Robert Redford is passionately discussing the ethical issues raised in Quiz Show when the telephone rings. He has been speaking quickly, almost urgently, alternately acting out scenes from the movie- including the female roles-and explaining what they mean. He seems a little annoyed to be caught in mid-thought; he answers on the third ring.
''Oh, gosh,'' he says to his assistant, a slight panic creeping into his voice. ''Yes, but what do I do? Okay. You can explain it's just for a second.''
Redford excuses himself and hurries out of the room. He returns a few minutes later bearing a ceramic plate filled with pomegranates, peppers, and cheese. It is a homemade surprise from screenwriter-novelist Laura Esquivel (Like Water for Chocolate); Redford is developing a film based on her next book. He gingerly places the dish on the window behind his desk, next to a small pile of brightly wrapped gifts.
''It was very sweet of her to bring it by,'' he says, almost embarrassed.
Today is Redford's 57th birthday. His assistant has left his lunch-a sourdough roll, a salad, and a hunk of rich chocolate cake-on a Lucite tray, and as he eats it, he's flooded with calls and faxes from family and close friends; he apologizes profusely, but takes every one. The walls of his Southwestern-decorated office in the New York suite of his Wildwood production company are studded with photographs that reflect his public and private lives: Shots of Redford with Jason Robards, with Sydney Pollack, and with the Quiz Show cast vie for space with dozens of pictures of his three grown children-and his three grandchildren.
''Don't ask me how I am with (being a grandfather),'' he says. ''It's kind of hard for me to grasp. I'm still having trouble being called Mister.''
The paradoxes don't end there. The grandfather is still a romantic leading man and still in demand, although Hollywood is beginning to notice that his female costars are not years, but decades, younger than he is. Behind the camera, however, Robert Redford is Hollywood's Hot Young Thing-a director who, with just four films (Ordinary People, The Milagro Beanfield War, A River Runs Through It, and Quiz Show) under his belt, has become one of the industry's most acclaimed filmmakers.
Though he won an Academy Award for 1980's Ordinary People, his directorial debut, it is Quiz Show, which opened last week to universally glowing reviews, that marks his coming of age. Redford has deftly transformed an historical scandal into a cultural cautionary tale for the '90s, examining the cheating that brought down TV game shows through the stories of three men-the patrician, telegenic Twenty-One contestant Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes); the man who deliberately lost to him, Herbert Stempel (John Turturro); and ambitious congressional lawyer Richard Goodwin (Rob Morrow), who investigated the shows. Critics have hailed Quiz Show for its coolheaded examination of class and religious prejudice, and for probing TV's influence on a society desperate to create pop-culture heroes.
But Quiz Show may also be the most personal film Redford has made, a re- creation of the time when he first arrived in New York as a struggling actor, of the time before he was overtaken by fame.
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