Pollack's lone documentary feature focuses on his close friend, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry. The director integrated interviews with art-world celebrities like Dennis Hopper, Julian Schnabel, and even himself, creating an intimate and even look at the "starchitect" behind such awesomely warped feats as Spain's Guggenheim Museum.

Dreams are dashed left and right in Pollack's deeply moving spectacle of ambition and desperation at a Depression-era dance marathon, which earned a total of nine Oscar nominations but won only one, for Gig Young's performance as the contest's tireless MC. It also earned Jane Fonda her first Oscar nod, marking a turning point in Fonda's career.

Re-teaming with Robert Redford would prove very successful for Pollack, and he put Redford's leading man magnetism to work as Joe Turner, AKA Condor, a low-level CIA intelligence operative who becomes the target of a covert assassination plot. Evoking the Hollywood thrillers and unsettled political climate of the 1970s (and suggesting Jason Bourne long before the Bourne saga hit theaters), Three Days of the Condor excelled in creating taut, believable Hitchcockian suspense.

Dustin Hoffman became Hollywood's favorite cross-dresser with Tootsie, a comedy about a thorny actor so desperate for work that he turns to drag and becomes a soap opera sensation -- as a woman. The comedy was nominated for ten Oscars, winning one for Jessica Lange as Best Supporting Actress; Pollack's onscreen turn as Hoffman's aggravated agent brilliantly segued on-set tensions between the director and his star into one of the film's most crackling scenes.

Pollack's best-reviewed film is yet another of his many collaborations with Robert Redford, the hard-bitten saga of a 19^th century mountain man who encounters life, death, and Indians in the wide open terrain of Utah. While passed over by the Oscars -- it was the year of Cabaret, Deliverance, and The Godfather -- Jeremiah Johnson nevertheless remains Pollack's most critically celebrated work. As with many Pollack films, the Western isn't merely a genre exercise; it's also an existential character study that examines the impact of living the anti-establishment life, a driving theme in 1970s New Hollywood.