Creativity Regained

Robert Redford happens to be a movie star, but he's the star who founded an enterprise that changed an industry. Along the way, this very successful entrepreneur developed theories of innovation and creativity that will inspire you and improve your business, too.

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Two hours after meeting Robert Redford, I fear I have already let him down. Redford has suggested we tour his 6,000-acre complex in Sundance, Utah, on horseback, and that is clearly how these wild western mountains are meant to be viewed. But horses terrify me -- always have -- and while I yearn to saddle up with the Sundance Kid in a prototypical act of male bonding...I just can't. Redford is nice as can be about it, and soon we are trekking along a footpath leading away from Sundance Village, surrounded by tall pines and wooded canyons. And I am glad we are on foot because it means I can give Redford my full attention as he talks about how it feels to build something from nothing, and how he encourages the people he works with to do that day after day after day.

Fit and rugged in blue jeans and running shoes, Redford points to the rockwork on the village restaurant. "Sweat equity!" he declares. "I did a lot of the work myself. And when you do something by hand -- it's just different." The pride in his voice is quintessentially entrepreneurial, which isn't surprising: Redford is the quintessential entrepreneur. The birth legend of Sundance is positively Lincoln-esque: In 1961, the then-24-year-old actor bought two acres of land for $500 and built a log cabin there. Today Sundance is an international enterprise that includes a cable channel, a DVD/video line, a retail catalog, a resort, and -- as its nucleus -- a not-for-profit institute that is part artists' colony, part R&D shop and that also produces the annual Sundance Film Festival. All of it, says Redford, furthers a single goal: "the sponsoring of a process that will allow people to have new visions and new voices."

"Do you think the world was created by an accountant?" Redford asks me. "No! The universe was created by the combustion of a creative explosion. Fire and chaos started everything. Then order came on top of that."

If new voices and visions are the "products" of Sundance, they are products whose success most businesspeople would envy. Sundance, after all, is among the very few organizations that can credibly claim to have pioneered a market: the market for independent film, which continues to withstand the hurricane force of Hollywood sequels, event movies, and saturation marketing. Its film and theater labs have helped develop such groundbreaking work as Raising Victor Vargas, Boys Don't Cry, Reservoir Dogs, Requiem for a Dream, Love & Basketball, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Angels in America, I Am My Own Wife, and The Laramie Project. And Sundance has contributed to the emergence of a constellation of artists that includes Quentin Tarantino, Allison Anders, John Cameron Mitchell, Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Craig Lucas, Tony Kushner, and Julie Taymor.

Nor is the organization doing badly by standards unrelated to art. In a nation where so many projects and products fail, 35% of projects developed in the Sundance Filmmakers Lab and 85% of its Theater Lab projects make it to production -- in other words, producers outside Sundance consider them promising enough to finance and complete. That's more than 85 feature films in 22 years. The brand is so well recognized it has become shorthand for independent filmmaking. There's a Sundance shelf in more than 4,000 Blockbuster stores.

Redford has also built commercial enterprises -- some of them profitable -- that further his goal of creating venues for innovative work. (Sundance does not release revenue figures.) The Sundance Channel, launched in 1996 as a joint venture by Redford, Showtime Networks, and Universal Studios, has grown steadily and now has 16.7 million subscribers, according to Kagan World Media. (The market-leading Independent Film Channel has 26.8 million subscribers.) A documentary channel is on the way, and a new Sundance Film Series is rolling out in 10 major markets this fall. Redford has also speculated about launching an investment arm and even a production company, in essence becoming a full-fledged manufacturer of the products Sundance now develops and markets.

"Redford is a proven, smart, savvy entrepreneur," says Dale Pollock, veteran Hollywood producer and dean of the filmmaking department at North Carolina's School of the Arts. "The business potential is enormous. Sundance has the best brand name and the ability to expand its audience base.

"How large the indie film niche can become, I don't think anyone really knows," says Pollock. "As for profitability, it may not be huge by mainstream Hollywood standards yet. But it's growing significantly, and Sundance is the lead player positioned in the right way."

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