Years before he helped launch the Sundance Film Festival in the Utah mountains, Robert Redford brought his love of skiing to the big screen with the Olympic tale Downhill Racer.
After starring with Jane Fonda in 1967’s Barefoot in the Park, Redford was on a train to shoot Paramount‘s Blue when he had a change of heart and quit the Western halfway through the trip. Paramount sued but relented when Redford agreed to eye other projects, including an adaptation of Oakley Hall’s 1963 novel The Downhill Racers that director Roman Polanski was developing.
Redford worked with writer Peter Salter on the script that focused on arrogant skier David Chappellet (Redford), who joins the U.S. Ski Team and clashes with its coach.
“Bob saw Downhill Racer as a transitional moment where he turned away from the option to be a traditional Hollywood movie star to follow the New Wave principle of auteurship,” Michael Feeney Callan, who penned 2012’s Robert Redford: The Biography, tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Redford and Salter traveled with the U.S. team and based the lead character on skiers they met. When Polanski dropped out to finish Rosemary’s Baby, Redford brought on Michael Ritchie, who had yet to direct a feature but impressed the star with his TV work. Ritchie, who would later direct Redford in The Candidate, helm The Bad News Bears and work on the screenplay for Cool Runnings, cast Gene Hackman as the coach and Camilla Sparv — ex-wife of then-Paramount honcho Robert Evans — as Redford’s love interest. Among the extras was a young Sylvester Stallone.
Using cameras held by the skiers during racing scenes, Downhill Racer filmed in Switzerland, Austria and France. Footage was also shot on the Wasatch Mountains property that Redford purchased in 1968, now known as Sundance.
“Downhill Racer is one of the pioneering films for the American sports movie,” Grant Wiedenfeld, author of Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream, tells THR. “I actually see this movie as being in parallel to the car racing movies that Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and James Garner were doing in the ’60s. You can see it in the plot and how the drama revolves around crashing, and especially that it’s about a working-class figure getting into high society. What Downhill Racer does with documentary-style camera work is still exhilarating to watch.”
Paramount released Downhill Racer on Oct. 28, 1969, and it grossed $1.9 million ($16 million today). Redford had far greater success a month earlier with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, his Newman team-up that became the year’s top-grossing title.
Utah bids goodbye to the Sundance fest Sunday, days before the skiing world gets its close-up with the Milano Cortina Olympics. As for Redford — who died in September at 89, seven months after Hackman — he acknowledged in a 1975 interview that Downhill Racer underperformed because there “just wasn’t enough of a story,” but he characterized it as “a very personal movie for me.”
A version of this story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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