Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  To put all this simply, there is no end to the cultural confusions with which Thunderbolt and Lightfoot toy. And no end to the good nature, the lack of pretense, with which it does so. In that sense, it remains Cimino’s most assured work. He does not strain to impose obvious meaning on his material here as he would in his great success, The Deer Hunter, or in his great failure, Heaven’s Gate (an early script of which was optioned by United Artists as part of the Thunderbolt and Lightfoot deal). Whatever reputation for grandiosity accrued to Cimino in the wake of Heaven’s Gate’s astonishing cost overruns and equally astonishing failure at the box office, he was in 1973 a very Eastwoodian filmmaker—prudent, frugal, fast moving.

  Because Cimino was a writer-director realizing his own vision, Clint was inclined to grant him considerable leeway. But the director deserves credit for sizing up the situation accurately and handling it intelligently. He resolved that no big deal be made of Clint’s first appearance on the set. When he arrived, there was no break in activity, no more than a casual greeting from the director and those crew members who had worked with him previously. Cimino thought that if the star were given a messiah’s welcome, power would flow away from the director to him.

  Indeed, it was Jeff Bridges, not Clint, who gave Cimino his biggest scare. The night before they were to begin shooting, the actor knocked on the director’s door around midnight, looking distraught. As Cimino recalls it, the dialogue went something like this:

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” said Bridges.

  “Sure, come in.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “You can’t do what?”

  “I can’t play this character.”

  “What do you mean, Jeff?”

  “He’s too good. He’s too good. I’m afraid I can’t be as good as he is, and I’m really worried.”

  “Well, I’m not worried.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not worried? You’ve never even made a movie before, how can you not be worried?”

  “Well, I’m not worried because I have the best actor in the world to play the role, and if I didn’t have you, I don’t know who would play it, because I didn’t have a second choice.”

  “He said, ‘Really,’ ” as Cimino remembers, “and his whole face changed, and he said, ‘OK,’ and he walked out the door. I closed the door, I went into the bathroom and promptly threw up.”

  Bridges’s memory of this scene is slightly different. He would remember Cimino saying, “You are that guy. There’s nobody else who’s going to be that character, so whatever you do is appropriate. You don’t have to worry about trying to emulate somebody else, because you’re it, you’re the prototype.” That, said Bridges, “was very liberating.”

  Throughout, Cimino maintained a similarly sunny relationship with his other star. Sometimes, he recalls, when he was in the midst of making a setup, Clint would “sort of sidle up to me by the camera [and say] ‘What do you think about putting the camera here?’ ” pointing to some other spot, “and I’d say, ‘Well, that’s interesting, but I think it’s better the way we have it,’ and he’d sort of smile, you know, almost as if he’s saying, ‘Just testing.’ ”

  Cimino says that Clint reserved his impatience for himself—when he blew a line or a bit of business. With other actors he would make all the takes necessary for them to settle comfortably into their line readings. The incident the director remembers most vividly occurred one time when they were making the last shot of the day, with the sun sinking behind the mountains as Clint and Bridges completed a scene. It seemed fine to Cimino, and he called a wrap. But as the crew started breaking down the equipment he noticed a troubled look on Bridges’s face. “What’s the matter, Jeff?”

  “You know, Michael, I really don’t think I got it on that take.”

  “What do you mean? I thought it looked pretty good.”

  “I really think I could do it better.”

  “OK, we’ll do it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. We’ll do it. Get back in the car and we’ll do it.”

  At this point, however, Clint had disappeared into his trailer and was changing out of wardrobe. Cimino asked an assistant director to summon his star back to the set.

  “Tell him yourself, here he comes right now.” And indeed, he was wheeling the movie’s Firebird down the dirt road where they’d been working, a spume of dust flying up behind the car. Cimino flagged him down, told him that Bridges thought he had a better take in him and got no more than a nod followed by a roar as Clint wheeled the car around, heading back to his trailer. He was back in a moment, dressed for the shot, which they managed to squeeze in just seconds before the light failed completely. “I mean, that’s Clint,” says Cimino.

  That’s Clint, perhaps one should say, when he has confidence in a director’s or a fellow actor’s judgment. He will give anyone twenty takes on a trial basis, but, as Cimino observes, you had better print one of the later ones (the shot just described was the one used in the picture). If you don’t, he will not be so patient later.

  Cimino says he asked Clint at the end of every day that he worked if he was content with the way things were going, if there was anything he wanted to change. “Every single time he said, ‘Nope, I want you to shoot … exactly the way you envision this movie.’ I mean, he didn’t change one period, one comma, one word in the script; the way I wrote it was the way it was made.” What he did do, according to Cimino, was step back a bit in performance, so the focus of the picture shifted to Bridges. (Cimino told Bridges his main job was to try to make Clint laugh, “because nobody’s ever seen him smile in a movie before,” and that he managed several times.)

  Clint took “a kind of joy in what Jeff was doing,” and that shows in the movie, and in the support he later offered his costar, in the form of trade ads proposing him for an Oscar nomination. When Bridges got the nomination, “Clint was like a proud father,” in part because this was the first such recognition anyone involved in any of his pictures had secured.

  “Michael, you’d better enjoy this,” Cimino remembers his longtime friend and sometime producer, Joann Carelli, telling him, “’cause it’s never going to be like this again,” which, obviously, it has not been for him. He had only one bad day on the production—the last one. They were working on the robbery sequence, scheduled to take two more days, when Bob Daley came to Cimino, telling him the wrap party was set for the following night. Can’t be, said Cimino. Going to be, said Daley, Clint’s leaving day after tomorrow.

  Cimino guesses this was some kind of final initiation. But whatever it was he says it induced “a state of total shock.” He went down to the hotel’s kitchen, obtained a roll of brown wrapping paper and spent the night with it rolled out on the floor, making the most detailed shot list of his life. Two decades later he would remember precisely the number of setups—fifty-six. Next morning he unrolled it for cinematographer Frank Stanley, who registered appropriate dismay, and they set to work.

  “All day long all you heard was ‘Cut. Print. Next setup. Cut. Print. Next setup.’ The minute the camera was on the head—on the floor, on the dolly, wherever the hell it was—we would do the shot.” And so it went, from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. when Cimino made his last take—an insert shot of a clock. At the wrap party he confronted his grinning star and said to him, “‘Well, we made it,’ and he just sat there with that smile, you know, ‘I didn’t think you wouldn’t.’ ”

  Later, according to Cimino, Clint offered him a three-picture deal which Cimino, who knew his destiny lay elsewhere, turned down. But Clint has remained a friend and supporter. In recent years they have developed other projects together that, for whatever reasons, have not worked out. Clint has remained loyal to Thunderbolt and Lightfoot as well.

  He accompanied Cimino and some studio functionaries to Denver for a sneak preview, at which, as was his habit in those days, he appeared in what he fondly bel
ieved was a disguise—in this case a Groucho mask (glasses and false nose) with a baseball cap pulled low over his face. “What the hell are you doing?” Cimino asked. “It’s so no one will recognize me,” Clint said, for this was not supposed to be a celebrity occasion, but a true, working preview, to test audience reactions to the film. “And he walks like two steps and a guy says, ‘Hi, Clint.’ ”

  It played well in Denver and played well enough when it went into general release in June 1974. Rex Reed, writing in the New York Daily News, called it “a demented exercise in Hollywood hackery,” as he identified Cimino as “a no talent … about whom you are unlikely to hear more.” Others were far more appreciative. Jay Cocks called it “one of the most ebullient and eccentric diversions around,” particularly praising Cimino’s “sinewy” direction, “his feeling for the almost reflexive defenses of masculine camaraderie and for its excesses.” The Times’s Howard Thompson judged it “a modest, enjoyable winner.”

  That was pretty much the way it went critically, with many reviewers correctly perceiving in Clint’s performance something they had not seen in him before—something relaxed, bemused, unthreatening. This, far more than Magnum Force, was the antidote for those who had found Dirty Harry poisonous and was the harbinger of the lighter roles he began to assume a little later.

  According to Steven Bach, the United Artists executive who could not control Cimino when he came to make Heaven’s Gate (but wrote a marvelous book about the experience), UA records revealed the picture “returned rentals of a solidly profitable level … a respectable, if not spectacular, hit for Eastwood.” Not respectable enough, by the star’s standards. He thought the studio mishandled the film, in pretty much the same ways Universal had mishandled its releases of his off-beat titles. By pushing it as a standard Eastwood action-adventure, UA slightly disappointed his core audience’s expectations while not reaching the middle-class, middlebrow audience he was always seeking in those days. According to Bach, his relationship with the studio became so acrimonious that he vowed never to work there again—which he has not.

  He had reached virtually the same conclusion regarding his relationship with Universal, and he was close to doing something definitive about that, too, but he owed the studio one more picture and, as he saw it, one more chance to let it do right by him. More important, producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, then headquartered on the lot, had a project that interested him.

  The Eiger Sanction—another Paul Newman reject—was an adaptation of the first in a series of novels about an art-collecting college professor with a profitable second career as a hit man for a CIA-like espionage organization (“sanction” was the series’s euphemism for “killing,” and was employed in all its titles). Published under the pseudonym “Trevanian,” they were popular, particularly vacuous, airplane reads of the period.

  Clint didn’t think any better of the story than Newman did. In it, the character he would play, Jonathan Hemlock (the name alone suggests something about the writer’s inventive capacities), is drawn out of retirement as both a spy and a mountain climber in order to “sanction” two Communist assassins. In return for his services he is to receive, among other rewards, an agreement from the IRS not to tax his largely stolen art collection. The script includes a swishy spy (rather uncomfortably played by Jack Cassidy, the singer), a nubile female of the sort usually found in James Bond adventures and a spymaster who can’t stand light, lives always in a temperature-controlled environment and requires an annual change of blood—also a rather Bondian invention.

  A send-up of sorts was perhaps intended, but that was not entirely clear, and, anyway, Clint was never particularly interested in espionage as a subject, whether spoofed or not; he had something else in mind at this time, so even though Bob Daley and Jim Fargo urged Clint to get the script, which already had been revised at least three times, and rewritten one more time, he ignored them. What he most deeply cared about was the project’s potential to realize his ideal of making movies in isolation with companies as small as feasible, enhancing efficiency by reducing distractions and wasted motion. Nothing could be more to his liking than shooting a film’s crucial sequences on a remote mountaintop in Switzerland, which would perforce limit cast and crew to a daring handful.

  The idea was that everyone would do double duty. The actors, himself included, would help haul equipment and, whenever possible, do their own climbing. When that would be too dangerous the professional mountaineers guiding them would serve as stunt doubles and, as well, play small roles. Clint would direct the picture himself, eliminating yet another figure he deemed unnecessary from the production’s rolls—and, more important, from the mountain’s sheer walls. Finally some special equipment, notably lightweight, disposable batteries to power a specially adapted camera and recording gear (devised by Peter Pilafian, the soundman who doubled as occasional stuntman and camera operator), would be employed.

  Something more than frugality (or proving a point) was on Clint’s mind. He was convinced that the authenticity of the climbing sequences, the lack of the fakery that had attended most Hollywood mountaineering movies, would redeem the narrative’s implausibility—which it did in the eyes of some reviewers and many moviegoers. In his postproduction comments one discerns pride in an adventure successfully undertaken, but also a sense that if he had it to do over again he would, at the very least, choose a different venue for his experiment.

  Eiger means “ogre” in German, and, at an early meeting with Mike Hoover, the climber-cameraman who was credited as climbing adviser on the film, and Dougal Haston, another alpine veteran, Clint was warned that it ranks with Everest and K-2 as one of the world’s most dangerous mountains. It had, at the time, claimed forty-one lives. After the two mountaineers were told what the script was going to require of them, Haston, a taciturn Scotsman, who had remained silent throughout, finally spoke up. “You’re out of your fucking minds,” he said.

  According to Jim Fargo, the AD who was present at that meeting, they were told the Eiger is not technically difficult to climb. Its dangers stem from the fact that it is, as Fargo puts it, basically “a pile of rotting limestone,” making rock slides an omnipresent danger, and from its capacity to make its own weather, meaning that one can start out on a morning under a cloudless sky then find oneself, without warning, trapped in thick clouds or even a blizzard.

  But Clint was not to be deterred. The book had specified the Eiger, and the Eiger it would be. The book had specified that Jonathan Hemlock was an expert climber, therefore Clint Eastwood would try to become one also. He may have begun to have regrets about the latter decision even before he got to Switzerland, when Hoover took him on a training climb in Yosemite. Clint had done a little rock climbing when he was a kid, but he was not prepared for the levels of difficulty Hoover was introducing him to, and about halfway up a rock face Clint “flamed out” as Hoover later put it. “He looked up at me and said, ‘Gee, I don’t think I can make it.’ I said, ‘Well, Clint, you really don’t have much choice, do you?’ Then he reacted characteristically—he got pissed off. He pulled in his chin and gritted his teeth and with absolutely no technique at all, just blood and guts, he moosed his way up. No skill, no brains, just pure muscle. It was gruesome to watch.”

  Before going to Switzerland, Hoover, Clint, George Kennedy (whose character is eventually revealed to be the villain) and a small crew shot a sequence, supposed to be a practice exercise for the main characters, in Monument Valley, where they scaled the Totem Pole, a rock spire 640 feet tall and only 18 feet in diameter, which provided one of the film’s most striking passages. The Navajo tribe, whose reservation encompasses the valley, had forbidden climbing on this formation, which has religious significance to them. Hoover, however, proposed that his little group would remove pitons and other hardware left by previous expeditions, thus restoring the rock to pristine condition. This gained him permission to make the ascent. When his party attained the top Clint insisted that the others be helicoptere
d off first, and one of his happiest filmmaking memories is of waiting alone atop the Totem Pole, watching the dying sun paint Monument Valley, John Ford’s favorite location, thus almost as revered by filmmakers as it is by the Navajos, in glowing reds and golds.

  No such epiphany awaited him on the Eiger. Clint had decided that the hardest and most dangerous work on the mountain should be done first, and it went well the first two days. By midafternoon on August 13, 1974, when the light began to fail, they had virtually completed a sequence in which a rock slide imperiled the film’s climbing party. A wrap was called, and helicopters were summoned to begin ferrying everyone back to Kleine Scheidegg, the 129-year-old hotel near the Eiger’s base, where the company was housed.

  As this operation began, Hoover remembered that they had not got any shots from the climbers’ point of view as the boulders rumbled toward them. He thought he could grab these while the airlift continued. Armed with a handheld camera he rappelled down to the ledge where the day’s action had been staged, accompanied by a young but experienced climber, a twenty-six-year-old Briton named David Knowles, who had, like Hoover, attained the Eiger’s summit on a previous climb. His job was to prevent the rubber rocks being cast down on them by another mountaineer, Martin Boysen, from bouncing into the lens.

  They made their shots and were gathering up their gear, Knowles telling an anecdote from a previous climb, when they heard the sound of a huge rock—nothing fake about it—heading toward them.

  Hoover: “It sounds real close and I instantly cover and crouch into the wall as close as possible. I hide my hands so as not to lose any fingers. Feel pretty good. It smashes into the small of my back and I almost black out as a smaller shower of rocks continues. I feel a weight on top of me. I can’t move my legs, so I pinch them and am so happy to feel the pain. Dave must be okay. But he’s on top of me—hanging upside down—dead.”