by Marc Eliot
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.†
Magnum 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.”
For 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.
While he had loved the script, and Cimino’s cockiness, Clint hadn’t counted on the director’s perfectionism. It closely resembled what Clint had experienced with Siegel, times ten (bordering on the obsessional, it would contribute to Cimino’s later self-destruction with Heaven’s Gate).
Clint was well known on his sets for preferring to do one take in the morning and spending the afternoons on the golf course. During Play Misty for Me, in which he wore three caps—as director, de facto producer, and star—he said, “I must confess I can’t stand long locations or production schedules. Once you get moving, I don’t see any reason to drag your feet. During production, I can function much more fully and efficiently if I move full blast. Maybe it’s because I’m basically lazy.”
Clint found Jeff Bridges easy to work with and his performance revelatory. When the film was released in 1974, Bridges was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.* But according to several sources, including (but not limited to) Steven Bach’s Final Cut, Clint perceived himself as having been upstaged by Bridges. His disappointment and anger were palpable. And when the film proved a disappointment at the box office (settling in at about $9 million in its initial theatrical release, less than half of Magnum Force), according to Bach, Clint excused his unofficial and overly indulged protégé Cimino. Instead he pointed the finger at UA, which, Clint felt, had failed to adequately position or promote the film. Despite all they had done for him, going all the way back to the Leone westerns, he swore he would never work for the studio again. He remained true to his word and never made the second film of the two-picture deal or any other for UA.
Instead, Clint went back to Universal to make a more comfortable type of movie, and a more reliably profitable one—straight action, with no women, no matter how tight their asses were, to interfere and slow things down. He wanted to return to the safety of the kind of film where he had to hang by his fingertips for dear life, while the audiences eagerly lined up to see him do so.
Only this time, he nearly fell making it.
*Best Actor that year went to Gene Hackman for The French Connection, a character-driven policier with an East Coast, ultrarealistic style
and timely theme based on the Academy-loving “true story.” The other nominees were Peter Finch in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday; George C. Scott in Arthur Hiller’s The Hospital; Walter Matthau in Jack Lemmon’s Kotch; and Topol in Norman Jewison’s Fiddler on the Roof.
†Bob Daley, who had executive-produced Joe Kidd, was moved down a notch by Clint to the position of hands-on producer.
*Clint has always denied any supernatural affect to the film, stating on more than one occasion that his intention was to insinuate that the mysterious drifter is the murdered sheriff’s brother. See Boris Zmijewsky and Lee Pfeiffer, The Films of Clint Eastwood (New York: Citadel Press, 1993), 152. But multiple viewings reveal little, if any, evidence of such a link.
*He was also one of the producers and shared in the Deer Hunter’s Oscar for Best Picture.
*Even Mel Gibson’s character’s name, Sergeant Martin Riggs, is an echo of Lieutenant Neil Briggs, played in Magnum Force by Hal Holbrook.
*The other three were Carol Burnett, Michael Caine, and Rock Hudson.
*Thirty-two years later, Clint and Ruddy (and co-producer Tom Rosenberg) would jointly accept the 2004 Best Picture Oscar for Million Dollar Baby.
†In 2000, he presented the Best Picture Oscar to the producers of American Beauty (1999).
*Bridges lost to Robert De Niro in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II. The other nominees were Fred Astaire in John Guillermin and Irwin Allen’s The Towering Inferno, and Michael V. Gazzo and Lee Strasberg in The Godfather Part II.
ELEVEN
Costarring in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) with Sondra Locke at the start of their tempestuous thirteen-year on-and off-screen relationship.
I went into The Outlaw Josey Wales a little in awe of Clint Eastwood, top star. I finished it in awe of Clint Eastwood, the total talent.
—Sondra Locke
The film was The Eiger Sanction, a James Bond–style movie in which Clint plays a government assassin on a mission to kill a renegade spy; in reality, the agency believes he is the renegade and wants him killed, or so he thinks. The politics of paranoia are insinuated in the backstory. It is the physical assault on Switzerland’s Eiger mountain that dominates the screen.
Clint leaped at the chance to do another film that would emphasize his physical prowess, in a surrounding where he would not have to share the stage with other, perhaps more talented or more famous actors, be harried by a self-indulgent director, and for a script that was more colorful than the resulting movie. The Eiger Sanction was just the kind of picture he knew best how to do—its content and form melded into one continuous flow of action, so that its content became its form, like a film with no plot starring a Man with No Name.
Apparently, at the relatively late-for-Hollywood age of forty-four, Clint felt he still had something left to prove. The financial dip that Thunderbolt and Lightfoot had taken was enough for Clint to want to fall back on more familiar turf, preferably in an outdoor setting, playing a silent but deadly hero with death-defying physical skills. Jonathan Hemlock (Eastwood), the former assassin who has lately turned to the clergy (of all things), is once again summoned by a “secret (i.e., CIA)” U.S. intelligence agency to return for one final assignment that will, upon its completion, enable him to make some new art purchases. As preposterous as it sounds, this plot offers the perfect setup for pure action, the essential ingredient of The Eiger Sanction. As he always liked to do, Clint personally went through the script with a thick blue pencil and slashed the dialogue as much as possible.
The Eiger Sanction property had been owned by the studio for quite some time. They had purchased the screen rights in 1972 to the first of what became a series of Sanction novels by Trevanian (sanction means “assassination” in the lingo of his books), its twisty hook being its intellectual hero who is all-too-easily able to become a man of action who thrives on danger.* The production team of Richard Zanuck and David Brown, sitting pretty with a strong development deal at Universal, had purchased The Eiger Sanction with Paul Newman in mind. (The next year they would score big with their filmed version of the novel Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg.) Newman was red hot after George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973), but after expressing preliminary interest in the project, passed. Jennings Lang then suggested that Zanuck and Brown offer it to Clint (who had been Lang’s first choice). He read it, loved it, and with Malpaso worked into the deal, signed on.
Once aboard, Clint assumed complete control of the project, becoming its nominal producer, although Zanuck, Brown, and (for Malpaso) Bob Daley got the on-screen credit. The first thing Clint did was toss the script and contact Warren Murphy, a novelist whose work he liked (Murphy’s action-oriented Destroyer series would be the basis for at least one movie—Guy Hamilton’s 1985 Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins; Murphy eventually provided the story for Richard Donner’s Lethal Weapon 2). Clint liked Murphy’s minimal style, and although he had as yet no background in scriptwriting, Clint convinced him to try one for The Eiger Sanction.
Working off what Murphy considered his first draft, Clint went into production with a cast that included costar George Kennedy as Big Ben Bowman, Hemlock’s pal and also his secret enemy. Clint and Kennedy had gotten friendly during the making of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, and as was Clint’s way, he rewarded that friendship by making Kennedy a member of the Malpaso “family.” Clint filled out the rest of the cast with Jack Cassidy and Vonetta McGee (playing the female spy Jemima Brown). McGee had made a couple of “blaxploitation” pictures and had the kind of “taut bottom” that Trevanian had given Brown in the book.
He wanted the film to look authentic, which not all his pictures did. This time, because he saw the film as essentially a great mountain climb with a little story and even less dialogue, he recruited Mike Hoover to serve as the film’s technical adviser. The set was, in reality, the north face of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, a mountain with a reputation of being nearly impossible to climb; the names of those who had died trying was a grim roster. Hoover had made a documentary called Solo that had been nominated for an Oscar for Best Short Subject—Clint had seen and admired it. For this film his assignment would be twofold—to teach Clint how to look professional while he climbed, and to serve as a cameraman on the more dangerous shoots. After several days rehearsing the action sequences at Yosemite Mountaineering School, Hoover and his handpicked team (which included at least one veteran of the north face), and the cast and crew all left for Switzerland, where they were booked into the Kleine Scheidegg Hotel, located at the base of the mountain.
One of Hoover’s crew was David Knowles, a twenty-seven-year-old British climber who had been awarded the Royal Humane Society’s highest honor for his part in the 1970 rescue of several stranded climbers in Glencoe, Scotland. His good looks made him a perfect double for Clint in some of the more difficult mountain shots. (Clint and the rest of the cast did very little actual climbing—helicopters transported them to and from the mountain.) The last shot of the first week of filming was a pickup of a mountain slide, re-created by using rubber rocks. Hoover and Knowles decided to shoot it themselves. They positioned on a lower ledge to get the angle they wanted, when suddenly the rubber rocks triggered real rocks, and they all started falling at the same time. Possibly the vibrations from the helicopters created the landslide. Hoover suffered a broken pelvis and clung to the side of the mountain until rescuers could get to him. Knowles wasn’t so lucky. He was found dead, hanging upside down, dangling from one foot, his head crushed by a boulder that had killed him instantly.
Everyone was, naturally, upset, and for a while Clint considered canceling the production, but Clint’s unofficial statement was this: let it continue.
It was a very difficult picture to make. A good thing our gadgets were limited in number; we were running the risk of heading in the direction of the James Bond movies. And especially the mountaineering sequences posed enormous problems. We had to shoot with two crews,
one crew of technicians and one crew of mountain climbers. Every morning, we had to decide, according to the weather report, which one to send up the mountain. The three actors and myself had to undergo intensive training. On the seventh day of filming, we lost one of our mountaineers and, believe me, I asked myself repeatedly if it was worth it.
The unfortunate incident was used, rather coldly, to promote the film. In an interview entitled “Clint’s Cliff Hanger,” James Bacon described some of the footage (he’d had an advance look) as “white knuckle” material. He also said that “the only time [Clint] ever used a double was a dummy. One professional mountain climber hit on the head with a falling rock was killed in Switzerland. Clint had dropped from the same site only moments before.” Bacon quoted Clint about it this way: “I just got myself involved deeper and deeper. There was no turning back. At first, I was going to use a double but a double can only think of the stunt. He can’t think of the characterization. It just wouldn’t have worked with a double.” Bacon wound up his piece noting Clint’s youthful looks: “Clint, at 44, is the world’s greatest advertisement for health food … Even Clint’s restaurant in Carmel—’Hog’s Breath Inn’—features health food. He even serves organic booze—no preservatives added. The menu includes such goodies as ‘The Dirty Harry’ dinner, ‘Fistful of T-Bone,’ and a ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ New York–cut steak. It seems that everything Clint touches makes money. His wife Maggie told me that the restaurant took off like Clint’s box-office record.”