American Rebel (43 page)

On the direction front, the nominees included Taylor Hackford for
Ray
, Martin Scorsese for
The Aviator
, Alexander Payne for
Sideways
, and Mike Leigh for
Vera Drake
.

The ceremonies took place on the unusually warm Los Angeles evening of February 27, 2005, once again at the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Chris Rock began the evening with a series of interminably unfunny jokes. Despite the big box office that
Million Dollar Baby
had generated (it had outgrossed Scorsese’s
The Aviator
by
nearly $100 million, domestically), Scorsese looked unbeatable for Best Director. Scorsese’s trademark was the idiosyncratic New York street drama, such as
Mean Streets
(1973),
Taxi Driver
(1976), and the grand
Raging Bull
(1980)—he’d lost both Best Picture and Best Director to Robert Redford for
Ordinary People
. The buzz was that this finally had to be Scorsese’s year, as much as the previous one had been Clint’s. The evening came down to a battle of the East Coast independent versus the western rebel.
^*

Clint was sitting several rows back with Ruiz—on the aisle, just in case—not far from where Scorsese had been placed, ready for his leap to glory.

The trend was set early. For Best Supporting Actor, the nominations included Freeman, Alan Alda for
The Aviator
, Thomas Haden Church for
Sideways
, Jamie Foxx for Michael Mann’s
Collateral
, and Clive Owen for Mike Nichols’s
Closer
. These were four strong performances, and although Church and Foxx were considered favorites, they likely split the vote, leaving not enough for Owen or Alda to overtake Freeman, who won it. The theater erupted. This was Freeman’s fourth nomination but only his first win. Seated directly behind Clint, he got up and grabbed Clint’s hand on the way up. Clint’s grin lit up the room. “Heavens to Murgatroyd,” Freeman said into the microphone under the noise from his standing ovation. “And I especially want to thank Clint Eastwood for giving me the opportunity to work with him again,” he added, as Clint watched, slowly chewing gum and looking pleased and even a bit humbled by the moment.

The evening worked its way through the dozens of awards until it was finally time for the Big Three. The first, Best Actress, was given out by Sean Penn, the winner of the previous year’s Best Actor award for
Mystic River
. The nominees were reviewed one more time: Swank, Annette Bening for István Szabó’s
Being Julia
, Catalina Sandino Moreno for Joshua Marston’s
Maria Full of Grace
, Imelda Staunton for Mike Leigh’s
Vera Drake
, and Kate Winslet for Michel Gondry’s
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
. The only real challenger to Swank was Winslet, but her movie was indecipherable to the few people who had actually gone to see it. Penn opened the envelope and read aloud
Swank’s name. As he rose to head for the stage, she passed a black-tied Clint, put her hands on his face, and softly kissed him on the lips, all during her ovation. Wearing a dress with no back that cried out “I’m really a woman and a sexy one at that,” she humbly accepted the award as “just a girl from a trailer park” and thanked everyone she could possibly think of. Then she stopped the music from playing her off to thank Clint, for allowing her to take the journey with him, for believing in her, for being her
“mo chuisle”—
the words she wore on the back of her robe during the film, which translated from the Gaelic means “My darling, my blood.” Clint bowed his head gently in response.

Next came the award for Best Actor. The nominees included Clint, Jamie Foxx in the second of his two nominations for the evening, this one for the title role of
Ray
, Don Cheadle for Terry George’s
Hotel Rwanda
, Johnny Depp for
Finding Neverland
, and Leonardo DiCaprio for
The Aviator
.
^*
During the recap, when Clint’s clip was shown, and the TV camera found him, Ruiz had her arms linked around one of his, pulling him with excitement, while Clint stared ahead, unwilling or unable to show emotion. A radiant Charlize Theron opened the envelope and read the name of the winner
—Jamie Foxx
. The place cheered happily as Foxx ran up to the stage and accepted his award. As he did so, Clint’s smile melted into a mask. His eyebrows raised slightly, and he applauded for Foxx.

Finally came the award for Best Director. After the nominees’ names were read, the crowd hushed as Julia Roberts opened the envelope.

When she called his name, Clint showed little emotion as he loped on his long legs to the stage. Holding the Oscar, the white-haired, trim, and tanned actor spoke in his trademark low drawl, a guttural slide of sounds rather than a vocalized string of words. After thanking the usual roundup, he paid special tribute to the legendary studio-era production designer Henry Bumstead, ninety years old, who had worked on
Million Dollar Baby
. Clint thanked his mother, ninety-six, reminding audiences that she was only eighty-four when he had won for
Unforgiven
. “So I want to thank her for her genes. I figure I’m
just a kid—I’ve ot a lot of stuff to do yet.”
^*
At the age of seventy-four, he had become the oldest person to ever win an Oscar for Best Director.

“I’m happy to be here and still working,” Clint said, with a smile, while in the audience a brittle-faced Scorsese slumped deep into his seat.

Clint was back again a few minutes later, when
Million Dollar Baby
won Best Picture. How a picture wins that award, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress, and Best Director but not Best Actor is hard to explain. But one thing is clear: the Academy, as always, can be sadistically cruel in its reward-denial syndrome.
^†

This night Clint went home once more another actor’s bridesmaid, this time to Jamie Foxx, as the remaining grains of sand ran ever faster down the hourglass of his life.

Clint’s most recent film
, Gran Torino,
2009
.

I
n 2005, at seventy-five years of age, Clint Eastwood was happily married to his second wife. His eight-year-old-daughter Morgan Eastwood had been named after his costar and good friend Morgan Freeman. He was a grandfather of two, Kimber’s son and Kyle’s daughter. And he was the head of a financial empire that included restaurants (the Hog’s Breath Inn and the Inn Mission Ranch), real estate, the exclusive invitation-only Tehama Golf Club in Carmel Valley (with an initial joining fee of $300,000), part ownership in the Pebble Beach Golf and Country Club, whole or part ownership in the sixty films he had produced, directed, starred in, or all three, and Malpaso, the company that made nearly all of them. He had eight Academy Award nominations and five Oscars. And as the year began, he was deeply involved in not one but two new movies.

They were a related pair of World War II films that reached back to the days of his youth and held no star-turn roles for him.
Flags of Our Fathers
and
Letters from Iwo Jima
was a unique double package, separate films about the same battle told from the perspective of each side (both with musical sound tracks by Clint Eastwood).
Flags of Our Fathers
was based on the book co-written by James Bradley, the son of one of the flag raisers, and Ron Powers; the film uses flashbacks to tell the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima and the fate of the six men of Easy Company who raised the victory flag there.
^*
Also known as Operation Detachment, the battle started on February 19, 1945, and lasted thirty-five days. It was one of the bloodiest and most pivotal battles in the Pacific Theater.

The historic raising of the flag on the fifth day would endure as a
powerful symbol of victory tself. The moment was immortalized by photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won the Pulitzer Prize for it. (The one he captured on film was actually the second flag-raising.)
Flags of Our Fathers
tells how the three survivors of that photograph were exploited by the American government for propaganda purposes, to boost the morale of the American people during the war, and to help with the sale of war bonds. It also looks at what happened to the men themselves, how the battle affected them, and their difficulties dealing with guilt and self-worth in the years that followed the so-called moment of heroic glory.

It is a moving subject whose symbolic and political relevancies had, if anything, become even more vivid as the war in Iraq dragged on, while the administration that had forced it struggled to find ways to “sell” it to the American people. No one knew better than Clint Eastwood how much a picture could do to promote an image. Take a man with no name, for instance, and give him a poncho and a cigarillo, and you could redefine the iconic image of the gunfighters of the American West.

The project was the brainchild of Steven Spielberg, who, along with Tom Hanks, had become the self-appointed representatives of a peculiar niche of the baby boom generation: those who had never served in the military (and likely protested the war in Vietnam) but regarded the previous generation—their fathers, uncles, and older brothers—as “the greatest” for their service in World War II. (The “greatest generation” became the slogan for the uncomplicated heroism and patriotism of the Second World War, the “good war.”) For Spielberg and Hanks, World War II became less the basis of real drama and more the ultimate boomer video game, something of a techno fetish in films like
Saving Private Ryan
(1998), an award-winning box-office smash loosely based on the true story of one family, the “fighting Sullivans,” who lost five sons during the war. In the film, which begins with a violent re-creation of the Allied landing at Normandy, a group of soldiers are sent out to find the last remaining Sullivan son and bring him home. It is a noble gesture and a great theme for a film (if one disregards the huge body count that piles up to save the one last surviving Ryan). Spielberg had previously made
Empire of the Sun
(1987),
1941
(1979), and
Schindler’s List
(1993), as
well as the Indiana Jones films and TV series, all World War II-themed projects, and he would go on to do a ten-part series for HBO called
Band of Brothers
, co-produced by Tom Hanks. Perhaps wisely, this time Spielberg felt he needed to emphasize dramatic substance over stylized mythology, with a little more penetration and a little less envy.

Clint first came upon the project while he was in production on
Million Dollar Baby: