MOVIES : ‘Milagro Beanfield’ Grew for Producer Redford

One night during the Cannes Film Festival in 1972 Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack, who were there with “Jeremiah Johnson,” went out for an impromptu dinner with a visiting journalist from Los Angeles at a quietly unfashionable restaurant.

It was, as Redford agreed during a conversation the other afternoon in his permanent dressing room at Universal, just about the last period in his life when he could enjoy even a semiprivate life in public, free of stares, autograph seekers and other invasions of his privacy. Even then the restaurant, long gone, had the advantage of being off the festival’s glamour track.

“That night I was remembering my first visit to Cannes,” Redford said last week. “That first time I was an art student in Paris (at the Ecole des Beaux Arts), totally poor. I was going to be an artist, not an actor. I was on my way to Italy, hitchhiking, and I’d had a vague dream of seeing the South of France.

“I was lying on the sand underneath the pier in front of the Carlton Hotel, with all my belongings in a duffel bag. And I remember looking up at the Carlton and wondering what goes on in there.”

In 1972, as a star who had already made “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” he was finding out. “I felt you were an accomplice in my indoctrination to that festival craziness,” Redford said kindly the other day. “It was all an experience I figured everyone ought to have once, but it’s easier if you’re not at the performing end of the camera.”

The festival does treat the film maker royally, and on the night “Jeremiah Johnson” had its official screening, Redford recalls, “They made you feel as if yours was the only film in the world.”

Later the night of the screening Redford was strolling along the Croisette. “I could see the spot under the pier where I’d slept on that first visit, and I wanted to tell my other, older self that the view from above is not as great as it seems.”

Redford, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley but who does not admire the subsequent densification of Los Angeles and spends little time here, was in town for the premiere of “The Milagro Beanfield War,” which he co-produced (with Moctesuma Esparza) and directed.

He had read John Nichols’ massive 640-page novel first in 1979. It deals, generally comically, with a clash of cultures between Anglo developers and a Latino New Mexico valley and village they want to ravage into golf courses and condos.

Redford, then directing his first film, “Ordinary People,” couldn’t get to the book right away. When he did he found that Esparza had acquired the rights. “We thought it would be an interesting idea to co-venture, so we joined forces,” Redford says.

In 1981, they began the long struggle, working with Nichols and David Ward, who wrote “The Sting,” to compress the novel, with its innumerable subplots, to a 120-page script that would not flatten out the vitality of the story.

Over the years Redford has become increasingly fascinated with the cultural history of the West and the Southwest, especially the Rio Grande Valley where “Milagro” takes place and where at least three cultures have intermingled during the centuries. “The villages hadn’t changed much in 300 years,” says Redford. “Until the Second World War they had a barter economy. It was the draft that forced them to enter the system.”

The valley had been settled initially by the Indians; later the conquistadors and the padres came and left their cultural imprint, and then the Mexican Indians. What remains as the center of the culture is a kind of Catholicism enriched or supplemented by a special mysticism in which the locals talk to saints, who talk back. “The air and the skies have a mystical quality themselves,” Redford feels. “Georgia O’Keeffe spent a lifetime trying to capture it in her paintings.”

There is more of the mysticism in the film than in the book, Redford admits. The spiritual influences, so to speak, of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, both fabulist interpreters of their cultures, have been brought to bear on the film through Redford’s inputs, he also admits.

Much about the project appealed to Redford. “I wanted something as much in contrast to ‘Ordinary People’ as possible. This was outdoors. It was humorous, lighter in nature, and not quite so internal, as well as interior, as ‘Ordinary People.’ ” It was an ensemble piece, which was also appealing, he says. It was about reality rubbing against mysticism within a little-understood culture about which he was intrigued. And as much as anything it was a different kind of challenge, a big piece of logistics as against shaping the hothouse intensities of “Ordinary People.”

The logistics proved even more challenging than they looked going in. Achieving the script was only the beginning. A bean field had to be planted and then harvested. “And,” Redford says with a combination of grin and grimace, “it snowed in September.”

In the village 50 miles from Sante Fe where the film was shot, there were indeed two cultures rubbing together and producing occasional friction.

“There were actors and non-actors. There were those who spoke no Spanish and those who spoke no English. And there were two attitudes about our presence. We were treading a line between being classified as a Hollywood film and not being. I resist classification at any cost, always have. What I’ve found through the years is that being classified as a Hollywood film or as a non-Hollywood film is a liability. But certainly it’s no help to be classified as a Hollywood film.

“So some of the people resented us and were afraid we were going to desecrate the culture. And another group welcomed us because we were Hollywood and they had dollar signs or stardom in their eyes. Well, whoa! Either way, everything becomes a big deal. Some wanted the spotlight and the Hollywood charisma and the others didn’t want us around at all.”

It all got sorted out.

(Despite generally laudatory reviews, some industry analysts found the movie’s opening weekend performance disappointing. It averaged $15,757 per screen in the three theaters--in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto.)

In recent years Redford has appeared in only three films, “The Natural,” “Legal Eagles” and “Out of Africa.” Much of his time has been spent getting the Sundance Institute for independent film makers well and truly launched in Utah.

“I’ve been putting something in the soil, so to speak,” Redford says, “putting something back into my industry. It took more time than I anticipated but I’m happy about the way it’s gone. It’s really on its feet.” Several films have already come out of the development process at Sundance, where experienced writers, producers, directors and performers lend their talents to help new people perfect their scripts. “A Trip to Bountiful,” which took shape at Sundance, won Geraldine Page a 1985 Academy Award and a screenplay nomination for Horton Foote.

“I suppose in the beginning the idea was selfish. I was trying to find the right use for the land I had in Utah. It’s really beautiful. I’d spent 15 years trying to hang on to it without developing it. But I had to pay for it.

“Rather than build a resort to which you bring art, which is the way of most resorts, I thought it would be better, and ultimately more satisfying, to create a place that was for the arts first, with skiing and the rest of it just as a sideline. The industry has its boom and bust cycles, but it does go on.”

Initially, Redford says, he hadn’t realized quite how sharp the need was for a place like Sundance. “It began to seem that there wasn’t enough production for all the new distribution entities that were forming and that art would suffer because the pressure to produce would lead to formula stuff, more of the same.

“There’s nothing really wrong with that and you can’t stop it anyway. But the fear was--is--that you’d lose the diversity that’s really important to film.

“If we could develop it, it would only be a drop in the bucket, but it would be important. New talent, new resources, lower budgets. You would and you will see more films like ‘El Norte,’ ‘Northern Lights,’ ‘Heartland’ and ‘Bountiful.’ ”

In addition to his own production company, Wildwood, Redford has formed North Fork Production in concert with the Toronto-based Cineplex-Odeon theater chain and its chief executive Garth Drabinsky. “It’s not a heavy deal,” Redford says, “a picture a year for five years, each under five million bucks.” It’s an additional chance to do the small, quality films like those coming out of Sundance.

Redford has a reputation for being a private man, even as actors go who are known for cherishing their privacy. “As you get older,” Redford says (he is 50), “your aperture narrows. You place a higher value on your time, all the time. I started as an artist, and part of the joy in my life was sketching people, listening to people. But you can’t do it if you’re not having an even exchange--if you’re the center of attention. I miss being able to be unobtrusive. Yeah, I miss that.

“If I had to boil everything down-- everything --it’s finally about the work. That’s the most important thing. It’s true about Sundance, true about everything, and it’s always easy to get off the track.”