The Robert Redford sequel Paul Newman would have loved to star in: “You bet your sweet ass”
Even though they only made two movies together and the last one was released in 1973, Paul Newman and Robert Redford remained intertwined until the end of their respective careers.
It all started with a kind gesture after Newman suggested Redford for the secondary title role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid when several more established stars turned it down. It was the gift that kept giving personally and professionally, with the latter using the name to launch a film festival that evolved into one of the industry’s most prominent and important.
They re-teamed for The Sting four years later, and the results were arguably better. While Butch and Sundance became instant icons, Redford thinks their reunion with director George Roy Hill wasn’t only the superior of the two but the best film he’s ever been in.
For the next three and a half decades until Newman’s passing in 2008, they’d remain close friends and sounding boards, even if that third picture remained elusive. Redford developed A Walk in the Woods specifically to get him back onscreen with his most famous scene partner, but it wasn’t to be.
However, Newman had an idea in the mid-1990s, even if his tongue was planted firmly in cheek. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times on the set of writer and director Robert Benton’s dramedy Nobody’s Fool, he was asked if there was anything left on his career to-do list, and one thing was at the forefront of his mind: “I’d like to do a film with Redford again.”
At the time, Redford was fresh off the success of Indecent Proposal, in which he played a wealthy businessman who offered Woody Harrelson a million dollars to spend the night with his wife, Demi Moore. It hasn’t aged too well and definitely didn’t have franchise potential. Or did it? When he called into a radio show to raise money for charity, an errant pitch got him thinking.
“So I called and they said, ‘Why don’t you and Redford do another film?'” he recalled. “And I told them, ‘We’ve been looking for a script we want to do for 20 years and we’ve never been able to find one’. ‘Well’, they said, ‘Why don’t you do Indecent Proposal 2? Wouldn’t you shack up with Redford for a million bucks?’ I said, ‘You bet your sweet ass.'”
An erotic drama starring two middle-aged guys where Redford shells out a seven-figure sum for an evening in Newman’s company wouldn’t have been what anyone expected – or necessarily wanted – from their mythical third film. Still, it’d damn sure sell a lot of tickets, especially if Joanne Woodward was in the Harrelson role. Sadly, it was quickly shot down. “But they called Redford,” Newman explained. “And he said, ‘No, it’s not enough.'”
