American Rebel (21 page)

The abject failure of
Breezy
drove Clint back into the warm and waiting (and wealthy) arms of Warner, which was eager to green-light a sequel to
Dirty Harry
. Enough with the silly romances, they both agreed. Let’s get back to good old blood-guts-and-gore.

Clint would not make another romantic “love story” for twenty-two years.

    
O
ne thing Clint agreed to was the subtle softening, if not exactly mellowing, of Harry Callahan. It was not wholly Clint’s choice; rather, a combination of talented writers working in collaboration with him and Robert Daley, all of whom believed the character and therefore the film would be much more appealing if Callahan were more accessible to and easier on women, as a way to boost the date-movie weekend
audience. Of course, Callahan couldn’t become a pussycat, but they felt that a slight declawing wouldn’t hurt the franchise.

The inspiration for the story—whose working title was
Vigilance
, later changed to
Magnum Force
, named after Callahan’s weapon of choice and the elite enforcement squad of the San Francisco police force—came from screenwriter John Milius, who had done some uncredited partial revisions on the original
Dirty Harry
and had since written the screenplays for Sydney Pollack’s
Jeremiah Johnson
(1972) and John Huston’s
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
(1972) and was on track to write and direct
Dillinger
later that year. This time, however, nothing came out of Milius’s rewrites before he opted out of the project to work on
Dillinger
.

Clint then turned to a talented young newcomer offered to him by the William Morris Agency. Michael Cimino was charged with developing Milius’s main contribution to the picture—the eventual showdown between Callahan and the secret and deadly Magnum Force unit rather than some crazed killer. This plot element was key. While it kept Callahan as violently antiauthoritarian as before, it also put his maverick behavior more clearly on the side of law and order, making him a hero while maintaining his rebel status. Cimino (who would go on to write and direct the phenomenally successful
The Deer Hunter
and win the Best Director Oscar for it,
^*
then self-destruct with his 1980 remake
of Shane, Heaven’s Gate)
prior to
Magnum Force
, had partially written only one screenplay. It was a collaborative effort with Deric Washburn of Douglas Trumbull’s
Silent Running
(1971), not a big winner at the box office but good enough for William Morris to put him up for Clint’s film.

To direct, Clint surprised everybody by going with Ted Post over Don Siegel, feeling either that his creative teaming with Siegel had run its course or that Siegel was not going to be able to ease up on the intensity of the Callahan character.

That may not have been the only problem. Clint, by now, had begun to feel restricted by Siegel, as much by his methods as by his style. Clint liked to move quickly, especially as Malpaso was now producing most of the films he worked on. Siegel was deliberate and liked
to shoot scenes over and over again—which rove Clint to the brink of his patience. Finally, the aging Siegel’s on-screen bluntness was losing some of its edge, where Clint was looking to go younger and sharper. He believed that speed and instinct were the ways to do it, and he wanted a director who was less committed to a set style of directing, less deliberate, and more willing to go with the moment.

Clint felt grateful to Post for the success
of Hang ‘Em High
, and the studio liked him as well. Not long afterward the trades announced that Siegel was “unavailable,” due to a prior commitment to direct a project in Europe tentatively called
Drazzle
, starring Michael Caine. (It was never made.)

However, things did not go as smoothly as Clint had hoped. On set Post, who had known Clint since
Rawhide
, wanted to expand on the notion of Harry as a dirty cop, while Clint wanted less, to bring more couples into the theaters. Most of all, he wanted to keep the movie in the entertainment sections and out of the general news pages of the newspapers. (He did allow a Japanese TV crew to follow him around for an episode of the popular Japanese series
Leading World Figures
, which had previously profiled Pope Paul VI, Pablo Picasso, Aristotle Onassis, Princess Margaret, Chou En-lai, Indira Gandhi, Princess Grace, and Henry Kissinger.)

One adjustment to the original
Dirty Harry
was the addition of a partner for Callahan called Early Smith, who was played by Felton Perry. The fact that Perry was black was a conscious attempt by Warner to ameliorate the outrage that the punk in the “‘Do I feel lucky?’” scene had been black. Everyone, it seemed, had been upset that the figure cowering on the other side of Dirty Harry’s gun was African-American, just when militant groups such as the Black Panthers were denouncing lethal police violence inflicted on Fred Hampton and George Jackson. (In 1987 the “buddy” teaming of a “crazed” white cop and his more sensible black partner would be reprised by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, respectively, in Richard Donner’s
Lethal Weapon
, a hugely popular film that would enjoy three sequels, all of which owed some measure of debt to
Dirty Harry.)
^*

During preproduction, Clint was asked to present the Best Picture
Oscar at the Academy Awards eremony on March 27, 1973. Although it was and still is considered an honor to present the most important award of the evening, Clint initially turned down the job, but because of pressure from the studio and from Maggie, he decided to accept the assignment. As long as his appearance was short and sweet, with one or two lines, he would be fine.

That night he showed up for the ceremony with Maggie and took his assigned place in the audience, smiling and waving to friends scattered about the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The telecast show was to have multiple hosts, as it had for the past several years. (Clint had previously presented the Best Foreign Language Film award, alongside Claudia Cardinale, to Costa-Gavras’s
Z
in 1970.)

And then the roof fell in. One of the show’s four “hosts,” Charlton Heston, was scheduled to kick off the proceedings, but had not shown up for his half-hour call and was nowhere to be found.
^*
His introduction, explaining the voting rules and regulations, had been tailored to Heston, as a parody of the gravitas he was known for from his biblical hero films.

Howard Koch, the show’s producer, nervously signaled for Clint and Maggie to hurry backstage. They went, not knowing what was going on, and Koch asked Clint to fill in for Heston. He refused. That wasn’t his thing, he told Koch. He wasn’t prepared, and he just couldn’t do it. Koch continued to plead as the audience began to murmur about the delayed start. Finally Maggie stepped in and told Clint he ought to help out. With nowhere to go and stuck between a begging producer and an urging wife, he silently nodded and walked out onto the stage. There he was greeted by thunderous applause and the occasional shrieks caused by his unexpected appearance.

In his gut, he felt a sense of panic. The teleprompter was filled with Heston-related movie jokes, written by screenwriter-novelist William Goldman. Clint stopped in the middle, looked out at the audience with a tight smile on his face, and said, “This was supposed to be Charlton Heston’s part of the show, but somehow he hasn’t shown up. So who did they pick? They pick the guy who has said but three lines in twelve movies to substitute for him.”

Only mild laughter came back at him—the audience was as
confused as he was—so he read the rompter as best he could, making jokes about
The Ten Commandments
that nobody could possibly have found funny, especially coming from him. After several torturous minutes, sprinkled with the nervous laughter of an audience of nominees already on edge, Heston arrived backstage out of breath, claiming to have been the victim of a flat tire. Koch grabbed him and literally threw him onto the set. Now, the audience roared.

A much-relieved Clint quickly and gratefully handed the proceedings over to Heston, who began from the top as if nothing had happened. When he reread the same jokes Clint had done, the audience erupted, this time with good-natured laughter. Clint returned later that night to present the Best Picture Award, but by then the audience was reeling from Marlon Brando’s personally chosen stand-in to accept his Best Actor Oscar for the title role of Francis Ford Coppola’s
The Godfather
. Sacheen Littlefeather, a woman dressed as an Apache, had protested the treatment of American Indians in Hollywood movies and was received less than enthusiastically. Clint had to follow that. He took the opportunity to make what was for him a rare and witty, if sarcastic, ad-lib: “I don’t know if I should present this award on behalf of all the cowboys shot in John Ford westerns over the years!”

He then presented the Oscar to Albert Ruddy, who won for
The Godfather
.
^*

The next day Rex Reed commented, “Last night we learned Clint Eastwood can be funny!” It would be twenty-seven years before Clint consented to be a presenter for this or any other live event.
^†

    
M
agnum Force
opened in December 1973, and despite the lack of controversy surrounding the Callahan character, was the biggest hit of the year. Its only real negative criticism came again from Kael, who derided Clint’s abilities as an actor and pompously held her nose throughout her review. But neither she nor any other critic could stop audiences from flocking to see this film, which outgrossed
Dirty Harry
by more than $2 million, to become Clint’s highest-grossing film to date. During its initial domestic release, it broke through the $20 million ceiling, which at the time defined a “blockbuster,” the next big step above “big hit.” And, because it was a sequel, it broke another Hollywood rule of thumb—that a sequel is usually half as good as the original and earns about half as much.

So here was a film that may or may not have been half as good, that was made for little more than the original (minus the original director)—that actually managed to outgross the original. The reason was singular and definitive; Clint Eastwood’s name above the title, in the role he had created two years earlier, was enough to draw audiences in huge numbers. More than any other achievement,
Magnum Force
removed any lingering doubts that he was a worldwide box-office sensation.

But something else was equally undeniable. For the first time, both in person and on screen, Clint looked old, or older—every day of his forty-three years. His thick, brown mane of hair had begun to thin and recede on both sides. His face had weathered, and lines were visible on his forehead and two short vertical ones, like quotation marks, on the bridge of his nose between his eyes. By Hollywood standards, he was no longer industrial-strength young.

And he knew it, which only added to his desire to shift from star to director. Could anything be more ludicrous than a middle-aged, huffing and puffing Harry Callahan? That was something he believed might happen if he worked with and trusted the wrong advisers. “People who go to the movies like me,” he reminded one interviewer, explaining that he had never felt beholden to any one studio. “I haven’t had a special push or a big studio buildup. I never get my picture taken kissing my dog when I get off a plane, that sort of thing. There are stars who are produced by the press. I’m not one of them. Bogart once said he owed it to the movie-going public—and to them alone—to do his best. I feel that way too.”

    
F
or his next project, Leonard Hirshan had a project he thought Clint might like, which had come to him through Stan Kamen, the head of the William Morris Agency’s motion picture department. Kamen was, at the time, helping propel the rising star of Michael Cimino, whose script-doctoring
of Magnum Force
had made him 100
percent bankable, with producers lining up to throw development money at him. Cimino had written a road movie script with Clint in mind. The genre had become popular in the new independent Holly wood following the extraordinary success of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s
Easy Rider
(1969), one of the last, and perhaps the biggest, nail in the old studio system’s coffin.

Everyone now wanted to do a road picture, including Clint. Or at least that was what he decided when he read Cimino’s script, an unlikely pairing of a bank robber and a drifter. Kamen had already attached one of his biggest clients, Jeff Bridges, who was fresh from a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Peter Bogdanovich’s
The Last Picture Show
, to the project (in the part that not too long ago would have gone to Clint). Kamen wanted Clint to play the bank robber, a Vietnam War veteran.

Cimino knew what Clint liked and made sure the script had plenty of it: foamy barroom philosophy and lots of dialogue about women’s “tight asses,” “cock-sucking,” and other vainglories of the proverbial and never-ending (and ultimately existential) road. The film would have no shortage of women, all young, sexy, and willing, who came Thunderbolt’s (Clint’s) way.

Cimino also insisted that he had to direct his own script. Clint—sensing in this fellow traveler a fiercely independent young hothead who wanted to do things his own way—approved it, as long as Hirshan could make the film a Malpaso project. No problem, Kamen assured him, although Frank Wells at Warner had, prior to Clint’s firm commitment, turned down the project, feeling it was too idiosyncratic and lacked blockbuster potential. When Clint found out about that, he was furious. According to Clint, “Lenny Hirshan took a script that I liked called
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
to Frank [Wells] and John [Calley], and they said, no, not at that price, so twenty minutes later I had a deal at United Artists.”

To sweeten the deal, UA—Clint’s original American distributor for the spaghetti trilogy—offered Malpaso a nonexclusive two-picture deal, which he immediately accepted, the second picture to be decided at a later date. With Bob Daley in place as the film’s line producer, filming
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
began in July 1973, on location in Montana, and lasted until the end of September.