by Marc Eliot
And finally English Bob’s biographer, W. W. Beauchamp, as played by Saul Rubinek, is so corrupt, cowardly, self-promoting, and unconcerned about truth (and unable to stand up for it) that history itself becomes suspect. Legend blends into fact when, in a coda, the audience is left to wonder what really happened to Munny. In a sense, Beauchamp represents for Clint all writers (biographers included) and probably none more so than film critics, who too often play loose and easy with movies and set up straw heroes and villains to knock down in the name of their own brilliance.
Other strings that run through the film are racism, sexism, and vainglory, all of which come together to one incredible climax that resolves, as do all the great westerns—and in a larger metaphorical sense, all great movies—in one of the most powerful gunfights ever filmed.
And it was all shot in less than a month.*
The pre-release buzz on this film was enormous from the start. The cast included two actors at the top of their respective games—Morgan Freeman, who had been nominated for Best Actor for Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and Gene Hackman, who had won Best Actor for The French Connection (1972). Years before the script even came to Clint, Hackman had turned down the role of Munny. He’d also turned down the role of Daggett when Clint offered it to him because he felt he was oo violent and repulsive a character, until Clint somehow managed to convince him the film carried a strong antiviolence message. Richard Harris, an offbeat Irishman born in Limerick City, had hung around inside the Hollywood A-list long after his best movies were behind him; those who saw advance footage of his scenes said it was the performance of his career.
Because of all the good advance word, Warner volunteered to take over the film’s promotion. Clint would normally have rejected the offer but this time readily agreed. Almost every previous Malpaso film had been promoted independently by Charles Gold and Kitty Dutton, whom Clint had hired, via Malpaso, during Warner’s Frank Wells period, when he had little faith in the studio’s ability to promote films. Now that Terry Semel and Bob Daley were in charge, the studio had become far more aggressive, and they convinced Clint they could do a better job than Malpaso on this one.
Several press junkets were arranged—Clint had been opposed to them before Unforgiven—and Richard Schickel, the film critic and documentary filmmaker, was allowed virtually unlimited access to produce a “making of the movie” promotional short. Jack Mathews of the Los Angeles Times was allowed aboard, as was Peter Biskind of the then relatively new and highly influential Premiere magazine, which had a Rolling Stone look and similarly hip style of reporting for movies. Numerous theatrical tie-ins and promotions, contests, and one-on-one interviews with Clint were arranged.* And something nobody thought they would ever see: Clint actually agreed to go on The Tonight Show to hawk the film.
The reason for all this atypical accessibility was not hard to understand. Clint still wanted to win an Academy Award. It was as simple as that. He would be sixty-two when the film came out, the fiftieth film that he had either appeared in, or directed, or both, and if it was ever going to happen, the time was now.
Unforgiven, dedicated to Sergio Leone and Don Siegel in its closing credits, opened August 7, 1992. August is a month where summer films that are not expected to do well are released; the best are given the Memorial Day weekend slot, the next July Fourth, the also-rans after that. But with this film, the aley-Semel strategy was to separate Unforgiven from the year’s other big summer films that included Tim Burton’s Batman Returns and Phillip Noyce’s Patriot Games starring Harrison Ford, both of which opened before August.
The strategy paid off big time, with a $14 million opening weekend, Clint’s best ever. Not only was his career resurrected, but suddenly he was the hottest actor and director in Hollywood. Unforgiven went on to gross $160 million in its initial domestic theatrical release and an additional $50 million overseas, placing it behind only Clint’s two orangutan films as the highest grossers of his career to date.
That winter, when the Oscar nominations were announced, to no one’s surprise, Clint and his film were prominent among them. Unforgiven was nominated for Best Picture, pitting Clint as producer against Neil Jordan’s quirky, sexually ambiguous, highly original, and completely riveting The Crying Game; Rob Reiner’s military courtroom drama A Few Good Men, which starred three of Hollywood’s then-hottest stars, Jack Nicholson, Tom Cruise, and Demi Moore, and that carried the added imprimatur of having been a recent Broadway stage hit; James Ivory’s Howards End, the obligatory prestige nomination that showed the world how literary Hollywood could be; and Martin Brest’s bizarre Scent of a Woman, about a blind man who can really “see,” starring Al Pacino as the “hoo-wa” man.
Clint was also nominated for Best Actor, a long-awaited first that put him up against Robert Downey Jr.’s facile Charlie in Richard Attenborough’s windy biography Chaplin; Stephen Rea’s affecting performance as an Irish subversive in The Crying Game; Denzel Washington in the title role of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X; and Pacino.
He was also nominated for Best Director, against Robert Altman—for his inside-is-hell exposé of Hollywood amorality, The Player—Martin Brest, James Ivory, and Neil Jordan.
Other major nominations for Unforgiven included Best Supporting Actor for Gene Hackman, and Best Screenplay for Peoples.
On March 29, 1993, the night of the awards, a smiling, silver-haired Clint showed up resplendent in a tuxedo and tie, with a not-yet-showing pregnant Frances Fisher on his arm. The usual Academy dross that passes for humor and entertainment was kicked off by host Billy Crystal being driven onstage in a chariot by Jack Palance, the unlikely winner of the previous year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ron Underwood’s City Slickers, thereby robbing himself and the ceremonies of any last shred of dignity.
The theme of the show was “Women in Film,” and although memorable women’s roles and performances were few that year, the appearance of Elizabeth Taylor and the presenting of a Jean Hersholt Award to the recently departed Audrey Hepburn sent an electric charge through the audience as the evening crawled toward the expected coronation of Clint Eastwood. One bump in the road came when the Best Actor Oscar went to Al Pacino, for one of the lesser performances of his career, not long after Gene Hackman had won for Best Supporting Actor. In a night that was a Vegas gambler’s delight, always in danger of sidestepping the favorites, Clint braced himself.
Barbra Streisand, arguably the biggest female star in Hollywood, dressed resplendently in black, made the next presentation. “This award is for the Best Director,” Streisand said, leaning slightly into the microphone, her bare shoulders glistening under the bright lights, “and it is my privilege to present it tonight.” She dutifully read the names of the nominees and their films, while clips of them directing flashed across the screen. Clint’s name was read last, and the visual showed him unshaven and looking into the viewfinder of a movie camera while slowly and steadily chewing gum. “And the Oscar goes to …” she said, opening the envelope, then breaking into a big smile as she nodded to Clint, sitting in the first row with Fisher, before saying, “Clint Eastwood!”
The audience erupted with its most enthusiastic response of the night, a rush of cheers and “yays” reaching above the happily clapping crowd. Just before he rose from his seat, Fisher gave Clint a quick kiss on the cheek. On the way to the stage, he stopped long enough to accept a handshake and congratulations from Attenborough. When he arrived at the podium and the cheering subsided, Clint made an off-the-cuff comment about his dry throat, the result of having to sit for so long waiting for the big moment. He wiped his lip and then began again. “I just want to …,” he said, then trailed off, looking at the Oscar in the tight grip of his right hand. “This is pretty good, this is all right.” Then, laughing nervously, he continued his acceptance speech.
I’ve been, uh, I’ve been around for thirty-nine years and I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve been very lucky … I heard Al [Pacino, winner of Best Actor] say he’s
lucky but everybody feels that way … when you’re able to make a living in a profession that you really enjoy. That’s an opportunity I think a lot of people don’t have. I’ve got to thank the crew, and David Valdez [the film’s executive producer], and Jack Green [director of photography], and all the camera crew … the trouble is with living this long you know so many people but you can’t remember their names.
As Clint turned his head in mock confusion, good-natured titters rippled through the audience. Then he smiled.
You get a little flustered. So, but in the “Year of the Woman” I’d like to salute the women of Big Whiskey, that would be Anna Thomson, Frances Fisher, and Lisa and Tyra and Josie and Beverly and all the gals who really were the catalyst to getting this story off the ground, and David Peoples’ fabulous script, the Warner Bros. for sticking with this film, the film critics for discovering this film—it wasn’t a highly touted film when it came out—but they sort of stayed with it throughout the year, the French film critics who embraced some of my work very early in the game, the British Film Institute and the Museum of Modern Art, and some of the people who were there long before I became fashionable. Lenny Hirshan, my agent … I’m leaving out a whole bunch of people I’m going to regret when I sit down again, so, anyway, thank you very much.
With that, Clint raised the Oscar and waved it to the crowd, before leaving the stage to more thunderous applause.
Only to return a few moments later when a smirking Jack Nicholson read off the names of the nominees for Best Picture as if they were a private joke and then opened the envelope and calmly announced Clint’s name. Once again enthusiastic applause filled the room, and this time Clint was ready with the names of those he’d failed to thank in his earlier speech, including Warner publicists Joe Hyams and Marco Barla, studio executives Terry Semel and Bob Daley, and “the whole executive strata” at Warner. He also paid special tribute to former Warner chief Steve Ross, who had died the previous year from prostate cancer, and who had been one of Clint’s strongest supporters at the studio. And then, pausing and in a soft voice, Clint said, “In the Year of the Woman, the greatest woman on the planet is here tonight, and that’s my mother, Ruth.” The cameras quickly found her in the audience, eighty-four years old and looking quite robust, smiling with pride over her son’s success.
It was a night of triumph for Clint and his film, which walked off with four Oscars, two for him, one for Hackman, and one for Joel Cox for Best Editor.
After dutifully, if briefly, attending all the official celebrations, including the obligatory Governor’s Ball, Clint took a couple of close friends and Fisher to Nicky Blair’s restaurant. Blair had been one of the Universal contract actors Clint had met during his early days who remained a friend and who also happened to be a talented chef. In those days he’d often made meals for all his out-of-work buddies, including Clint. He had since become a well-known restaurateur on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Clint partied there with Fisher and his friends until dawn.
Asked by a reporter the next day how he felt, Clint replied, “Tired.”
At sixty-two years of age, Clint had reached the peak of his career. A tottering John Wayne had been that old twenty-three years earlier when he won his only Oscar for his twilight-years performance in Henry Hathaway’s True Grit. Clint felt not only redeemed but rein-vigorated, and within days of his double Oscar win he was ready to begin work on a new film, In the Line of Fire. He was set to embrace the future, unencumbered at last by the limitations of his past, believing all the old scores in the game called Hollywood had finally been settled.
Until Sondra Locke reemerged, more determined than ever to settle her own score with him.
*Clint has never commented on the meeting or even acknowledged that it took place.
*For Best Black and White Art Direction. He also won for Art Direction for George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973) and was nominated but did not win for Vertigo.
†Bumstead’s career began in the 1940s. He died in 2006, following work on Clint’s Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
*Ever actor-superstitious, Clint’s talisman for this film was the boots he wore, the same ones he had worn for much of the making of Rawhide. In 2005 he loaned them to that year’s Sergio Leone exhibit at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, California.
*The interviews were nearly identical, and as always Clint’s stock answers revealed little about himself. Questions were limited to the subject of the film.
TWENTY
Clint outside the courtroom-Burbank, California, Tuesday, September 17, 1996-during a break in the long civil trial brought against him by former lover Sondra Locke. AP Images.
My feelings [about Sondra Locke] were the normal feelings you have when someone has been planning for many months to assault your children’s inheritance.
—Clint Eastwood
Sondra Locke’s very existence was a recurring nightmare for Clint. Every time he thought she was out of his life, she returned, and every time the bad dream got a little worse.
In December 1990 Locke had finalized the details of her lawsuit against Clint, and before the start of the traditional Christmas break, when the entire industry disappears from town until after New Year’s, she had moved into her new offices at Warner, per her settlement deal with Clint. She pored over scripts in search of a new project to develop, eager to get something going because Oh Baby had collapsed due to Orion’s lapse into bankruptcy.
Knowing that Arnold Schwarzenegger had shown some interest in playing the lead, Locke figured it was a no-brainer to walk it over to Warner. She confidently pitched it to Terry Semel and Tom Lassally, together with a shooting script and Schwarzenegger’s interest.
Semel and Lassally passed.*
Every day for the next three years Locke, with her $1.5 million development deal still in place, went to her office at Warner, searched for scripts, and tried to interest Terry Semel, Bob Daley, or Lucy Fisher in a project, or even to get the okay to direct one of the hundreds of scripts that were earmarked for future production by the studio. But there was nothing for her. Nothing. Nada.
Meanwhile Clint began work on his next film, In the Line of Fire, for Columbia. It was his first film for a studio other than Warner since 1979, when he had made Escape from Alcatraz at Paramount. Perhaps he felt that after all that had gone on, a change of corporate scenery might be good for both him and Warner Bros.
For this film Clint took a (relative) backseat to director Wolfgang Petersen (best known for Das Boot and personally chosen by Clint, who maintained directorial approval). Clint plays a retired Secret Service agent who was present at John F. Kennedy’s assassination and is called back to duty to prevent an attempt on the new president’s life. The film costars a slew of midlevel stars, including John Malkovich and Rene Russo.
One likely reason Clint wanted to take it easy was the outsize success of Unforgiven. More often than not in Hollywood, when a film wins that many Academy Awards, the director and the star do not immediately try to compete with their previous success. The next film they make is unlikely to be as successful, and they often prefer to do another film or two before their next “big” film.
Finally, if anyone deserved to take it a bit easier, it was Clint. At sixty-three years old, kicking back for one film and “only” acting in it was completely understandable.
So naturally In the Line of Fire became the highest-grossing film of Clint’s career to date, taking in over $200 million in its initial domestic release and twice that overseas. Yet it was an ordinary film with a decidedly nonsuspenseful plot that some critics dubbed “Dirty Harry Goes to Washington,” and the cast had no single star other than Clint who ever attracted anything near those kinds of numbers. The only logical explanation for the film’s success was the tremendous drawing power of Clint Eastwood, once more the most popular movie star in the world.
In 1993, the third and final year of her contract at Warner, Locke was doing postproduction on a
TV movie she had taken on, Death in Small Doses. She hoped it would be the icebreaker that would bring her back to features. While sitting in her office, she received a phone call from, of all people, Clint—she hadn’t spoken to him or had any contact at all with him in years. This was just weeks before the big Academy Awards night, Clint and Unforgiven were the big favorites, and with all the promotion he was doing, his was about the last voice on earth she expected to hear in the receiver.
Their conversation was short and sweet and completely puzzling to Locke, even more so when Clint told her he was happy she had a movie and would love to see a rough-cut cassette when it was finished. With that he hung up, leaving her bewildered. Kindness was not a part of Clint’s personality she was that familiar with, especially after all the legal ugliness they had put each other through.*
Not long after Clint’s grand night at the Oscars, Locke learned from mutual friends that Fisher was pregnant and had been for several months, although she had not been showing the night of the Awards telecast. Could that possibly have had anything to do with Clint’s phone call? But trying to figure out his motivations, she knew, was like trying to solve Rubik’s Cube.
Sensing something was not right but having no clue what it was, Locke tried to find out what was going on. In her office she reached for the phone and direct-dialed Clint’s office. According to her, when Clint picked up, this was what she said: “I don’t know what’s going on, Clint, but something’s not right with Warners and my deal. Nothing at all has come together here. I mean, I hope that they aren’t still uncomfortable about our split-up. I would hate to think that’s what’s been going on.” Not hearing anything on the other end, she continued: “Look, I have a script now which has a lot of potential. I’ve submitted it to one executive who likes it, but hasn’t been able to get it past his boss, Bruce Berman. If you read it and like it, would you step in on my behalf? After all, the deal was I’d make some films here. And if you don’t like it, I’d like to hear where you think I’m off-target.”