EXCLUSIVE: Robert Redford Changes Agencies And Exits CAA For WME
EXCLUSIVE: “It was time to make a change,” an insider tells me about Robert Redford‘s decision to leave CAA for WME. Redford had spent 32 years as a client of Creative Artists Agency, originally signed by Michael Ovitz in 1980 away from the William Morris Agency. Now Redford is returning not to WMA but to WME (William Morris Endeavor). Which shows how everything in the Hollywood agency business often comes full circle. It was with CAA that the actor segued into a director and producer and entrepreneur and independent film icon through his Sundance Film Festival and Sundance Institute. Redford, who is 76, unveiled his latest directing effort at this year’s Venice Film Festival and Toronto Film Festival — the all-star drama The Company You Keep which Redford stars in and directed. Sony Pictures Classics will release it in the Spring of next year. (“It is so great to see Redford back doing this kind of role again,” Sony Pictures Classics co-President Michael Barker told Deadline’s Pete Hammond at the time.) Redford stars as a successful family man whose violent past as a member of the radical 1960s Weather Underground is exposed by a young news reporter played by Shia LaBeouf. At Toronto, Redford took a bow during enthusiastic applause for the film. It’s the kind of material Redford, who won an Oscar for helming 1980′s Ordinary People, knows how to do very well. As an actor, Redford just wrapped a one-man tour de force in the drama All Is Lost written and directed by JC Chandor (Margin Call). In other recent news for Redford, Sundance Channel unveiled its 2013-2014 original scripted development slate which includes the drama project Valentines from producer Redford and writer Olaf Olafsson. And Redford recently announced that the Sundance London Film and Music Festival which ran for the first time this year, hosting the UK and European premieres of movies that debuted in Park City in January, is renewed for two more years.
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