Clint Eastwood (72 page)

By never spending the studio’s money foolishly, he always managed to make foolish amounts of the stuff for it—and for himself. A studio executive said recently that 95 percent of Clint’s films have made money, and Barry Reardon estimated a few years ago that in worldwide theatrical release alone they had returned something over $1.5 billion to Warner Bros. This figure did not include all the takings from
Unforgiven
and none from
A Perfect World
or
The Bridges of Madison County
. Nor did it include home video sales or television licensing or any of the other ancillary sales the Eastwood library continuously generates (Robert Daly says he often sells the subsequent TV licenses for an Eastwood movie for more than he gets for the first run). All in all his grosses for the company far exceed $2 billion—and do not include the monies generated by the eighteen films he has starred in or directed elsewhere, which surely add another billion to his works’ total earnings.

That this is accomplished with few displays of temper and none of temperament is, of course, vastly relieving. Henry Bumstead likes to say, “
Clint takes the bullshit out of filmmaking,” which is a rare enough gift for people in his line of work, but a benison beyond price for the inhabitants of a studio executive suite.

By now, so far as an outside observer can tell, authentic affection rules Clint’s relationship with Daly and Semel. They do business by doing favors for each other. When Warner’s high-flying video-games division had crashed without warning in the early eighties, bringing stock prices and profits down with it, Clint went to Daly saying that if it would be helpful, he could have his new
Dirty Harry
film ready for Christmas 1983, when it would have a salutary effect on the company’s balance sheet. He delivered
Sudden Impact
as promised, and it turned out to be the most profitable entry in the series.

But this sense of mutual interest extends far beyond the movie of the moment. Through the years Clint has cheerfully joined Warners executives on all kinds of “state” occasions, helping them to open new theme parks, theaters and stores all over the globe. They, in turn, have
been alert to every opportunity to advance his standing with those writers and institutions that take films seriously, an effort that began in earnest in the early eighties. He carefully made himself available to writers for small, serious film journals like
Film Comment
for interviews more extensive than he granted the popular press, and much more soberly cinematic in subject matter. These writers spoke his language, and one can sense his comfort with them. Here and there phrases like “one of the most honest, influential and personal filmmakers in the world today” began to be applied to him. Here and there social and cultural commentators began to write seriously and sympathetically about him. This kind of thing made it acceptable, in turn, for an institution like the Museum of Modern Art to mount a one-day retrospective of four of his films in December 1980 with Clint in attendance.

This was a great moment for him. As he told a reporter a few years later, “
They don’t do that for many actors or actors as young as I am. These things, they usually wait until somebody’s coughing badly. It was very nice.” So nice that when Joe Hyams sent him a picture of the two of them taken on this occasion and asked him to autograph it, Clint hesitated over it for some weeks, searching for the right words. It finally came back inscribed with thanks for what Clint called one of the happiest nights of his life.

It was just the beginning. Clint has returned to MoMA many times. He has, as well, given the
Guardian
lecture at the British Film Institute twice and been appointed one of its fellows; has been named both a chevalier and a commander of arts and letters by the French; had retrospectives of his work staged at just about all the significant film archives, museums and festivals; contended for the top prize at Cannes and has been chairman of its jury. Of late, of course, the more prestigious of the career achievement prizes—the motion-picture academy’s Thalberg Award, the Life Achievement Awards of the American Film Institute and the Film Society of Lincoln Center—have come to him.

He is, to be sure, the kind of American filmmaker foreign cineasts adore—someone with roots in the humble genres they have long respected more than American critics have—so some of the recognition from abroad would doubtless have come to him in the natural course of events. It is also true that with John Wayne’s death in 1979 an opening was created in the celebrity pantheon. That they were, as we have seen, essentially antithetical in their ambitions and in the attitudes they brought to their work was less important than the forgiving affection in which they were so widely held, and the opportunity that offered analysts to say something knowing and sympathetic about the popular culture they usually felt obliged to abhor.

That a newer generation of critics, determined not to be seen as middlebrow fuds in the Crowther–Crist vein, had come along helped Clint’s cause, as he himself has recognized. That, unlike Wayne, he could be seen as an auteur, seriously involved in the process of creating movies instead of just making rich deals to participate in someone else’s enterprise, also recommended him. This fawning, indeed, became so intense that James Wolcott felt obliged in 1985, in a particularly vicious
Vanity Fair
assault, to insist that “
the truth is not that Clint Eastwood’s films have gotten ‘hip,’ but that movie critics have gotten so square.” This he attributed to the desire among liberals in the Reagan era to prove they had
cojones
as weighty as any neo-con, missing the point that their needs were more cultural than political, and missing, too, the insinuating revisions Clint kept adding to his screen character.

Still, one cannot entirely evade the point: No one gets the kind of acclaim that has accrued to Clint over the last decade and a half without institutional support. If nothing else, the logistics of celebration have to be attended to, and in this respect Warner Bros. has been wonderfully attentive.

In essence, studio and star have achieved a blend of the old Hollywood and the new. Clint’s career has been nurtured as such careers were when studios looked upon them as long-term investments to be guarded and guided over many years—the difference here being that the patronization (and resentful dependency) that sullied those arrangements are absent. At the same time Clint and Warners have in their dealings come closer to the mutually beneficent ideal everyone imagined for the era of independent production, eliding that paranoid friction that is more typical of these arrangements.

It’s all very reasonable. Aside from taking the nonsense out of moviemaking it sometimes seems that Clint has drained the drama from it as well, and there is a slightly perverse downside to that. For we like to think that making movies is a desperate enterprise, a form of high-stakes gambling in which people risk everything in pursuit of some impossible dream. We want brutal conflict between the visionary artist and the visionless studio boss. We want sudden rises to fame and fortune, equally sudden descents into ignominy and poverty. These make good copy. Ultimately, they make undying legends. Griffith, von Stroheim, Welles—these are the figures that command such historical imagination as is generally brought to bear on Hollywood’s past; they are the dark exemplars of its propensity first to flatter genius, then to abuse it, then to crush it. Along with such victim-performers as Garland and Monroe they are the source of its black glamour, engines of the tragic celebrity drama that keeps the world attuned to its doings.

Two things are usually omitted from our consideration of these scenarios. One is that there is a powerful self-destructive element in them; Hollywood’s victims are usually first the victims of their own needs and weaknesses. The other is that most of the more treasurable older movies were created by moviemakers who learned to bend the system to their own ends. Vernacularists working their own variations on genre conventions, they conceived themselves more as artisans than as artists, their art being something that was generally recognized long after their craft was rather dismissively acknowledged. This does not mean that such now-famous auteurs as Hitchcock, Ford, Hawks and Lubitsch were without egocentricity or eccentricity. It does mean, however, that they were most basically men who got on with their business, building their huge filmographies while manipulating to their own advantage essentially benign relationships with their studios.

Like Clint, some of them had trouble at first establishing their credentials with the knowing audience, and some still fail to attract the attention they deserve. How much more difficult it is today, when several generations have so thoroughly absorbed the romantic myths of moviedom, to establish one’s seriousness through the exercise of simple professionalism. It might have helped Clint’s reputation in some circles if he had, in this period, made one or two visibly unreasonable movies, might have helped it, too, if the most widely perceived pattern in his work—two or three clearly commercial works followed by something that seemed more “personal”—had seemed slightly less metronomic.

In interviews Clint has repeatedly denied conscious intent in this matter, always insisting that he never made a movie solely on the basis of box-office considerations, and most of the time one can discern, even in, say, a
Dirty Harry
sequel, its point of emotional contact with him. In the later eighties, however, he did not achieve the kind of consistency that he enjoyed between
Josey Wales
and
Bronco Billy
. One cannot entirely evade the feeling that his studio relationship was sometimes just a little too comfortable for his own good.

It’s not that Clint failed to justify his rising cultural repute or that he did not make interesting and ambitious movies in the years between 1983 and 1990. Two or three of them rank among his best work. It’s that he also made several of his weakest movies in that period. Some of these were projects the studio urged on him that he too readily acceded to. Some were films a sterner management might have counseled him to cast differently or have rewritten one more time, or just think about a little harder, so that an interesting idea could be converted into a truly arresting one. But Clint remained an impatient man, driven by his restless need to be up and doing, and sometimes one felt him working just
to keep working, on pictures that detain his interest—and ours—only minimally. Naturally, incalculable chance being the largest determinant of a movie’s fate, some of these turned out to be large hits, making it even harder to argue with his success, especially in Hollywood, where arguing with failure is the sport of choice.

Not that anyone in their right mind would have advised Clint to skip making a sequel to a $100 million grosser.
Any Which Way You Can
reunited him with all the principals except Manis from
Every Which Way but Loose
. Not to worry, though; the replacement Clyde was just fine, and so was the new screenwriter, Stanford Sherman. He came up with a nice running gag, which called for Clyde to solemnly stick his powerful fist out the pickup truck window whenever Philo said, “Right turn, Clyde.” At a certain moment, when the Black Widows are once again menacing them, he gives the cue, and Clyde responds and smashes their leader, whose backward fall generates a domino effect, knocking the entire motorcycle gang off their hogs.

He came up with some other pretty good material—Clyde placidly dismantling a bad guy’s car; Clyde and a “date” enjoying a motel room tryst, with the noise of their lovemaking engendering alarmed reactions from a frumpy middle-aged couple next door that are at least semiprecious—and a story line that is a little more coherent than the previous film’s. After a fight Philo decides to retire from bare-knuckle boxing because, as he tells his pal Orville, he’s beginning to like the pain. But mobsters want him to return for one last bout with an eastern champion, Jack Wilson (William Smith). When he refuses, they kidnap Locke’s Lynne Halsey-Taylor (chastened and more agreeable now), telling Philo he must fight if he hopes to see her again. Naturally he sets forth to recapture her, and eventually the big fight takes place rather spectacularly; it wanders through what appears to be most of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the crowd tagging along as Philo and Jack (who really rather like each other) slug it out.

The picture contains the only overt political statement Clint has ever made in a movie (“A handout is what you get from the government, a handup is what you get from a friend”) and another sound-track duet, “Beers to You,” with the star partnered this time by Ray Charles. Other than that, what is there to say? Only perhaps that it represented quite a decent directorial debut by Buddy Van Horn, Clint’s longtime stunt coordinator. They had first worked together on
Coogan’s Bluff
and
Two Mules for Sister Sara
, and, in their way, started to indicate mutual respect.
“We kinda grunted at each other,” is the way Van Horn puts it, “didn’t say too much.”