Jane Fonda showed up at the opening-night film of the 2026 TCM Classic Film Festival on Thursday to salute her late co-star in four movies, Robert Redford. But the famously political actress also took the opportunity to slam the potential Paramount/Warner Bros. merger as being anathema to what the actor was fighting for when he founded the Sundance Film Festival and the Sundance Institute in the early 1980s.
In a 20-minute onstage conversation prior to the screening of the 1967 comedy “Barefoot in the Park,” Fonda remembered being around Redford in the late 1970s, when he was getting frustrated with Hollywood’s growing blockbuster mentality and making plans to support independent film with Sundance.
“He didn’t like the way movies in Hollywood, had to be commercial,” the 88-year-old actress said. “It was a time when it was like, ‘Don’t make any westerns because they won’t do well.’ You know, that kind of thing. He wanted to make independent film that had nuance and diversity.”
Fonda circled back to that idea at the end of her conversation with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz. “When I look at what’s happening in this town, when I look at the pending mergers, if that goes through we’re going to lose what Bob was trying to do,” she said, to resounding applause from the full house at the TCL Chinese Theatre. “The diversity, the complexity, the nuance… We have to fight. I want to fight in the spirit of Robert Redford.”
Most of the Q&A was lighter in tone, of course, as befits an intro to “Barefoot in the Park,” a romantic comedy based on one of Neil Simon’s first hit plays. It was the second film that teamed Fonda and Redford, following 1966’s “The Chase” and preceding 1979’s “The Electric Horseman” and 2017’s “Our Souls at Night.”
“I had such a crush on him it was painful,” Fonda readily admitted. “We were both married, but I once asked him, ‘Do you ever have affairs?’ He had a weird answer. He said, ‘Well, if I was going to have an affair, it would be to somebody that was, like, a hooker.’”
Redford was not yet a movie star when the two started working together, but Fonda said she saw it coming. “We shot [‘Barefoot’] on the Paramount lot, and I remember walking down the corridor with him. Every secretary would open her door and look at him walking. I thought, ‘He is gonna be a big star.’”
She also shared that Redford loved to climb the tower on top of the Fox Westwood Village Theater in Los Angeles; that he was always two or three hours late to set, even when it was a movie he was producing; and that she saw women in Las Vegas during the “Electric Horseman” shoot run up to him and then faint at his feet.
“I had never seen anything like it,” she said of the adulation he received. “It was hard for him to be a movie star, but he liked the power it gave him because he was able to do Sundance.”
Fonda and Mankiewicz agreed that that film festival, and the institute that has nurtured independent filmmakers since the early ’80s, were the accomplishments for which Redford would most like to be remembered.
“He could have built an empire,” she said. “And [instead] he built a nest for artists to feel safe and to grow.”
The TCM Classic Movie Festival will continue through Sunday, May 3, in Hollywood, with additional guests that include Glenn Close, Barbara Hershey, Laura Dern, Alexander Payne, Carol Burnett, Paul Williams, John Turturro, Faye Dunaway, Cameron Crowe and Jay Mohr. Info at filmfestival.tcm.com.
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