Redford’s Sundance Success Clouded by Failed Ventures

For much of January, snow, ice and freezing wind shut down Portland, Ore. Annual rainfall the rest of the year averages 3 feet. It’s the kind of city, in short, where it would be folly to design a movie theater with a retractable roof. And yet that was once the plan at the Portland multiplex Robert Redford was building for his failed Sundance Cinemas.

As the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, opens tonight, Redford will enjoy an especially high degree of attention. He is starring in the thriller “The Clearing,” his first role in a movie shown at the festival he made famous, and he is an executive producer of “The Motorcycle Diaries,” a Che Guevara drama making its world premiere.

Redford’s nonprofit ventures -- which include the festival and various filmmaker laboratories -- have been enormously successful, and he has been able to translate the Sundance chic to several small, for-profit lifestyle and leisure businesses, including a ski resort and a mail-order catalog. But similar attempts to extend the Sundance name and sensibility into a number of new for-profit, show business enterprises have proved to be about as workable as the abandoned retractable roof.

His cinema unit shut down with two theater complexes under construction. A planned production company was closed months after its doors opened, and its two senior executives are now suing Redford over back pay. A $150-million deal to buy back the Sundance Channel fell apart.

“You win a few and you lose a few,” a sanguine Redford said in an extended interview.

Redford, perhaps Hollywood’s most influential advocate for movies made outside the studio system, said one regret is that he has wasted so much time trying to jump-start these Sundance offshoots. “If I have any remorse, it’s that too much of the ‘80s and ‘90s commanded so much of my time because I was so emotionally involved in extending the purpose of independent filmmaking,” he said.

From “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” to “Ordinary People,” Redford has a distinguished body of filmmaking work. Although he is no longer a top box-office draw and is often cast in supporting roles, the 66-year-old Redford has worked hard to keep his image fresh, acting opposite Brad Pitt in “Spy Game” and Jennifer Lopez in the upcoming “An Unfinished Life.”

But in an era when Hollywood is fixated on building brands and crafting franchises, Redford so far has been mostly unable to ride the coattails of his Sundance creation.

Through its filmmaking workshops and its hugely popular annual festival, Redford’s nonprofit Sundance Institute has supported the work of nearly 1,000 artists, helping launch the careers of many of Hollywood’s most distinct filmmakers, from Steven Soderbergh to Robert Rodriguez. A new Sundance program benefiting international documentaries has yielded five new works showing at this year’s festival.

“The festival is now a place the world looks to,” said festival director Geoff Gilmore. Over the next few days, thousands of celebrities, filmmakers and executives from around the globe will stream into the festival, whose revenue is returned to the Sundance Institute.

But away from the festival spotlight, Redford’s recent business track record has been surprisingly troubled. What’s more, according to interviews with a number of former Sundance employees, Redford’s empire has been governed by feuding factions divided over the direction of the many divisions that make up Sundance. While some of Redford’s advisors, called the “Parliament” within Sundance, want Redford to focus on his own acting and directing career, others believe he needs to commit to expanding the Sundance name to an array of new businesses. The result of such infighting, former employees say, is a company that came to be dominated by more internal feuds than at the politically charged studios many of those employees fled.

At the same time, when Redford left town to star in a movie, decisions couldn’t be made, and creative and financial opportunities were squandered, these employees say. Redford would become personally involved in the smallest details of Sundance strategy, yet often struggled to make up his mind. He was Sundance’s best ambassador, often meeting personally with real estate developers and architects, but was so busy acting that he couldn’t provide the face time so many deal makers coveted.

Redford, who is depicted unflatteringly in Peter Biskind’s new book “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film,” agrees that his advisors have not been unified and that some people charged with making key decisions may have been bad hires. But he says he is optimistic that the past missteps were simply the price of taking chances.

“There are more and more films in the mainstream that came out of the independent world, some of which we had responsibility for,” Redford said. “That feels really, really good. And good enough for me not to want to give up on the whole idea.”

No one disputes that the ideas driving Sundance Cinemas were inspired. In starting his institute in 1981, taking over the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in 1985 and renaming it the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, Redford successfully found a way to shepherd independent filmmaking at nearly every step of the creative process. Nearly every step, that is, except for exhibition.

Every year in Park City, Sundance executives watched hordes of moviegoers line up in the snow to watch little-known films, then crowd around directors after screenings to converse about filmmaking.

“The question we asked was: How can we take experiences that work at the festival and put them in a different venue?” said John Cooper, Sundance’s programming director, who worked with Redford on the cinema project.

A Sundance multiplex was the answer: Instead of six screens all showing the latest “Lord of the Rings” sequel, the Sundance cinemas would mix independent films with documentaries, foreign-language features and experimental shorts. Cineastes would gather to argue about Todd Haynes movies in adjacent cafes, while a gift shop would peddle John Sayles videos when his new film came to town.

Sundance started designing its own movie palaces. But what began as an imaginative scheme to reinvent the multiplex quickly fell into chaos.

Among the main hurdles was the struggle to define Sundance’s eco-friendly Southwestern aesthetic and turn that into a money-making concept. The debate led to unworkable cinema ideas such as a menu patterned after Spanish tapas bars (which real estate developers misunderstood as “topless bars”), natural fabrics for theater seats (which weren’t fire-resistant) and retractable roofs.

Although the cinemas were intended to make money, the cinema unit staff was told to avoid theater locations that felt overly commercial, several former employees said, costing Sundance potentially strong locations in such places as Westchester, N.Y.

At the same time, Sundance started feuding with its financial partner, General Cinemas Theatres, over construction budgets. High-priced architecture drove costs of the cinemas nearly beyond reach: While fancy multiplexes can cost $1 million per screen to build, the state-of-the-art Sundance cinemas were budgeted at $2 million.

“It was always a struggle to balance Bob’s vision with General Cinemas’ conservative funding,” said Bill Freeman, a restaurant executive Redford hired from Fuddruckers for the cinema unit.

By 1999, Sundance had broken ground on two theater complexes, one in Portland, the other in Philadelphia, near the University of Pennsylvania. But before either was completed, General Cinemas joined a long list of theater chains facing insurmountable balance sheet problems and declared bankruptcy in October 2000.

“I really think Robert Redford is a visionary,” said Gary Meyer, who consulted on Sundance’s theater unit for a year. “His heart and mind were in the right place. But too many other people told him what he wanted to hear, rather than what he needed to hear.”

With nearly $20 million spent, the Portland and Philadelphia projects were stopped. (They were finished and now are operated by other exhibitors.) Redford personally settled unpaid bills, and the cinema division died.

“I had to pick up a lot of pieces with the vendors,” said Redford, who spent more than $1 million of his own money on construction bills. “Of course, it was disappointing. I don’t mind failing at something, but it’s hard for me to let go of something that hasn’t been tried. But I think the idea got away from itself.”

The concept for his production arm was not complicated: It would make modestly budgeted movies that embraced Redford’s enthusiasm for sophisticated storytelling without forsaking profitability. Unlike the actor’s separate Wildwood Enterprises, which develops movies for Redford to act in or produce, Sundance Productions movies were not intended as Redford vehicles.

Redford hired two well-regarded young Hollywood executives from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to run the production unit, Jeff Kleeman and Eric Greenfeld, who in turn hired six more people. In early 2000, the fledgling unit moved into temporary offices and bought ready-to-assemble Ikea furniture. Redford engaged architects to draw up plans for office space inside a converted hangar at Santa Monica Airport.

The production company started looking for movies, and within a few weeks, two potential projects surfaced: “The Banger Sisters,” a road movie about two former groupies, and “About Schmidt,” a story about an actuary’s life after retirement. They were both smart scripts with commercial prospects and would immediately put Sundance Productions on the map.

But Redford told the production staff to sit still and do nothing, according to several members of the staff. The holding pattern didn’t last long. In just a few weeks, Kleeman had to start laying off staff. There simply wasn’t any money. By December 2000, the company was closed. “The Banger Sisters” was eventually made by Fox Searchlight, while “About Schmidt” was produced by New Line Cinema, and both were art house smashes.

Redford says Kleeman and his team wanted to spend too much money. He says his intention was to make films budgeted at about $3.5 million, not a range of up to $15 million, as Kleeman and Greenfeld wanted to spend.

“Sometimes things get bloated, and there was a confusion about staying in that zone,” Redford said of Kleeman and Greenfeld’s proposed budgets. “The team that came in there saw a much larger agenda....I felt we should be small.”

The underlying money problems hinged on an attempted deal to infuse Sundance with new funds. At one point, Microsoft co-founder and investor Paul Allen was going to help Sundance purchase a controlling interest in its cable channel from channel co-owner Universal Studios. As part of that $150-million transaction, Allen, an early investor in DreamWorks, would recapitalize Sundance, enabling it to pay the overhead of the production company. Redford was hopeful that he could then launch another Sundance channel, perhaps one dedicated to documentaries.

Despite a series of advanced negotiations, the deal never closed.

“The Paul Allen deal got all complicated with lawyers and with this, that and the other,” Redford said. By the time Seagram Co. sold Universal to Vivendi in 2000, the Sundance Channel was no longer on the block. Redford had invested millions of his own money in the production company and needed to cut his losses. “I was getting hammered pretty good,” he said.

The fallout has hardly subsided. Kleeman and Greenfeld allege in a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed last year that after Sundance Productions closed, Redford agreed in October 2001 to make a series of payments totaling $750,000 to settle their contracts, but made one payment nearly a year late and never made the rest.

“Because we are in litigation, and in light of the confidentiality provisions of our settlement agreement with Mr. Redford, we are declining to comment on Mr. Redford’s remarks,” Kleeman and Greenfeld said in a statement. “We look forward to our day in court.”

There is no talk within Sundance these days of immediately relaunching either the cinema division or the production company.

“Sometimes,” said Redford, without regret, “the reward is not money, but the satisfaction of seeing something new created.”