Robert Redford Remembered: How Hollywood’s Golden Boy Used His Star Power to Boost Indies and Launch the Sundance Film Festival |
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.
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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.
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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........