That, as it turned out, was not the worst of the problems. When Shaw and Truscott had scouted the location in the spring it was still covered with snow, which mantled an extremely rocky terrain. This was crucial information, for to achieve the movie’s Sodom and Gomorrah climax Truscott planned an elaborate hydraulic system, which would enable his sets to collapse on cue. But installing it with bedrock so close to the surface proved to be an expensive nightmare. Clint recalls that it cost $300,000 to rig the system on the town saloon alone. “It’s a lot of money now,” he says mildly, “but it was a lot lotter then.”
Such problems might have annoyed a director used to marshaling large, rough forces in remote areas, but it would not have daunted him. Clint remembers thinking, the first time he saw the Eagle Creek site, Boy, this is fabulous. John Ford would go crazy in a place like this.
“The first day was kind of slow,” Clint says, “and I figure, well, they’re just kind of getting their feet on the ground.” But the days that followed were no better. He observed Logan consulting extensively with his immediate staff—an invitation to disaster. A director may ask questions of his cameraman or AD—but only from a position of strength. If his inquiries are too needy or clueless, if they betray a lack of command, others will quickly arrogate his power.
Especially if you are as tensely wired as Alan J. Lerner. To Logan he seemed “pieced together by the great-great-great grandson of Dr. Frankenstein from a lot of disparate spare parts.” He openly questioned some of Logan’s choices for setups on the first day of shooting, and once simply stepped forward and started lining up a shot, telling the extras where to stand (and move) while Logan was still thinking it over—the movie equivalent of lèse-majesté.
Very early in production Lerner called Clint in to tell him that he was thinking of replacing Logan. Clint was dismayed. “Replace him,” he remembers saying. “He’s only shot a couple of days’ worth of stuff.”
“Well, he just doesn’t understand the thing.”
“Let me ask you something, Alan. You guys worked together, and he’s prepared this thing for a year. How come now you’re deciding he’s not the guy for this picture?”
Lerner’s answer was not entirely satisfactory; Clint thinks that, at least in part, the producer was shifting blame for his own failures to the director. He simply was not knowledgeable enough or secure enough in himself to organize this curiously misshapen project or to give Logan the support he desperately needed.
Soon after this conversation a planeload of men in suits arrived from the studio offering Logan reassurances, but also looking grim and worried as they tried to ascertain the extent of the chaos that had been reported to them by Lerner. It is one of the reliable constants of motion-picture life that studio executives never know what to do when a production is in trouble. In fairness, it must be said that their choices are often limited, and firing the director is the most difficult of them. It taints a film, often irreparably, especially in this day of the sacred auteur, and, of course, it makes it appear that they didn’t know what they were doing in the first place. They came, they conferred, they departed silently, leaving authority still divided between an indecisive director and an equally insecure producer.
The production was now “a ship, literally, with no captain on the deck,” as Clint describes it, a condition particularly upsetting to that very queasy sailor Lee Marvin. An alcoholic exactly the opposite of Richard Burton in that he showed the effects of drink almost immediately, he was, as Clint says, a man who needed to know on a daily, perhaps hourly, basis what course they were on. “The minute you said, ‘Well, I’m not sure about this or that,’ Lee immediately went, ‘Pour me a double.’ ”
In his autobiography, Logan was still speaking of Marvin as a courtly Southern gentleman, at heart not very different from the director himself, and that, unfortunately, was the way he treated him on the set. Only once did he let his true feelings publicly slip, when he told Marvin’s biographer, Donald Zec, “Not since Attila the Hun swept across Europe leaving five hundred years of total blackness has there been a man like Lee Marvin.”
What Marvin obviously needed, what he had received from other directors when he did his best work, was stern discipline administered by a man’s man. To Lerner and to Tom Shaw that suggested Richard Brooks, a literate, tough-minded character, as blunt in conversation as Logan was circumspect, who had a reputation for handling complex productions (among them Elmer Gantry and Lord Jim), and difficult actors (among them Lee Marvin, whom he had directed without incident in The Professionals).
Brooks, who had a powerful collegial feeling for others of his profession, refused to take over the picture. Naturally, this whetted everyone’s appetite for his saving presence. Everyone except Clint’s, that is. When Lerner mentioned Brooks to him, he responded, “I’ve always liked Richard Brooks. I’d love to work in a picture with him. But I don’t think you should write this guy off. I don’t really think you’re being fair to the guy. Why doesn’t everybody who’s not being supportive of him right now get together and be supportive of him, and let’s try to get this movie on track.”
Anxious Alan Lerner (he frequently wore white cotton gloves to prevent himself from picking and gnawing at his cuticles), however, was still determined to hire Brooks, and flew to Los Angeles to plead with him directly. The director told Lerner that if he had not informed Logan of this approach he was acting unethically. He also repeated Clint’s argument; it was late in the game to be discovering that he had hired the wrong director. At the end of the meeting Brooks believed that he had heard the last of this matter.
He had not. Marvin now called to support the producer’s plea; Brooks responded by urging cooperation on him. Then Joyce Haber, the gossip columnist, printed an item claiming that Logan was on the verge of dismissal and that Brooks was the “likeliest candidate” to replace him. This leak was obviously not accidental. Haber was being used by Lerner to provoke Logan into quitting, which he may have imagined would still Brooks’s qualms about replacing him. In this he reckoned without Brooks’s most salient qualities—his stubborn rectitude and his almost comically paranoid certainty of everyone else’s deviousness. He might consider taking over for a director who had left of his own volition, or had fallen ill. But he would not angle for another man’s job. Nor would he be placed in a position where he might seem to be doing so. Now, even if Logan could be forced to leave the production Brooks would never replace him.
There, finally, the matter ended, and everyone went back to work—for five endless months. The snows would be flurrying again before the company quit its location and moved back to the studio (where, as it turned out, they had to rebuild the saloon set that had caused them so much trouble and expense earlier). Disorganization being ever the mother of more disorganization, “all the things that could go wrong did go wrong,” as Shaw put it later. The horses drawing a stagecoach that was carrying a group of women extras, who were playing hookers, ran away heading for a ravine, and only a quick response from the horsemen (Buddy Van Horn among them) averted a tragedy. The bright idea of hiring hippies as extras (they lived in a temporary tent commune on site) didn’t work out; they were frequently in a near-mutinous state over pay and living conditions. Day in, day out the actors were engaged in shots that struck them as ludicrous. Clint remembers warbling one of his songs—seeking authenticity, playback was not used—in a scene with Seberg so far out in a field that they could barely see the camera, on which was mounted a 1,000-mm lens; this made for a radically foreshortened shot, supposedly making them appear to be at one with nature. Of course, the opposite effect was created; the shots looked jarringly artificial.
In general, however, realism was heavily stressed—Clint remembers much fuss about costumes, the details of which were rigorously authentic to the period, but which the camera could not see—and distinctly misplaced: Who needs realism in musical comedy? And that, finally, is what’s wrong with Marvin’s performance. He was properly grizzled and dishe
veled looking, this hard-used man, but called upon to play a dirty old man, he stubbornly, charmlessly remained … a dirty old man. When rolling his eyes and broadly commenting on his own raffishness, his performance is clumsy, unfunny, distancing. He is, finally, the opposite of a star; he is a black hole, swallowing this little universe.
Another metaphor occurs to describe his working behavior. Overt rebelliousness eventually disappeared and Marvin became something like a scary ghost haunting the production’s by-ways, spreading chaos whenever he appeared. Clint credits Michelle Triola, Marvin’s longtime companion and eventual initiator of the famous “palimony” action against him, for doing her best to restrict his intake of alcohol, but she could not be everywhere with him. Typically, Clint says, “His stand-in would come over to my trailer and say, ‘Lee’s going to come by here in about ten or fifteen minutes asking for a beer. Tell him you don’t have any.’ So I hid all the beer and it became this kind of game all the way.”
Except that whenever possible Clint chose not to play in it. Logan would later describe Clint as “warm and decent,” his words correctly implying that, as much as possible, Clint distanced himself from the ongoing hubbub. He did his job and maintained a pleasant, cooperative, but reserved, manner. He had rented a farmhouse and did chores around the place. He found some locals who knew where the good fishing was and often joined them on their expeditions. One of the helicopter pilots ferrying him in and out of the set was an instructor, and when Clint showed an interest in learning to fly the contraption he started teaching him to do so, inspiring a stubborn ambition to fly that, almost two decades later, Clint would realize. Some nights, Clint would bunk in his trailer on the set and enjoy the peace of the wilderness.
Eventually, he found himself keeping more and more company with Jean Seberg. “Jean and I were close buddies.” Pause. “I really liked her a lot.” Another pause. “I was kind of nuts about her.” He has had his share of location romances, but this is the one he speaks of most tenderly.
It was her fragility and vulnerability that attracted him, a sense that this was a woman who needed protection, as both her professional and personal histories seem to prove. As a college freshman from a small Iowa town, she had won a nationwide talent search for the title role in Otto Preminger’s production of Saint Joan, for which she received disastrous reviews. After appearing in another Preminger production, Bonjour Tristesse—in this period the producer-director specialized in a kind of wooden sensationalism, adapting popular, slightly scandalous novels in a metronomic manner—she rescued her career as Clint had by appearing in a marginal European film that became a surprise international success, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. She confirmed her abilities with her complex work as the schizophrenic heroine of Robert Rossen’s Lilith and continued to divide her time between European and American filmmaking. Married (not entirely happily) to Romain Gary, the French novelist and diplomat, she had involved herself in various radical causes (notably supporting the Black Panther movement), but yet retained the saving air of innocence that had marked her work for Godard.
Clint seems to be correct when he comments, “She just wanted a peaceful life,” and they achieved a semblance of it by absenting themselves from the chaos of production whenever they could. Clint had a motorcycle with him, and when they were not required on set they spent many days together. Seberg was sufficiently smitten that in a later interview she dropped an obvious hint about their affair to a gossip columnist, but, given their other commitments, it could only be a thing of the moment. In the years that followed, her unhappiness and confusion deepened, and after a decade of troubled relationships she died of an overdose of sleeping pills in 1979.
Their performances do not so much reflect their affection for one another as their remoteness from the production process. Sometimes it almost seems as if they’re working in a different picture. He is more a juvenile than a potent romantic lead; she’s more an ingenue than a mature sexual being. But, in a curious way, this worked for them; their romantic passages are little islands of calm and sweetness in a sea of desperation and discontent. And by and large they would escape responsibility for the picture’s failure. Critics mostly dismissed their work with a bland sentence or two, while Hollywood blamed Logan, who would never direct another picture.
But in another way, Paint Your Wagon did have a major, and continuing, effect on Clint’s career. As the muddle persisted right up to the very last days on location, he firmly resolved never again to place himself in such circumstances. “That’s when I came to the conclusion, after the fifth month, that I was going to be really active with Malpaso. I was going to go back to doing just regular movies.”
That is to say, relatively small-scale films employing good, but not necessarily big-name, actors, and certainly none that carried with them any explosive personal baggage. By this he also meant that he would direct at least some of these films himself. As he put it on one public occasion, “If I’m going to make mistakes in my career, I want to make them, I don’t want somebody else making them for me.” Or, as he put it a little more colorfully later on, “if these guys can blow this kind of dough and nobody cares about it, why not take a shot at it, and at least if I screw up I can say, well, OK, I screwed up, and take the blame on it.” This realization, and this resolution, constituted for Clint “a turning point in my career.”
It was the most important decision, in fact, since accepting A Fistful of Dollars. For the moment, however, this was a largely negative turning point; knowing now what he didn’t want to do—further pursuing the stardom-by-association strategy—he still didn’t know precisely what he wanted to do, beyond making more manageable films. What their subject matter might be, what developments he might permit his screen character, when, exactly, he would begin to direct, remained unclear to him. And, in fact, he was at the moment committed to two rather routine movies, neither of which would advance him along the path he was beginning to imagine for himself.
But at least he was done with Paint Your Wagon, except for recording his songs, attending to the usual looping chores and showing up for the premieres in New York and London. “Gulp,” he said when confronted by Nelson Riddle and a full orchestra on the recording stage, but he persevered. When he finally saw the film in completed form he thought it was “cut defensively,” meaning that wherever there was a choice the more conventional material was used to make a film that was without energy or sense of movement. It contained very little dancing, and what there was of it was not integrated into the plot. The songs (some of which, like “Wanderin’ Star” and “They Call the Wind Maria,” were agreeably melodic) were clumsily staged and sometimes simply played over other action, almost as if they were a kind of narration. Its attempts at spectacle were glum and distant, and the big finish, the town collapsing, was unpersuasive. “Fiascoesque” was Clint’s neologistic final judgment.
Some reviewers, like Vincent Canby, were surprisingly tolerant of it; “amiable” was his word for it. Here and there Clint got a good notice. The Los Angeles Times’s Charles Champlin wrote favorably of him (his “stoic and handsome dignity stands out and he sings in an unscholarly baritone which is fine”). The reviewers who liked his work were responding to Clint’s strategy of polite reserve—the old Rowdy Yates manner, come to think of it. “People were so favorable to me,” Clint now observes, “because they didn’t like anything else about it.”
This was essentially true. “Coarse and unattractive” was Champlin’s summarizing phrase. “Rarely has a film wasted so much time so wantonly,” said Newsweek. In this chorus of disapproval Pauline Kael’s voice was the most devastating, and her savage, career-long dislike of Clint—not just his work, but, it often seemed, his very being—was enunciated here. She discerned his strategy—“he hardly seems to be in the movie”—but unlike some of her colleagues, viciously chastised him for his withdrawal: “He’s controlled in such an uninteresting way; it’s not an actor’s control, which enables one to release something—it’
s the kind of control that keeps one from releasing anything. We could stand the deadpan reserve of Nelson Eddy’s non-acting because he gave of himself when he sang, but Eastwood doesn’t give of himself ever, and a musical with a withdrawn hero is almost a contradiction in terms.…”
If her case against Clint’s work in this instance is perhaps justifiable, her larger generalizations about him as an actor are wrong, and her endless animus against him remains, like so many of her curious passions, inexplicable. Perhaps no more so, however, than her notion that films like Paint Your Wagon evidenced the terminal decadence of the whole Hollywood system.
It, along with the other expensive musicals of the moment had “finally broken the back of the American movie industry,” she gleefully crowed. The major studios, part of “a rotting system” she insisted, “are collapsing, but they’re not being toppled over by competitors; they’re so enervated that they’re sinking under their own weight”—rather like No-Name City itself, one might say. This ludicrously overdramatized the situation. All that was coming to an end was a mode of exhibition, road showing, in which overlong, overstuffed movies like Paint Your Wagon were made to be shown on a reserved-seat, two-shows-per-day basis at advanced prices—mostly because the public felt it had too often overpaid for too many big, bad movies.
That did not mean, however, that the whole Hollywood system was tottering, only that it was once again in transition. Indeed, Paint Your Wagon did not turn out to be the insupportable disaster Kael imagined it would. It was certainly not worth the trouble and anxiety it caused, but eventually it returned $15 million of its $20 million cost in domestic rentals and probably made back much of the rest overseas and in television licensing. Nor did it bring down Paramount’s management, which skipped blithely on to the profitable likes of Love Story and The Godfather. Like all radical critics of capitalistic enterprises, Kael underestimated their adaptability and their capacity for survival.
Clint Eastwood Page 31