POLLACK’S ‘AFRICA’ ADVENTURE

The advance word on Sydney Pollack’s “Out of Africa,” a $30-million love story starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep, was that the movie was in trouble.

The buzz around town was that the film was too long, that it needed heavy editing and that the story didn’t have enough plot to hold anyone’s attention.

Business as usual. People love to spread bad rumors about big-budget movies in Hollywood. What makes these rumors unique is that Pollack started them. He always starts them. Until he showed it to an audience, he thought “Tootsie” was going to be a disaster too.

“I do tend to wake up in the middle of the night convinced I’ve made a disaster,” Pollack said in an interview last week in his Universal Studios office. “Before I saw ‘Tootsie’ with an audience, I thought, ‘No one is going to believe this could convince anyone he’s a woman.’ ”

With “Out of Africa,” which Pollack calls the most difficult film of his career, the panic set in during production.

“All the time I was in Africa, I worried about it. When I came home and looked at the first cut, which was 3 hours and 40 minutes long, I thought it was boring. I hated it. I told my family, ‘Nobody is going to see this movie, it’s a disaster. What have I done?”

Pollack is more relaxed now. Last month, he became so anxious sitting outside a theater waiting to find out how key New York press would react to his hurried work print of “Out of Africa” that he started chain-smoking cigarettes. He quit smoking three years ago.

The studio had insisted on the screening, and it paid off. Pollack says Newsweek is planning a seven-page cover story. The New York Times has a Sunday magazine piece coming up. And Gene Shalit is planning to run several interview segments on the “Today” show before the film’s Dec. 20 national opening.

“It’s been terrible,” Pollack said, calm enough now to smoke a pipe. “But the reaction has surprised me. I couldn’t imagine showing a $30-million movie in that shape to the press. I was wrong, they (Universal executives) were right.”

It is not that Pollack is now over-confident. He says he still has major concerns about the length of “Out of Africa” (it’s down to two hours and 35 minutes) and its “lack of narrative drive.” The movie, based on Danish author Isak Dinesen’s experiences in Africa in the early part of the century and her romance with English hunter/adventurer Denys Finch Hatton, is not likely to draw teen-agers away from their 15th viewing of “Rocky IV.”

There is also the “accent question.” While Streep uses a heavy Danish accent throughout the movie, Redford has none at all.

“I thought it would be more off-putting for audiences if Redford had an English accent,” Pollack says. “He had worked on it and he had the accent, but when we went to shoot the first scene with him and Meryl, I knew it was wrong. Meryl has been everything--Polish, English--and people would expect an accent from her. But with Bob, they’d say, ‘Why is he talking that way?’

“I thought, ‘Well, we’re going to get killed by the critics for this, but I feel I can argue with them. I can say with a clear conscience that this is not a crass commercial ploy. I could not come up with one valid reason why this character has to be English. If it was essential to clarifying the story, I would have used an English actor.”

A bigger question for critics may be why Redford is in this movie to begin with. Although he has top billing, his role is clearly secondary to Streep’s.

“He wanted to do it for a lot of reasons,” Pollack says. “He was very realistic about it being her movie and there was no bull about beefing up his part. . . . He was an admirer of hers, he likes to do love stories, he loved the story and we like to work together.”

“Out of Africa” is Redford’s sixth movie with Pollack. The collaboration started with “This Property Is Condemned” in 1966 and includes “The Way We Were,” “Jeremiah Johnson,” “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Electric Horseman.” Pollack says there is a continuity to the characters Redford has played for him, and that they have evolved toward Denys Finch Hatton.

“I’ve always thought of Denys Finch Hatton as a combination of Hubbell Gardner from ‘The Way We Were’ and Jeremiah Johnson,” he says. “He is this ultimate individualist. There is a lot of Redford in there too.”

Redford’s career has evolved too, and Pollack acknowledges that when you cast the star now, you get a lot of extra baggage with him--the image that he brings to a role, and the expectations he creates in audiences.

“In this case, his image has helped. The public has this impression of him as private, intelligent, that he holds back. Finch Hatton has those same characteristics.”

“Out of Africa” is one of those elusive book projects that has been around for years. Columbia Pictures had the rights to the story for 15 years, Pollack says, and he tried to get a script together for it himself 12 years ago but gave up.

“I thought it was too delicate, that it was all feelings and observations,” he says. “I became convinced there was no way to do it as a movie.”

The book, published in 1937, was a fictional diary of Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen was one of her pen names), a woman with an aristocratic Danish background who moved to Africa with her husband just before World War I to start a coffee plantation. Although she mentions Finch Hatton and his death in a plane crash, she never reveals him as her lover. Nor does she go into detail about her philandering husband or mention the syphilis that she contracted from him. The novel is mostly an account of her experiences in trying to keep her farm operating in the face of physical and financial disasters and of her relations with the tribes in the area.

Writer Kurt Luedtke, an Oscar nominee for his script for Pollack’s “Absence of Malice,” pieced together the story of her affair with Finch Hatton from other sources (primarily from Judith Thurman’s recent biography “Isak Dinesen: Life of a Storyteller”) and created what Pollack saw as “a very traditional movie, an old-fashioned story that takes you on some exotic adventure.”

When Pollack read Luedtke’s first script nearly three years ago, he said he believed the story had finally been cracked, but he and Luedtke worked on the script for another year before he decided to tell Frank Price, then head of Columbia Pictures, that he wanted to make it.

“At that precise moment, Frank left Columbia to go to Universal,” he says, “and the movie was in limbo for a few days. Columbia was understandably concerned about spending the kind of money this would cost, especially on a movie being shot in Africa. They had just done ‘Sheena’ and spent a lot of money and the film didn’t work. They didn’t say no, they just said, ‘If you want to take it somewhere else, we understand.”’

So, the film followed Price to Universal.

“Frank has wanted it all along,” Pollack says. “He never blinked twice at Columbia. He hasn’t blinked twice at Universal.”

He must have at least gulped. Pollack’s decision to go with major stars--and particularly with Redford, who is said to be earning $6 million per film these days--pushed “Out of Africa’s” budget up to $28.5 million. Weather delays and other problems during production in Kenya ran the total to $30 million.

“I always figure that things will go wrong, and they always do,” Pollack says. “We start in January and February, the tourist season. ‘Great, it will never rain.’ The second week we were there, the heavens opened up and we got a deluge for a month. We had to dig our way out of that and move 250 people over roads we made as went.”

When you make roads or landing strips in Kenya, you do it the old-fashioned way.

“You hire 100 guys and they go out and pick up the rocks, fill in the holes with little shovels, stamp their feet and there you are,” Pollack says.

By the way, if you want to film stunts with lions in Africa, you have to bring your own. It’s against the law to touch the native cats, so Pollack had to import five from an animal actors’ preserve in Topanga Canyon.

One of the biggest problems for Pollack was scheduling the movie to shoot around the schedules of Redford and Klaus Maria Brandauer, the Austrian actor who plays Blixen’s husband. Brandauer was only needed to work for 5 of the 18 weeks, so Pollack tried to schedule his scenes together. He did the same thing for Redford, who made three different trips to Africa for a total of about eight weeks.

“I couldn’t keep Redford there for 18 weeks, he would have gone nuts,” Pollack says. “Bob got very antsy. There’s not a lot to do there when you’re not working. Everybody got to leave except poor Meryl. Of the 101 days we shot in Africa, she worked 99.”

And never complained.

“I absolutely could not have done this film without her,” he says. “There were so many other problems, so many logistical problems, that I wouldn’t have had time to deal with another one. She was perfect. She was always prepared, always in good spirits. She’s too good to be true.”

From July until a few days ago, Pollack says he was in a seven-day-a-week state of panic, running back and forth between four editing rooms where 16 different editors were busy putting the film together. It was hard during those weeks, he says, to remember why he wanted to make the movie.

“Making a movie is a network of decisions that keep multiplying as you go,” he says. “You leave a trail of decisions behind you and that’s how you start to see the shape of what you’ve done. When you get far enough, you turn around and say, ‘Ha, that’s the movie.’ It’s only then that you find out if it’s going to work or not.”

Has he ever been in the middle of one and wished he had never started?

“Every time,” Pollack says. “Every time.”