Adventures in the Screen Trade (29 page)

Often, when you begin a project, you fantasize about getting this star or that. You almost never do. Waldo was an exception: The only star we wanted was Redford; no other performer was mentioned. He was involved with us almost from day one. He wanted to do the part and, when he got the Final script, agreed to do it. And he was wonderful.

Now, Robert Redford at this time was not just the biggest star in the world. He was a phenomenon. In the period preceding Waldo's release, he had starred in The Sting, The Way We Were, and The Great Gabby. Plus the enormously successful rereleases of two other hits: Jeremiah Johnson and Batch. No star, at least in my time in movies, has ever had such heat focused on him.

And it is my firm belief that because of his presence in the film, giving a superb performance in a role tailored solely for his talents, that the movie was a commercial disappointment.

In order to try and make sense of the above, it's necessary to know a little of the plot of the movie and the world it dealt with: barnstorming.

The barnstorming era-often referred to as "the short-pants period offlying"-began roughly with the end of World War I and ended with the Depression. When peace came, the Europeans immediately grasped the potential future of commercial aviation, which is why so many of the great foreign airlines were founded around 1919.

No such thought occurred in America. Planes had been useful in taming the Hun, but that was done. Interest in aviation dwindled and all but stopped, not to be reborn until the Lindbergh flight in '27.

During that interim, it was the barnstormers who kept flying alive in America. They were either pilots who had served in the war or young men who wanted to fly. Planes, hundreds and thousands of them, were left in crates, just waiting to be assembled.

What the barnstormers did, at least in the beginning, was to give people rides, sometimes at a dollar a minute. Many if not. most people at this time in America, especially in the Midwest, had never seen an airplane, much less ridden in one.

So for several years, in the late teens and early twenties, a plane would appear in rural areas and it would buzz a town and then land in a field. A crowd would gather and the pilot-a genuinely romantic figure, a man who would usually claim, modestly, that his war experiences were nothing really all that remarkable-this white-scarred figure would make his pitch and then take people up for rides. And at the end of the day he would more than likely tie his plane down by the side of a barn, away from the wind, in case a storm came up. After which, if he was lucky, he would be given a free meal by some farmer, do his best to seduce any local wenches, and be off into the skies again the following dawn.

It was a frolicsome time, and the barnstormers would outsmart others in their trade, trying to get the best towns for themselves.

Then, in the early twenties, people began getting tired of it, so the pilots often banded together and did stunt shows to gather crowds. These shows were dangerous, and often people were killed in crashes.

Then, when Lindbergh happened, flying started to become Big Business. Those bamstormers still alive often drifted to Hollywood, where they did stunts for news cameras or stunt work for war movies. Most of them ended up broke, or crippled, or dead.

When Hill and I worked on the story, we found that the structure of the piece almost dictated itself. It fell, naturally, into three acts. The first, the fun-and-games act, had Waldo Pepper, our hero, engaged insulting and lying about his past and taking people up for rides and having his way with women.

The second act was the air show act. Fun and games are gone. The air show stunts get increasingly spectacular and hairy. Finally a girl (Susan Sarandon, and was she terrific) dies during a show. Waldo, who is innocent, is blamed and barred for life from flying.

Act three: Hollywood. Waldo, who really only lives to fly, is an outlaw now, doing stunt work under an assumed name. Finally he gets a chance to do battle with his hero, a great German war ace. They fight it out in the skies, with no bullets, both of them lost souls, trying to recapture a past that for Waldo never was. The movie ends on the climactic air fight where they tear each other's planes apart, with the cameras rolling.

Now, this is, relatively speaking, dark material. Oedipus it isn't, but it's a long way from Animal House. Waldo, a brilliant pilot who never got his chance in the war, is bounded from his passion, first by public apathy, then by an unfair legal judgment, finally by the forces of commerce-the Powers That Be in aviation don't want barnstormers around; they're dangerous when you're trying to convince the public to travel in safety aloft.

But the movie begins brightly. "Rollicking adventures," etc., etc. Not only was the fun-and-games act a way of getting the au- dience with us, it was also historically valid. Our problem was this: How do you indicate to an audience that bad times arc coming?

The solution was simple: The credits would be moody, mournful, dark. What we had was a beautiful sad tune playing while what we showed were the faces of young dead pilots accompanied by a series of still shots of terrible plane crashes. Planes in trees, planes stuck in rooflops, like that. We were alerting the audience to be ready for what was to come.

No picture I've been involved with aroused the expectations of Waldo Pepper. A giant star in a romantic adventure, a major director working from the single deepest passion of his life, the most spectacular aerial stunts maybe since Wings. I received calls from people in the business and the word was this: Waldo would pick up all the marbles. Hill and Redford had worked together twice before: Butch and Snag. Waldo would complete the trilogy.

I saw the sneak in Boston. Hill was there, some Universal executives were there, the place was packed. We were all nervous-normal at such a time. The movie began. The credits were lovely, the audience was properly quiet. Then the fun- and-games act began-

-and they loved it. Roars of laughter. They "fell about," as the English would have it. That sound of a group of strangers rising to your work-it's rare and it's one of the things you live for if you're in the movie business.

Now the movie elided into the second act of its story, the part that dealt with air shows. No problem-the audience was still with us. There were stunts, other air maneuvers-we still had them.

Then we came to the most sensational stunt of all-a midair plane-to-plane transfer. From the beginning of our story talks, we knew we wanted such a moment; it's an incredible sight to see, especially if the camera is set in such a way as to remove the possibility that we might be faking it.

The plot set up was this: Susan Sarandon played the girl friend of Redford's buddy. She begins the movie as this kind of wide-eyed innocent and, before our eyes, becomes obsessed with being the " It ' Girl of the Skies." A star.

The stunt the pilots agreed to try to draw a crowd was to have a plane fly right down the main street of a small town with Sarandon standing on the edge of one wing. Then, with the whole town watching, her clothes are rigged to come off. She's supposed to stand there frozen and helpless (the barnstormers did this kind of thing, by the way) and then the plane is to come back to the field outside town and land and all the locals will come running and take rides and spend money and a happy time will be had by all.

Only Sarandon freezes in fear on the wing end, and the plane can't land, because her weight makes the machine lopsided, and if it comes down like that, it will crash. Redford is not flying the plane, he's waiting back at the field, but when the plane comes close he realizes what's happened and he jumps into another plane, gets someone to fly him up close to Sarandon's plane. The two machines maneuver in the sky. Redford gets ready to switch from his plane to Sarandon's, grabbing hold on the opposite side of the wing from her, because if he comes up next to her, his added weight may cause her plane to go out of control and crash.

Dead silence from the audience. The two planes come close, Redford's about to make the plane-to-plane transfer, but the planes are parted by the wind. Again they maneuver together. Again the winds part them. Tension, as they say, is mounting. (The actual stunt, by the way, was done by a sixty-eighl-year-old man who got it on the first take.)

But the audience doesn't know it's a sixty-eight-year-old man. All they know is this: Susan Sarandon is clutching the wing of one plane, and Bob Waldo Pepper Redford is going to risk his life to save her.

And he makes the switch! Thousands of feet up, a figure grapples his way from one plane to another.

Everyone's stopped with their popcorn now, staring at the screen. I was staring, too, probably just as caught as they were. The transfer is a really chilling moment because it's shot from above and you can see the ground far below. No cuts to faces, no way to fake it. They 're up there.

Now the stunt really begins to get hairy. Redford makes his way slowly to the center of the plane, shouts to the pilot. Put the plane in a shallow dive to give it added balance-he's going to make the move out to where Sarandon, speechless, stares blankly out.

The plane begins a shallow dive. Redford, inch by dangerous inch, starts toward Sarandon, only now he's talking to her, telling her it's okay, everything's going to be fine, he's coming. No response from Sarandon. No sound but the sound of the

motor and the wind. Redford is twelve feet away from her now now ten. Talking soothingly, telling her that all she has to do is take his hand, grab hold tight, just take his hand, take his hand.

Eight feet away from her now. Now six. He reaches out his strong arm, still talking to her, still telling her it's okay, everything's going to be fine.

Sarandon blinks a couple of limes. He's getting through to her. The fear, which had her so totally, is beginning to break.

On Redford comes, talking, arm out. Closer and closer. Take my hand. Just. take my hand. Five feet. Take my hand. It's all right. We'll laugh about this later. Four feet. Almost there. Still he talks, his strong voice soothing. Take my hand now. Please, that's all you have to do. Take my hand. Take my hand. Now we're on Sarandon. His meaning registers. The fear retreats even more. Now we're on Redford-so close he can almost grab her, talking to her every moment. Now we're on Sarandon again and at long last she reaches for him-

-and now we're on Redford, stunned, alone on the wing. She's fallen. We hold on Redford's face a moment, distraught, stricken; he's come so far, risked his life, tried so hard. But she's gone. So was the audience.

At first there was just this buzz. You could see people turning to each other, asking questions. Where's the girl? What hap- pened? Then the buzzing stopped-they realized where the girl was. Dead. And after the buzzing ended, there was silence in the theatre. But not the silence of a group held in suspense. No. They were furious.

They felt tricked, they felt betrayed, and they hated us. The most violent sneak reaction of recent years probably belongs to Rolling Thunder, where the audience actually got up and tried physically to abuse the studio personnel present among them. These people in Boston were much too civilized for open war- fare. They just sat, sullen. For the first hour of the movie, they were in love with us, and in that instant when the girl went off the wing, the affair ended.

We'd tried to prepare them. We'd begun with death. We'd had people getting injured early on. We talked about pilots dying, we showed crashes. We knew it was a demanding moment and, academically speaking, we'd prepared for it properly.

They didn't want to know about "academically speaking." Waldo Pepper had let a girl die. Only he wasn't Waldo, he was the golden boy of the middle seventies, he was the hero of his time. Errol Flynn didn't let girls die from the wings of airplanes and neither, goddammit, did Robert Redford.

I truly believe that if Jack Nicholsonhad been in the part, he wouldn't have been as good as Redford, but the movie would have worked for audiences. Because there is, inherent in Nicholson's persona, something dark. They would have expected trouble with Nicholson. Or Facino. Or De Niro. Or the Redford of today. We know he's not just a golden boy anymore. We saw his serious side in All the President's Men, we know it from his Oscar-winning directing work in Ordinary People. But the Redford of 1975-alas no. Waldo was and is, for me, a quality adventure film. And usually a movie like that, especially one with a major star, finds a major audience.

But the Bostonians who angrily left the theatre were typical of audiences all across the country when the picture was shortly released. We had given them something they didn't want. No matter that we did what we could to forewarn them-we could not shake their expectations.

There is an Eisenstein dictum that says: "You must go where the film leads you." For a movie to work for amass audience, they must be willing to let you lead them toward your destination.

They wouldn't follow us with Waldo. No matter how we tried....

CHAPTER NINE

All the President's Men

"Have you heard about these two young guys on the Washington Post?"

That question was asked me over the phone early in the winter of 1974. By Robert Redford. And it began my association with All the President's Men.

I had not heard, at that point, of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Redford explained that they were young reporters (both in their late twenties when the break-in took place at the Watergate complex). And that they had been doing sensational work on the story and had written a book. He had taken an option and asked me to read it.

The version that I read was well prior to publication or even the proofing stages. It was a Xerox copy, full of half pages and cross-outs, and it weighed a ton. I went through it quickly and I knew well before I finished that it was not a job I could conceivably turn down.

Nobody wants to be connected with a garbage film. I find it hard to believe that at the early meetings involving The Own Slime or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter that the creative teams really thought they were in the Citizen Kane derby.