The Movie Star and the Mountain: On Robert Redford’s Sundance Origin Story

I.

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The first time he sees it, a chord is struck inside him. He is overcome by a kind of excitement he has no words for.

The mountain looms above him. Sheer rock walls rise, snow-covered up top with patches of limestone shining out. Nearly twelve thousand feet above sea level—11,752 to be exact—but, more importantly, seven thousand feet above where the young man stands and stares. Soon he is not just staring. He is and always will be a creature of movement and before he knows it his feet are taking the lead, rushing forward, climbing upward, wanting to somehow create an intimacy with this giant. He cuts through a meadow of sage and sumac and finds himself in a field below a wall of rock that blazes with aspen, a yellow closing in on orange. He is hiking faster now, almost running.

He stops and watches cloud shadows migrate across the mountain’s face. His mood lifts with the land. He notices movement in the rock wall and as he gets closer he sees it for what it is. Flowing water. A constant torrent and spray down the rock’s cleavage, splattering below. He stares at the various shelves which the water is flowing over and falling off of and dropping down from, trying to memorize the sight. The white rock is stained orange where it is forever wet. He listens to the pure cold music of falling water. When his head is down while hiking its song is a steady almost industrial roar, but with his head up it takes on a higher pitch.

He will discover that the mountain is called Timpanogos and that people of that name lived nearby five hundred years ago. The name means, roughly, “rock” or maybe “river” or, in some translations, the combined “rock river” or “rocky torrent.” Soon enough he will learn the meaning of the word, but it will take a while to understand what Timpanogos will mean to him. How can he know? His life is spread out uncertainly before him. He feels some vague intuition that this place will be important but nothing more.

All the confusion and anger he has been feeling vanishes for the moment. A silly idea comes into his head. Life suddenly feels larger. The smallness he has known, back in L.A. where his silent, judging father sits, washes away. All the uncertainty of his year of college in Boulder, the disdain for school, the drinking, the lack of direction, the early attempts to make art. His natural restlessness quiets.

At the same time he feels a twinge. The beginnings of that old covetous human urge. To possess the place. To make it his. Then, a second later, a better impulse. To stand below its beauty. Just beauty, not for any purpose. It isn’t awe exactly, that easy word that often means nothing. It is being absorbed in something larger than himself. Something thrilling and wild, jarring and huge. This is a moment that he will remember. A moment that will change his life.

He has found this place accidentally, while driving home to L.A. from the University of Colorado. He will later say: “It was so beautiful that I couldn’t pull myself away. The mountain, Timpanogos, was to me like Everest. It was Yosemite on a different scale. Spiritually, it was fascinating. When I left, I couldn’t shake it off. I lay in bed and thought about it. And whenever I had the chance to go back, I did. It became my favorite long shortcut, the only way to go home. I have a clear recollection of thinking, Someday I’d like to put a stake down here.”

The year is 1954 and the young man’s name is Robert Redford, and he will put that stake down a few years later when he pays $500 for two acres in the shadow of the mountain.

II.

Sixty-two years later, in December of 2016, I was the invited to do a reading at Sundance. Actually, the whole family was invited and my wife Nina, my daughter Hadley and I were thrilled to be there. The word was that Robert Redford would be there but despite the fact he did not show up it was a great week.

There was something in the air at Sundance. Though Redford was absent the whole place was permeated by his presence, a celebrity buzz alive in every corner. The aura of Bob. In the evenings Nina and I retreated to the Owl Bar after our days of skiing. The actual bar, which had been built in the 1890s, had been moved to Sundance from Thermopolis, Wyoming, where it was purported to have once been frequented by Butch Cassidy. The bartender told me Bob’s drink was tequila, so tequila it was.

I wish I could remember the bartender’s name. One night I came in alone, and the place was empty except for him. I started talking and told him my story, bragging a little about why I was there and telling him how Robert Redford had called me out of the blue to say some nice things about a book I had written. The bartender yawned. He seemed decidedly unimpressed by my conversation with Bob. He’d had many. Old hat for him.

Then he told me the story of how Bob first found Sundance. I had heard other versions of the same story that week, from Chad, the manager of Sundance at the time, and from one of the women who came up to me after my reading in the Tree Room. Either way it seemed as much a part of the place as the crags of limestone that jutted out of the snow on Mount Timpanogos. I recognized it for what it was.

An origin story.

III.

It happened one afternoon driving home from college. Since he was born in L.A., Redford did not live out the cliché of the easterner finding a new life in the West, a trope that he would bring to vivid life in Jeremiah Johnson, where an Easterner heads into the Rockies to become a mountain man, but he did make his great discovery while driving west, on the way home from the University of Colorado. Nearing Salt Lake City, he turned off the main road and wandered, basically following an impulse—an impulse that, it turned out, would change everything.

When he first saw it, a primitive ski resort, Timp Haven, occupied the spot he would later rename Sundance. From the start this was a place of strange coincidences, and Redford would soon learn that Timp Haven, and the land around it, was owned by the family of Omer Stewart, the same Omer Stewart who was one of the only professors who inspired him back at the University of Colorado. Then there was this: a few years later he would meet his wife Lola Van Wagenen when they both moved into the same apartment building in L.A. It would turn out she was from Provo, just down the canyon from the magical place he had stumbled upon.

The writer Ed Abbey, who Redford would later hike and camp with, wrote of first seeing the Rockies that it was an “impossible beauty, like a boy’s first sight of an undressed girl, the image of those mountains struck a fundamental chord in my imagination that has sounded ever since.” That, or something close, was the chord Timpanogos struck in Redford. It lingered like a dream of an alternate life as he flunked out of CU, reeled after his mother’s death, eloped with Lola, and endured the crib death of Scott, their first child, at two months.

The vision seemed to recede, out of reach, as he found some early success with small and then larger TV parts, but, using money he’d earned from his still fledgling acting career, he put down the $500 for two acres below Mount Timpanogos. At the time the only building on the lot was a dilapidated chicken coop, but it was a start.

As the struggling young actor tried to make it in New York and L.A., the land waited for him back in Utah. By then his daughter Shauna had been born, but it was the premature birth of his son, David James, that turned his world upside down. Both Lola and Jamie, as they called him, almost died during the birth, and this led to a deeper questioning, an internal wrestling match between career and family. After a period of soul-searching that included a ninety-mile November walk along the steep coastal woods of Big Sur, he came to a decision. His life was too scattered, too strewn about. He wanted to make a home for his growing family. And he knew just where he wanted to make it.

But it was then, after he had made his decision and resolved to go back and build a house on the plot below Timp, that a pot of gold was offered. The honeypot, he later called it. His agent phoned, excited to tell him that Bing Crosby Productions had offered him the lead in a new summer TV show, Breaking Point. This could be it! The big time. The break he’d been waiting for. Money troubles had plagued him and Lola during those early years, and now he was suddenly being offered $3,750 a week. $3,750 a week!

Nearing Salt Lake City, he turned off the main road and wandered, basically following an impulse—an impulse that, it turned out, would change everything.

He would always be, like his Sundance character, a man who did better on the move. But if he was eternally restless, in Sundance he would find a place where he, at least sometimes, quieted, a place where, to paraphrase the late writer Wendell Berry, he would find both his shadow and reflection. If that sounds mystical, so be it. It was mystical. Or at least it felt that way to Redford.

And it, the place, conferred a certain power.

Consider:

He said no to the offer of $3,750 a week.

He said no when they upped it to an unheard of $6,000 a week.

Then, after another walkabout and a night of brooding on a Malibu beach, he said no when they made their final offer of $10,000 a week. Remember this was a time when he was still struggling and money was tight, and ten-thousand dollars in 1963 was the equivalent of over a hundred thousand dollars today. There had been no hit movies and there was no promise there would be. His agent, mystified, quit outright. Robert Redford, he decided, must be insane. As for Redford, he turned his back on L.A. and headed to Utah.

His agent was not alone as far as being mystified. There were people in those early years who thought Redford was too stubborn, too angry. Maybe. And maybe it was crazy to say no at a time when he had debts and his future was far from certain.

I don’t know how or why he said no to the money, money he desperately needed. But he did.

And the payoff?

The payoff came in the days of peace and exertion—”soul work” he called it—looking up at the mountain as he built his new home in the canyon. He worked alongside a local builder and the builder’s son, planning out the house himself. He lost weight, his hair grew long and shaggy, his beard filled in. Not unlike one of the most famous characters he would later play, he retreated from the so-called real world.

The house would not be just a house. It would be both a refuge and a work of art, inspired by Frank Llyod Wright’s organic architecture, an A-frame, actually a series of As, built with local wood and rock with windows that stared up at Mount Timpanogos.

Looking back at that exultant time, he later said:

“We had moose and deer, a mountain lion, bald eagles, every sort of wilderness creature—but no running water. When the winter snows came we boiled water to cook and bathe with.”

Offers came in for films. He ignored them. His beard grew longer. He was in full retreat.

“The house is GREAT,” he would write soon after the A-frame was completed. “A three-level affair with exposed 8 panels of glass and 48 tons of rock work, it’s 45 miles from the nearest town and 8,000 feet up. The view is something, overlooking the back of a huge mountain peak and a year-round glacier. The hunting is the best and small game abounds. The streams are rich with rainbow trout.”

Over the next decades the place would continue to co-evolve with his personal and professional life—he would buy more and more acreage, he would fight with developers who wanted to build condos in the canyon, finally in 1981 he would form the Sundance Institute—but this was when it truly began, the initial commitment. “The first flush of rootedness is unrepeatable,” said the nature writer Robert Finch. Redford was rooting down and this was his first flush.

IV.

When people spoke of “Sundance” they often meant the big festival that until this coming year was held in Park City, Utah. But for Redford Sundance was the relatively small ski resort below Mount Timpanogos, forty-five minutes down the road in Provo Canyon.

The story of his finding the place would be told and re-told over the years, and details would get fuzzy with people re-telling it in different ways. Redford himself would tell the story when the directors made the drive down from Park City each year to Sundance on the first day of the festival. There, standing in front of a stone fireplace outside the screening room, he began by saying: “Where you were wasn’t Sundance… This is the real Sundance.” In more recent years the honor of telling the origin story had been passed off to Chad, now president of the Sundance resort. Not long ago over lunch Chad and I discussed the fine points of the origin story—was the year 1954 or 56 when he first saw the mountain, was he in a car, as Chad and I thought, or on a motorcycle, as the folks at the Sundance Institute contended?

“There was so much re-telling it became a kind of myth,” Chad said.

As with any myth, this one plastered over the somewhat messier reality. Redford’s retreat to the mountain to build his home was actually short-lived. When Henry David Thoreau came out of the woods, he worked as a surveyor and a handyman for Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Redford came out of the woods, he headed to Broadway. There he had his first major career breakthrough playing opposite Elizabeth Ashley in Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park.

“The first flush of rootedness is unrepeatable,” said the nature writer Robert Finch. Redford was rooting down and this was his first flush.

As for Sundance, there would be many years of debt, disappointment, and doubt. As it grew it became a money pit. His idealism ran up against the reality of the place. Sometimes it would seem that he was making movies or taking TV roles just to fund the resort. Early on Redford’s philosophy was: “Do another TV show, buy another acre.”

This pattern would continue, more or less, for decades. Though after the wild success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, he could substantially up the acreage.

That movie would give his beloved fiefdom below Mount Timpanogos its new name, but would not solve Sundance’s financial troubles. Redford quickly bought 3,379 more acres, and he wasn’t going to stop there. There was a good reason for this: he was trying to stave off tract housing on the mountain. But some saw more than that in his ambition. A desire to own, to possess, the entire mountain. Meanwhile Sundance bled money. Soon the newly-minted superstar was spending around $300,000 a year on the property, the vast majority of his movie money going directly into funding the place.

Again, there were inherent ironies. To make the resort viable, particularly after the much larger and higher-elevation Park City ski resort opened nearby in 1973, he had to become the very thing he abhorred: a developer. Timp Haven had been a simple rope-tow ski area but to make it profitable it had to be expanded, chairlifts and runs added, which meant clearing trees on the mountain and building more houses. To his credit, Redford tried to adhere to strict environmental standards, to make the place sustainable. But that was expensive too. Sundance was not yet close to paying for itself. It is strange to say of the most bankable movie star in the world, but at times he was strapped for cash.

As time passed there was another obvious irony when it came to his home in Sundance: He wasn’t there much.

“We humans are an elsewhere,” wrote the great western poet and essayist Reg Saner.

Redford was more elsewhere than most.

He had an apartment in New York, spent time in L.A., was on location in movie after movie. If he dreamed of settling at Sundance, he was anything but settled.

Redford shared at least one trait with the Sundance Kid. In a famous scene in the movie, Butch and Sundance attempt to go straight, trying out as payroll guards for a mining company in Bolivia. Their employer Percy Garris (played by Strother Martin), says to Sundance “Can you hit anything?” Sundance replies, “Sometimes.” The old-timer throws a coin up the street into the dirt and says, “Hit that.” Sundance starts to get fancy, spinning his gun and putting it in his holster as if readying to draw when the old timer holds the gun still and says, “No, no, no, son. I just want to know, can you shoot?” Sundance, now standing still and simply pointing the gun, misses his target. Garris and Butch stare at him. Butch’s look says this is the one thing I thought you did well and you can’t do it. More bemused than accusing.

Garris starts to walk away, disgusted and done with them, when Sundance asks, “Can I move?”

“Move, what the hell you mean move?” Garris says.

Suddenly Sundance dips down, crouches, draws his gun, and hits the coin twice, the second time when it is flying in the air.

“I’m better when I move,” he says.

It’s a great movie moment. It was also Redford’s modus operandi. Movement was his habitual mode of being. He drove fast. He liked to jog five miles a day and played tennis constantly. His daughter Amy, for one, looked forward to the lift in energy whenever he was home at Sundance: the sports, the hikes, all the action. Mary Tyler Moore had a different take. Staying at Sundance after Ordinary People and trying to stay sober after alcoholism had almost killed her, Redford was just too much. Tennis at 9? Swimming at 11? What was next? Archery? Bob, to her, was like a crazed camp counselor, activity after activity.

He took the same energy to the slopes. Though he had only learned to ski as an adult, and then trained and improved for Downhill Racer, he skied fast and paid for it with broken noses and collar bones. He also made movies fast. Consider the fairly ridiculous stretch, an interval of less than two years, from 1972 to 1974, when he would star in Jeremiah Johnson, The Candidate, The Way We Were, The Sting and The Great Gatsby. He even acted fast, “not wasting time” as the director George Hill said. On the set of All the President’s Men he grew impatient with Dustin Hoffman and Jason Robards, who loved to analyze and talk on and on about the characters and their motivation. Let’s get to it was Bob’s motto. At the same time, he refused to do any two takes the same way. He was after spontaneity and had an impatience with theory—he liked to do.

His desire to root pushed hard against this need to move. Both desires were real. He loved his family and tried to create a dream domestic space at Sundance. But he was gone a lot. He dreamed of peace, a place away from the pestering world, and he did have moments of peace with his family and in nature. But it would be hard to describe him as serene. His characters were uneasy, and so was he.

V.

There are many things the young man doesn’t know when he first stares up at Timpanogos. He has no inkling where his life will lead him. If you were to visit from the future and meet him on that day he sees the mountain, and tell him what was to come, he would laugh. More likely he would think you were insane.

He dreamed of peace, a place away from the pestering world, and he did have moments of peace with his family and in nature. But it would be hard to describe him as serene. His characters were uneasy, and so was he.[/pulquote]

What a strange and remarkable story you could tell him. It would seem a ludicrous fiction. You could let him know he will be a father, a husband (twice), a sex symbol, a would-be cowboy, a dashing outlaw on the screen and a sometimes geeky one off. That he will rise to fame as America’s most famous movie star, and one of the world’s most famous people while still trying to retreat and maintain some sense of his authentic self. That his love for this place will lead to defending it, which will ripple outward to loving and defending an entire region. And that he will not just pay lip service to this fight the way many celebrities do, but do the boring work that has to be done, lobbying congressmen, sitting in meetings.

And that is without even mentioning the Sundance Institute and Sundance Festival. He doesn’t know yet that he will have the wonderful grandiose idea of creating a space, in a world of crushing commercialism, where young filmmakers can do their work protected from the jaws of the market, and then help create a showcase for that independent work, and, if that showcase will become something of a monster, embodying in ways the opposite of the spirit in which it was conceived, well, that will not take away from the initial impulse nor all the good work that will get out into the world because of it. His will be a stubborn attempt to fight back against Hollywood, and without that stubbornness none of it would have been manifested. Oh, and by the way, you might mention to him that he’ll make a lot of movies, some of them damn good ones.

When he first stands below Timpanogos, there is no way he can know the gifts the mountain will bestow upon him. You could argue that almost everything in his life would grow out of the place: Art, family, nature, activism. So much of what he will achieve will spring from this first ringing discovery, the moment when a young man who wants to be an artist, but honestly doesn’t really know what he wants to be and sure as hell doesn’t plan on being an actor, a young man who is still wrestling with his judgmental father, a confused young man with no idea what he would call fate and I would call accident has in store for him, looks up and sees the mountain.