Down and Dirty Pictures

by Peter Biskind

  SEX, LIES came along at a particularly propitious moment for the U.S. Film Festival and its not-for-profit parent, the Sundance Institute. Only two years away from its tenth birthday, it was fighting for its life after nearly a decade of false starts, wrong turns, and dead ends. The institute was in the midst of a longterm and seemingly endless crisis of leadership. Redford, a control freak, was not in a position to run the institute himself, but neither, it seemed, was he able to let anyone else run it. The first executive director was his wife’s cousin, Sterling Van Wagenen. Van Wagenen was a charming, boyish-looking man with tousled blond hair and more passion than experience. He was the former head of the U.S. Film Festival, but better, he was family, which reassured the suspicious star. “Bob’s very paranoid, and doesn’t trust anyone who does not do the ‘Yes Bob’ shuffle,” says Maria Schaeffer, who would be general manager of the institute for four years before she was fired, leaving her bitter and disillusioned. “Sterling was a real charming, trainwreck kind of person—he could give good Sundance.”

  At the outset, Van Wagenen was little more than an administrator, deferential to the board—a mix of indie filmmakers, Hollywood figures, and foundation executives. But he was a quick study. According to one source, “Sterling was a very ambitious guy who understood from the beginning that the original board members, all of whom had considerably more experience in film than he did, were potential problems for him in terms of pulling together his power base.”

  The board’s terms were renewable, but some were more renewable than others, and within a very few years, certain terms—those of the indies—didn’t get renewed at all. Several of the original board members, like producer Annick Smith, felt betrayed. Smith was part of the Sundance “family.” Her film Heartland was a model for the kinds of films Sundance hoped to develop and possibly produce. She attended every lab in the early years, either with a project or as a resource person. “Sundance started out as one thing and changed into something else,” she said in 1990. “It became more Hollywood. I haven’t been back there since. I haven’t been asked.” Adds another board member, “They eliminated the people who created the institute, that gave blood and sweat, and had a real stake in it, the people who had the vision and the passion. A lot of us put in a tremendous amount of time, and what we got out of it was a silver-plated ashtray.”

  Moreover, for some of the board, Redford’s “Ordinary Bob” routine was wearing thin. Says one who worked closely with the star, “He wants to be seen as part of a group, but he’s also the king. There are lots of subtle ways he’ll let you know that: the way he walks out on the middle of your presentation, the way he writes a note while somebody else is speaking, the way he doesn’t say anything for half an hour, then talks for forty-five minutes, and then leaves, as if that’s the last word. Bob used to say, ‘This is not Robert Redford’s Sundance, this is all of you.’ We appreciated the intention of the remark, but we all knew it was bullshit.”

  Despite his detractors, Van Wagenen was a decent man and a key player in those early years. But it wasn’t too long before he began to get restless. In the beginning, he had been content to do Redford’s bidding, and he had done it well. But if Redford believed Van Wagenen had no ambitions of his own, he was mistaken. The two men nearly came to blows over a script called The Giant Joshua, which surfaced at the very first lab in 1981. The filmmakers’ labs, held once a year in June, were the heart of Sundance. The assumption governing the lab process was that indies have something to say but lack the skills to say it, and that Hollywood has nothing to say, but says it with great skill. The lab was a place where the twain met. Indies would come with promising scripts that they would proceed to rewrite, direct, tape, and edit with the help of topflight Hollywood talent, known as “resource people.” Sundance was a fresh air camp for Hollywood’s deserving poor. Seven or so scripts were chosen for the 1981 trial run. At the beginning, there was a distinctly “We’ve got the barn, let’s put on a play” air to the labs. Every day was an adventure in improvisation as a ski resort was transformed into a jerrybuilt backlot. The ski-rental shed was used as a screening room. “We’d convert the restaurant into a place to stage scenes during the daytime,” Redford remembered fondly in 1990. “At night, we’d put the furniture back. We’d move the fire engine out of the firehouse and use the building as a soundstage. It was really rough.”

  The Giant Joshua was written by John and Denise Earle. It was based on a sprawling three-generational account of a pioneer Mormon family, written by Maureen Whipple in the 1940s, that the Earles had optioned. According to Denise, one week after the lab was over, they got a call from a Redford representative who wanted to buy their script. She recalls, Redford “was irritated when we bought the option. His attitude was, ‘The script is worthless; let us take it off your hands.’ We were supposed to be happy that he was interested and walk away. It made us feel small.” Then, still according to Denise, along came Van Wagenen offering more money to buy the very same script to produce himself, with some sort of financial participation for both of them. The Earles made a deal. In 1984, John Earle died of a heart attack, and everything was put on hold. In October of that same year, Van Wagenen took a leave of absence to produce The Trip to Bountiful, written and directed by institute darling Horton Foote. With Van Wagenen gone, there was no one but Redford to pick up the slack. But “Redford was not there when you needed him,” says Safford. “It’s not just that he’s unavailable, but getting to him is a complicated game of cat and mouse, approach avoidance.” In January 1985, the star decamped for Africa to make Out of Africa. As one former board member puts it, Sundance “had become a ship without a rudder.”

  Trip to Bountiful was a success (it won an Oscar for Geraldine Page) and Van Wagenen returned to Sundance in 1986. Redford, who had not been pleased to see him go, did not seem pleased to see him return. Emboldened by Bountiful’s success, Van Wagenen moved ahead on Giant Joshua. “This project was like Merlin—it was like a sorcerer’s tool—and what it did to people was sort of amazing,” Redford recalls. “Sterling asked me if I would do the film. I said ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Can I work on the production?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ After he got the rights, Sterling developed his own ambitions. The next thing I know, it jumped from him wanting to develop it for me while I was busy on other projects, to him producing it with me directing it, to him directing it. I was suddenly out of it and being asked to have my company make it. Basically, that’s leveraging off of me. So we had a disagreement about it.”

  Redford’s backing had enabled Van Wagenen to put the financing together with Carolco, which was eager to shed the image of being the house that Rambo built, in the spring of 1987. Van Wagenen had selected Vanessa Redgrave for the female lead. “It was a perfect set of circumstances, if Bob would have supported me as a director,” Van Wagenen complains. “We got right to the edge—ten days before the start of preproduction. Then Bob pulled the plug.” According to Michael Hausman, who was set to produce, “Redford said to Carolco, ‘I don’t think it can be made.’ He didn’t think we had enough money, which was ridiculous. He created [so many] obstacles that the money fell out.” Says Earle, “Redford never wanted Sterling to go out on his own. He wanted him to be his gofer.” Van Wagenen stayed on as a board member until 1988. Ironically, looking backward at what he helped wrought, his position has changed. “Maybe because so many of us came of age in the ’60s, we envisioned an open infrastructure that had the rigorous participation of independent filmmakers where there would be debate,” he says. “I remember those early meetings with Victor Nunez, Moctezuma Esparza, Larry Littlebird, and Annick Smith, who had very strong opinions about where Sundance should go. Those people got weeded out. My last Sundance board meeting was held in a conference room at CAA Beverly Hills. Joe Roth was sitting on one side of me and Mike Ovitz on the other, and I looked around, and there were no independent filmmakers in the room at all.” With Van Wagenen preoccupied by producing, and his relationship with Redford virtually e
nded—today, Redford does not take his phone calls—the institute suffered. Says former board member Howard Klein of the Rockefeller Foundation, “In 1984, ’85, and ’86, no one was in charge.”

  In 1985, Redford hired Gary Beer, a former Washington lobbyist to solve the management muddle. Beer was a pudgy, unremarkable looking man who wore oversize aviator glasses and his dun-colored hair fashionably long and disordered, a lock falling casually over his forehead. He came from a different world, and struck some people like a breath of fresh air. Says Suzanne Weil, who was executive director of Sundance from 1989 to 1990, “He was funnier and hipper than most of the people on the staff.” But he was brusque, arrogant, and dismissive, and much of the institute staff disliked him.

  Beer became executive vice president, and it wasn’t long before the contradiction between the realities of the day-to-day grind of running an under-financed nonprofit and the Hollywood glitter of the fund-raising side, which required hobnobbing with celebrities, became more acute. According to several sources Beer, who was making about $100,000 a year, displayed the habits of a studio executive, staying in expensive hotels and eating at pricey restaurants. Maria Schaeffer, whom Beer hired, says, “Many for-profit corporations expect you to abuse [your expense account]. But Gary didn’t understand he was working for a nonprofit, and people under him were making almost nothing.” Indeed, Schaeffer charges that “All we were doing was maintaining the infrastructure and the high-priced executives with Jeeps and car phones, while there was no money to conduct the programs. The reason Gary Beer lives is to tell people he works for Bob Redford. He was willing to do whatever he thought Bob wanted. It was, ‘Yes Bob, yes Bob.’ ” Many blamed Redford for Beer. “Bob had blinders on about Gary,” says a source. Beer was like “the hunchback who manipulates the handsome prince.”

  Beer, who is now CEO of Smithsonian Business Ventures, emphatically denies any improprieties. The institute “is not like one of these organizations where 90 percent of the budget goes to overhead. It’s way under the national average of 15 or 17 percent.” There was nothing illegal about anything Beer did, and Johann Jacobs, a former Sundance financial officer, argues that the problem was not so much Beer as that “it was never clear where the difference lay between the institute, the resort, and the Sundance Group [a for-profit entity set up to develop commercial business opportunities for Redford]. It was hard to say, ‘Yes, this is right, or no, this isn’t right.’ ”

  Indeed, the expenses may have been justified and the accounting procedures accurate, but correctly or incorrectly, there was a general perception of waste, and it was a huge morale factor. A chasm opened up between Sundance’s high-flying executives, who breathed the rarefied air of wealth and celebrity, and its young, poorly paid, idealistic staff, which felt under-appreciated. “I worked there for a year and one half before Bob spoke my name,” says Schaeffer. The people who actually did the work running the programs struggled to make ends meet. Adds Cathy Schulman, who worked as a programmer at the festival in the early 1990s, “There was a lot of resentment, because you had people on the corporate side living this glitzy life, while at the festival and the lab the penny-pinching was really extraordinary. No expense accounts. You couldn’t take a filmmaker to lunch. We were always flying on the worst planes at the worst times with the most connections.” Schulman even had to share a hotel room with a male colleague. “That was weird, a man and a woman, even though he was gay. He’d say, ‘Just pretend I’m another girl.’ If his boyfriend came to stay with him, it was the two of them and me!”

  Originally, the idea was that the resort, a Redford-owned for-profit business, would support the institute. But the resort had never been a big money maker, and so it turned out that the institute was the resort’s single biggest customer, spending a little less than half of its annual lab budget for rental of cottages and food services. “We could have gotten comparable services [from outside vendors] for less, but we weren’t allowed to because we had to help finance the resort,” says Schaeffer. Thus, the original model was turned on its head: a nonprofit institution helped support an unprofitable business.

  Redford was acutely aware of the discontent. “It drove me crazy,” he says. “The whole point was to have an egalitarian tone. I don’t take kindly to fat-cat behavior. I’d caution Gary about it.” Still, the animus toward Beer may have been misplaced. As one former Sundance executive puts it, “To make Gary, or anybody else, the lightning rod for conflict within the organization is a bit of a shell game. Bob is unbelievably talented at deflecting blame, because at the end of the day, he is the man behind the curtain. All roads lead to Bob.”

  In 1988, Redford appointed Tom Wilhite, who had been vice president of production at Disney, executive director, and Beer was “Sundanced” over to the Sundance Group, apparently because so many program heads had complained about him. Wilhite did not bother to cultivate much of a relationship with Redford, never sought his permission to blow his nose like his predecessors, and before long the two men butted heads. Oddly enough, the tipping point that sent Wilhite into outer darkness may well have been the highly successful series of “Great Movie Music” events which took place from March of 1988 through 1989 and were organized by Wilhite and composer David Newman. By all accounts, what should have been a fund-raising watershed at New York’s Lincoln Center turned into a traumatic and contentious fiasco. A gaggle of celebrities was on hand at the glittering occasion, and top Hollywood composers like Maurice Jarre, Marvin Hamlisch, and Henry Mancini donated their services.

  But Redford was unhappy. According to one staffer, “Redford thought it was too Hollywood.” He reportedly had a hissy fit because he didn’t want to wear a tuxedo and was angered by the involvement of Charlton Heston, the National Rifle Association standard bearer, although staffers say he was informed on numerous occasions in advance of the event and never objected. In any case, he refused to come out of the green room at Lincoln Center to greet donors. The star explained, “I said, ‘Don’t put me in the center of this evening.’ And I suddenly found myself smack in the center of it. I resented it.” Van Wagenen, who probably knew Redford better than most, explains his behavior this way. “Bob does have a fundamental sense of integrity. His instinct said, Something needs to be done by somebody with visibility and power in the industry to support the independents. But he is not naturally a public person, and when he’s put in positions where he has to function publicly, he can get irritable, and sometimes that turns into anger.”

  Redford was such a magnet for money that from the start, the institute was dependent on him to raise it. But he found it humiliating to hold out the tin cup. Once, in the early 1980s, he visited Marvin Davis, who then owned Fox, to hit him up for a gift. Davis was watching football on TV and seemed more interested in the game than in Redford. “He said. ‘Hey, look, I’m going to give you the money, because you cared enough to come see me,’ ” recalls Redford. “Then he said, ‘There’s a few ladies out in the pool. Why don’t you go jump in?’ What’s really bad is I did. But in those days we needed all the help we could get.”

  Although the concert was a huge success, raising $600,000, Redford tried to cancel a similar event in Los Angeles (he relented only after the Hollywood Bowl, which had already sold tickets, threatened him with a law suit), and did succeed in cancelling the Chicago concert which featured the Chicago Symphony. Proud of their work, staffers regarded this as a “slap in the face,” says former accountant Gary Burr. Adds Mary Cranney, associate director of development, Redford’s attitude was often perceived this way: “It was like Bob was saying, ‘This is my dream, but don’t bother me—I want you to fund it.’ ”

  “Redford doesn’t fire people, he just stops talking to them,” says Safford. He stopped talking to Wilhite. When his head rolled, Sundance staffers were irate, but not surprised. Sundance was again without a director. As 1988 drew to a close, a gloomy Redford addressed the staff in the Sundancer, the institute’s newsletter. “Sundance,” he wrote, “is
a place with no luck, where the birds refuse to nest, where there is no local support beyond lip service, where water dries up, snow avoids us like the plague, and unpaid bills pile up like soot on a city fire escape. But by God I love it, and I love you, and that’s all that counts. Merry Christmas.”

  EVEN THOUGH he had spent a couple of years knocking out scripts in Los Angeles, doing what he could do to keep change in his pocket and move his career to the next square, Soderbergh didn’t know a soul in Park City. He was broke, having gone through the $35,000-odd he got to write, shoot, and edit sex, lies. He couldn’t even afford to rent a car and was forced to use the shuttle bus or walk. He had nothing to do but wait for the next screening, on Wednesday, when he expected to be joined by a handful of friends, along with two cast members, Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo. Much to his surprise, the tickets were gone a half hour before showtime, and the lobby was packed with excited moviegoers. This was also the first screening to be attended by distributors, which wasn’t saying much, because in those days, few bothered to take the long flight to Salt Lake City. Among the ones who showed up were Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, who were running Orion Classics. The two men alarmed Soderbergh by walking out after twenty minutes. He thought, Oh well, I guess we’re going straight to video.