dateline
PHOT0: KRISTINA LOGGIA
travel/faces/outdoors/dateline utah/arts & entertainment
Robert Redford at his Sundance Ski Resort.
Who is this guy? Robert Redford is alive and living well in Utah. BY TONY GILL
Robert Redford is a Hollywood legend—if you doubted, Wall Street Journal Magazine recently affirmed his status in a long cover story illustrated with a seriously craggy black-and-white portrait that could have come from Steichen’s Family of Man. In 2014, Time referred to Redford as The Godfather of Indie Film. But a “godfather” is a creative original who has stepped aside to watch their creation roll on. Neither godfather nor legend is a description that ever-passionate Redford himself seems likely to use. And, when Dan Rather, in a dual New Yorker interview by Tad Friend, referred to Redford as a “Hollywood celebrity,” Redford corrected him. “I live in Utah,” he said. Redford’s love affair with Utah began long before he became a legend. By Butch Cassidy’s release, Redford had already put down $500 for his first two acres of Utah and he continued adding land each payday. He became a serious
student of Native American and environmental issues. He had married a Mormon girl from Provo and fallen in love with a mountain named after an Indian princess, Timpanogos. In 1998, he put 860 acres of Utah wilderness into a land trust to forever protect it from development. Then he increased the family’s protected acreage to some 5,000 acres, and established the Sundance Preserve. “Some people have analysis,” Redford likes to say. “I have Utah.” In 1981, Redford used Sundance’s sprawling property to base the Sundance Institute, an arts colony like a Western version of Yaddo, where aspiring filmmakers could learn from mentors like Sydney Pollack, George Roy Hill and Alan Pakula. A few years later he took over a faltering Salt Lake City film festival and renamed it Sundance. Filmmaking titans like Quentin Tarantino and Paul S A LT L A K E M A G A Z I N E . C O M JAN/FEB 2016
57