American Rebel (41 page)

Absolute Power
opened on February 14, 1997, and grossed $50 million in its initial domestic theatrical release and nearly double that overseas. That was okay for most films but disappointing for a Clint Eastwood movie—about half what
The Bridges of Madison County
had done. Critics were not overly receptive to the film—most agreed that despite the theme of reconciliation that permeated it, the film was basically an action genre picture that, following
The Bridges of Madison County
, seemed like something of a throwback. It was given the prestigious closing-night slot at the Cannes Film Festival, but in light of the blasé reviews, Clint canceled his much-hyped scheduled personal appearance.

The film had another problem as well, one the critics danced around but that the public could not help but notice. For the first time, Clint simply looked too old for the part.

    
C
lint celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday making two more films. The first was yet another bestseller adaptation,
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
. John Berendt’s novelistic, antebellum tale of murder and intrigue in Savannah was based on a true story involving art dealer Jim Williams and hustler Danny Hansford (called Billy Hanson in the movie). The book had been optioned early on by Arnold Stiefel, an agent-manager who in turn sold the rights to Warner Bros., where it eventually came to Clint and Malpaso from Semel and Daley. The script was by John Lee Hancock, who had also written
A Perfect World
. Hancock turned the book’s author into one of the on-screen characters and eliminated many of Berendt’s enjoyable meanderings.

One gothic element of the story that lent itself particularly well to film was its main setting, the Mercer House, built by Johnny Mercer’s grandfather. Johnny Mercer was one of Savannah’s most celebrated songwriters—and one of Clint’s longtime favorites. He is remembered for, among others, the lyrics to “Laura,” the theme song to Otto Preminger’s 1941 film noir about a ghostly woman at the center of a murder mystery. When Clint read the script, he knew immediately he wanted to direct but not star, preferring to promote his daughter’s stalled career. Alison was cast in the role of Mandy, the on-screen author’s flirty girlfriend, a part greatly expanded from the novel.

Despite Clint’s aging visage, Warner wasn’t especially happy about his decision not to appear in the film—the last two he had directed without also starring in,
Breezy
and
Bird
, had not done nearly as well as the ones he had been in. When asked why he wanted to make the film at all, Clint said:

The all-star cast included Kevin Spacey—red-hot after his upset 1996 Best Supporting Actor win for his performance in Bryan Singer’s sleeper hit
The Usual Suspects—
John Cusack, Jude Law, and veteran actress Kim Hunter. An outsize publicity campaign led up to its big Thanksgiving-weekend release: Clint agreed to a first-time appearance on
60 Minutes
but dodged some unexpectedly pointed questions by Steve Kroft about how many children Clint had by how many different women, and (by implication) why, and a far less intense double appearance on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. Even after all these years, Clint had difficulty appearing relaxed on any stage that required spontaneous responses.

Despite all the buildup, the film did not even earn back its $30 million negative cost
^*
in the States; it brought in only about $25 million in its initial theatrical release, making it one of the biggest flops of Clint’s career. It did nothing for Alison’s career and it resurrected the ever-louder whispers that Clint Eastwood’s career as a Hollywood director was finished.

Almost immediately, as if on cue, rumors began to circulate that Clint was going to make another Dirty Harry movie, the sixth in the series. After all, Malpaso had optioned bestselling West Coast detective
novelist Michael Connelly’s
Blood Work
.
^*
Word was, Clint was thinking about bringing Harry out of retirement to solve one last crime, putting his own life at stake. But instead Clint announced that his next starring role and directing assignment would be
True Crime
, from the Andrew Klavan bestseller about a reporter who tries to stop an execution. Steve Everett (Clint) has to race against time to find the real killers before the wrong man is put to death. Nothing about the film really worked, and most people in Hollywood found its real mystery in its casting: Clint gave Frances Fisher the relatively small role of District Attorney Cecilia Nussbaum.

True Crime
, released in the spring of 1999, did very poorly at the box office, barely grossing $7 million. Shortly after its disastrous release, Bob Daley and Terry Semel resigned from Warner Bros., ending their long association with the studio and with Clint. Controversy swirled around the double resignation, but both executives steadfastly maintained that they simply felt it was time to move on and that their decision had nothing to do with the success or failure of Clint Eastwood’s latest movies.

Shortly thereafter, in January 2000, Time-Warner merged with AOL, a move that shook up the company and the film industry as it appeared to signal a major shift in the delivery of entertainment. The studio was turning away from the business of making motion pictures. Whether Semel and Daley had been forced out, were gently pushed, or chose to leave on their own accord, their departure underscored the fact that Clint Eastwood would no longer be as powerful as he once was. If ever there was a good time for Clint to be able to step down gracefully, this would have been it.

But Clint refused to believe that turning seventy—and looking every day of it, down to his well-worn face heavily wrinkled from a lifetime of living and acting outdoors and a bit of a turkey neck developing under his chin—meant his professional time was up. He still had something to prove, and he intended to do it with style, grace, big box office, and perhaps most of all, a Best Actor Oscar in his fist.

Clint and Dina at the 12th Annual Critics Choice Awards, Santa Monica, California, 2007. AP Images
.

A
s the last night of the old century dissolved into the first day of the new one, Clint Eastwood was living the life of a man half his biological age. He was slim, trim, healthy, and handsome, married to a thirty-four-year-old woman, and the proud father of a three-year-old toddler he could happily bounce on his bony knee.

He was also the head of a business empire and one of the most enduring actors of his generation, still making mainstream commercial movies long after his contemporaries had either died, or retired, or like his friend Jack Nicholson turned to self-parody in the face of diminishing box-office returns. Clint had wealth beyond all expectation and lasting world fame. He had made or appeared in fifty-six features and directed twenty-one of them; he had been acknowledged by the Academy of Motion Pictures with two competitive and one honorary Oscar for his efforts; and he had been feted by the most prestigious museums and grandest film festivals around the world. And yet the need to keep working still stirred within him, as if he still had something that needed to be said, or some accomplishment still to be won. Only months into the new century, he had finished the twenty-second feature that he had directed, the fifty-sixth role he had played on the big screen.

It wasn’t the Dirty Harry film everyone thought they were still waiting for. It was, instead,
Space Cowboys
, a space adventure comedy, starring what one producer referred to as the “geezer squad”—Clint, Tommy Lee Jones (the baby of the set), Donald Sutherland (whom Clint had last worked with in
Kelly’s Heroes)
, and James Garner (whom Clint had known since his
Rawhide
years, when Garner was starring next door in
Maverick)
. The film was Philip Kaufman’s
The Right Stuff
(1983) meets Ron Howard’s
Cocoon
(1985)—Geritol laced with Viagra, with a can’t-miss live monkey thrown in for good measure.

The new regime at Warner had no faith in the film and released—or
dumped—it in August 2000, hoping it wouldn’t do too much damage to its bottom line. It didn’t.
Space Cowboys
went on to be one of the biggest hits of the year, grossing more than $100 million in its initial domestic theatrical release and almost twice that in foreign and ancillary sales (including rental and purchase DVDs and pay-per-view, which had by now added significant profits to virtually all films, past and present).

Clint especially enjoyed the success of this film, literally laughing at the corporate towheads who scratched their scalps as he drove his pickup to the bank. But he had never been anyone’s fool. He had to know that this movie really was a step backward, if not straight down. It put him on the same page with Garner, who had long ago stopped making anything like “big” films, and for whom
Space Cowboys
was a late-in-the-day bonus.

Without taking so much as a deep breath, he went straight into production on
Blood Work
. As FBI profiler Terry McCaleb (in whom one might see the vestiges of good old Dirty Harry), Clint suffers the onset of mortality (or acknowledges it) when a massive heart attack nearly kills him, even as he is hot on the trail of a dirty killer. As he told one interviewer, “At this particular stage in my maturity, I felt it was time to take on characters that have different obstacles to face than they would if I were playing a younger man of 30 or 40.”

Despite the star power of Anjelica Huston and Jeff Daniels, the film failed to catch fire and grossed only $27 million during its initial domestic theatrical run, reaching no higher than tenth place with a paltry $3 million gross on its all-important opening weekend in 2002. Even Al Pacino was able to outdraw Clint at the box office, with
S1m0ne
, directed by Andrew Niccol, an unpronounceable sci-fi mishmash that nevertheless managed to come in ahead
of Blood Work
. No Pacino film had outgrossed an Eastwood film, when both were released at the same time, since
The Godfather
(1 and 2) in the early 1970s,

Clint blamed the film’s failure on the new administration at Warner Bros.: they had dumped the film into the soft third week of August. Semel and Daley were clearly no longer there to promote his work. He was especially angry that the studio had not given the film a New York red-carpet premiere, or scheduled any pre-opening screening
for the critics, giving them the unmistakable sense that the studio wanted to keep them from seeing it.

After the film opened in the States and quickly disappeared, Clint strongly hinted to the studio that he was thinking of giving up acting altogether. That was big, and not good, news for Warner, as the movies Clint acted in still far outgrossed the ones he only directed. In London for the overseas opening, he sent a message to the new power elite at Warner when he told the
Daily Telegraph
, “I’ve wanted to phase out of acting and into directing. I’ll do it when the day comes when you look up at the screen and say, ‘That’s enough of that
guy.’ And that day gets closer all the time”
(emphasis added).