized.
In recent years, though he had effectively retired from acting, Redford continued to appear in the occasional movie, including those by Sundance veterans such as J.C. Chandor (the one-man-show that is “All Is Lost”) and David Lowery (whose “The Old Man & the Gun” feels like a throwback to early Redford roles).
Redford’s acting career began a decade before “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” with roles on Broadway. One of his first big films, opposite Jane Fonda in “Barefoot in the Park,” was the direct result of playing the same part on stage, though he never looked back once Hollywood called.
“Butch Cassidy” opened the same year as Sam Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch” and was its opposite in nearly every way. Both films climax with a violent standoff, though “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” eschews the over-the-top carnage, ending on a freeze frame, rather than a bloodbath. (That also makes it a lighter alternative to “Bonnie and Clyde,” the Warren Beatty movie that kicked off the New Hollywood two years earlier.)
That playful tone proved an even better fit for “The Sting” (1973), which reunited Redford with director George Roy Hill and co-star Paul Newman. Redford is never more charming than he is in that multi-Oscar winner, though I’d argue that Sydney Pollack understood the actor’s potential better than any other director. The pair made seven movies together.
In “The Way We Were,” Pollack tapped Redford’s romantic potential (opposite Barbra Steisand), and in “Three Days of the Condor,” he emphasized the actor’s intelligence in the ’70s most entertaining (and sexiest) conspiracy thriller. Their two-decade collaboration built to “Out of Africa,” a sweeping, nearly last-of-its-kind Hollywood love story that robbed “The Color Purple” of Best Picture, but served as a fitting summit to Redford’s acting career, following on the heels of his beloved turn as all-American slugger Roy Hobbs in “The Natural.”
It was right around that time, in 1985, that he poured himself into Sundance. Today, when practically every city has at least one film festival, it may be hard to imagine how idealistic and risky Sundance was at its inception.
By this time in his career, Redford had already made the leap from actor to director with “Ordinary People,” a devastating family drama featuring hall-of-fame performances from its cast (Redford did not act in his debut, but won an Oscar for direction). If that project was the culmination of what he’d learned from the great directors he’d worked with, Sundance was an effort to open the field to others, to eliminate the barriers of entry and encourage stories that weren’t being told (as well as environmental-themed movies close to Redford’s heart, such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Cove”).
Over the years, aspiring filmmakers maxed out their credit cards to make calling-card projects, hoping to win the proverbial lottery: first being selected to play Sundance, and once there, hopefully sparking a bidding war for rights to their movie. More dreams were shattered than were ever made along the way.
Still, there’s no denying that Sundance served as both incubator and launchpad for some of cinema’s most important artists — many of whom were tapped to make studio tentpoles on the strength of their vision (half the Marvel movies were made by Sundance vets), which just goes to show how influential it was. Over the years, Redford has made a point of appearing on opening day of the festival, but never wanted to be the focus of attention there. Sundance was his way of giving back, of paying it forward — or, to put it in eco-conscious terms — of recycling the good fortune he’d enjoyed into opportunities for others. That, as much as his unforgettable film roles, will be legacy.
