Quote of the Day (Richard Russo, on Half of a Movie Buddy Team)

“[Actor William] Nolan was the reliable, competent American Everyman, the Nick Carraway who would never understand or accept or like himself half as much as Gatsby did. The Milton of my fourteen pages was a lot like me, a man cautious by nature and experience, who knew himself too well to be much of a fan and, as a result, was often too grateful for the good opinion of others.”—American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo, “Milton and Marcus,” in Trajectory: Stories (2017)

The news of Robert Redford’s passing this week prompted me to read at last the novella “Milton and Marcus,” in the story collection Trajectory by Richard Russo. Somehow I had never gotten around to perusing the book after buying it eight years ago, even though I’d heard it was a roman a clef (i.e., a story about real people or events, but overlaid by thinly fictionalized names and details) about his adventures as a screenwriter for Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

Once I started reading it, it turned out to be every bit as dishy as I’d been led to expect—and every bit as funny, compassionate, and rueful as the fiction that has brought Russo critical and popular acclaim.

The novella’s narrator (only referred to by the nickname “Hotshot” by one of the two movie stars in the story) is a less successful alter ego of Russo: a novelist and screenwriter whose career is on the wane. I knew that Russo had worked several times with Newman (called here Wendell Pierce, or “Wendy”) but I’d been unsure of any Russo collaboration with Newman’s two-time co-star and longtime friend, Redford (called “William Nolan” in this story).

Then, according to this 2012 Albany Times-Union article, I discovered that Russo had been working on the screenplay for the 2015 Redford film A Walk in the Woods. Yet final writing credit for the movie went to Michael Arndt (under the pseudonym “Rick Kerb”) and Bill Holderman, rather than Russo.

Clearly, at some point, Russo’s and Redford’s views on the first draft had diverged and the novelist was no longer associated with the project.

Until the appearance of either a Russo reminiscence or a full-scale Redford biography appears, all we have about what transpired during the script’s development is conjecture.

But “Milton and Marcus” offers a clue: Redford had a fragment of a script early on, solicited Russo’s ideas for expanding it some years after Newman had died, but chose to use the contributions of other writers whose services he had engaged in the meantime.

Ultimately, “Milton and Marcus” becomes a story of charisma, loyalty, self-absorption, and desire—sometimes on the part of writers as much as actors. “Wendy” is depicted more affectionately than “Regular Bill” (the nickname for the Redford character, who was called “Ordinary Bob” by many in the film industry).

But much of the intrinsic interest in the tale also comes from inferring the parallels between its characters and their real-life counterparts:

*Wendy and “Regular Bill” score huge successes in their younger years with a few “buddy” movies, as did Newman and Redford with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting (in the image accompanying this post, of course);

*Wendy engages in a fruitless, decades-long attempt to find another script for himself and Nolan to work with, as Newman did with Redford;

*Wendy thought before his death that the script idea by “Hotshot” (his nickname for the Russo alter ego) might appeal to Nolan’s “left-wing” tendencies; Redford was similarly a longtime progressive, particularly as it related to environmentalism;

*An associate of “Regular Bill” chuckles about the star’s penchant for fast driving; and yesterday’s New York Times obit noted that Redford in one year, the star received eight tickets for speeding in a Utah canyon;

*Nolan lives in Utah, as did Redford;

*To the surprise of many, a decade after Newman’s death, Nick Nolte replaced him on A Walk in the Woods; Nolan’s eventual co-star for “Milton and Marcus,” Gene Handy, possesses a similar gravelly voice, reputation as a dedicated actor, and tendency towards hard living that landed him in rehab;

*“Regular Bill” convenes his group to talk about “Hotshot’s” script while in post production on Desperation Alley, “which was rumored to be overbudget and behind schedule”; similar speculation swirled around a 2007 film that Redford directed, Lions for Lambs, whose $15 million in US and Canadian gross revenues fell well short of its $35 million budget.

As Wendy aged, Russo implies, he took increasingly riskier roles, while for Nolan, the notion of leading a “regular” existence, or even taking roles of “regular” people, had become unattainable.

I believe that in the case of Redford, this was largely true—by the mid-Seventies, he had stopped taking the edgy parts he had often taken as a younger, hungrier actor (as in Inside Daisy Clover, where he played a bisexual character). As a director, however, the opposite was true. The Milagro Beanfield War, for instance, was the first big-budget Hollywood production with a largely Hispanic cast, while his establishment of the Sundance Institute boosted the production of independent films.

Following Redford’s death, tributes have flowed in for the star, from both film colleagues and from people whose lives were touched by his activism. Moviegoers, unlike entertainment industry professionals, are less familiar with idols’ complex personalities and working methods. “Milton and Marcus” is an insightful reminder of how those who enter their turbulent orbit experience them at close range.