Opinion

One morning my wife answered the phone and someone said, “Is Miles there? It’s Robert Redford.” My wife yelled audibly, “There’s some joker on the phone who says he’s Robert Redford.” I grabbed the phone, and it was indeed him. I had submitted a screenplay written by Larry McMurtry (“Terms of Endearment, “Lonesome Dove,” etc.) for Redford to potentially direct, and he wanted to meet in person.

We did have several meetings in his modest offices that lasted close to an hour each and were much more thoughtful and substantive than most meetings I’ve had with actors and directors. He treated me as an equal, even though he was the biggest movie star in the world and I was just a relative newcomer, having made an Oscar-nominated documentary, managed The Film Fund which made grants to indie filmmakers, and co-founded The Independent Feature Project which later morphed into Film Independent which gives the annual Independent Spirit Awards. We had in-depth discussions of McMurtry's characters, the meaning of the location (Montana), and the screenplay's sub-themes about the dangers of strip mining. For a variety of reasons (probably mistaken in retrospect) I went instead with Francis Coppola to produce who shortly after went bankrupt and tied up the rights to McMurty's screenplay for 7 years, until it was finally made through HBO.

I’m mourning Redford's passing this week, not just because I knew him, however slightly, but because of his singularity in Hollywood as an actor, director, producer, social justice/environmental activist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival.