Clint Eastwood

by Richard Schickel

  One could argue that this movie is, in its way, its director’s most self-referential work. For Bronco Billy is Clint, or the Clint who might have been had Malpaso turned out to be a rundown Wild West show. He is the same guy with the same values, but operating out there on the eccentric fringe of things instead of at the center of our admiring attention, living in a place where we (and he) would inevitably perceive him as more quixotic than exemplary. That urge David Thomson has mentioned, to see “just how far he could stretch the audience’s support,” is operating here as surely as it is elsewhere. He wanted to know if we’d accept goofy righteousness as eagerly as we did the more outraged kind.

  As it happened, we did not—at least in our customary numbers. Warner Bros. thought it had, perhaps, another Every Which Way but Loose here. The industry, conscious that a trade-paper poll had early in 1980 named Clint the top box-office star of the seventies, aware that he had not had a flop since The Beguiled, also expected great things of Bronco Billy. The reviews, though mixed, were on the whole encouraging. Richard Corliss in Time said it was “as if one of the faces on Mt. Rushmore suddenly cracked a crooked smile. Watching Bronco Billy millions of moviegoers are likely to smile back.” If some critics insisted on biting their lips, the majority agreed with Janet Maslin’s assessment that Clint “never seemed more sweetly accessible.”

  But it opened, as they say, “soft.” It didn’t help that Maslin described Billy as an outsize Peter Pan, and that others made the same point less memorably. Soon learned disquisitions were appearing in the trades and elsewhere about the movie’s disappointing grosses. It was of a piece, some said, with other failures of the summer—Burt Reynolds in Rough Cut, Robert Redford in Brubaker, John Travolta in Urban Cowboy. All of them, it was said, seemed to promise the audience its favorites in familiar roles, then disappointed by slightly off-casting them in pictures that did not satisfy genre expectations, either. Exhibitors—traditionally whiners—insisted that this “product” was just not going to live up to its advance publicity the way the summer’s great hit, The Empire Strikes Back, did.

  Clint was not amused. This was a child of his heart, and he thought Warner Bros. had not prepared the public for it properly. So studio executives backed one of their jets out of the hangar one Saturday and “wearing sack cloth and ashes,” as John Calley put it, flew up to Jackson Hole, where Clint was making Any Which Way You Can, the sequel to Every Which Way but Loose, to placate him with promises of a revised and enhanced ad campaign (on which, prudently, they delivered). Even so, the movie passed into legend as a rare Eastwood flop.

  But that’s not so: The film was a disappointment only in relation to expectations. Eventually it did quite a tidy business—returning some $15 million to the studio in domestic rentals and a similar amount from overseas distribution. It also produced a hit single for Warner records, “Barroom Buddies,” a duet sung in the film by Clint and Merle Haggard—at long last a musical success. This was not bad for a picture that had cost around $5 million, and not at all bad as a conclusion to a five-year period during which Clint achieved a quality and range of workmanship—and of box-office success—that were unprecedented in his career to date and never quite so seamlessly paralleled in the years that immediately followed.

  THIRTEEN

  MY FATHER’S DREAM

  Clint Eastwood turned fifty a couple of weeks before Bronco Billy opened. This fact was duly noted in the press. Here and there writers attributed the sunniness of the film and the sweetness of his performance to the mellowing effects of maturity, and Clint was inclined to agree. The “sexy legend,” as Cosmopolitan called him in the title of the profile it ran coincidentally with the film’s release, suggested to its writer that “serenity” and “tranquility” were qualities he now required in a relationship. Inevitably, he said, “the warrior ego gives way to something higher,” and he implied that he had reached that “plateau” now.

  This new mood was reflected in real estate as well as in relationships. Making a personal appearance in Shasta County, raising funds for the family of a highway patrol officer killed in the line of duty, Clint had been given a tour of the Bing Crosby ranch. This was something like home country for him, since he passed a boyhood year in nearby Redding. Learning that the Crosby estate—the singer died in 1977—intended to auction the ranch off, he was determined to bid on it and won the property in the fall of 1978, while he was making Escape from Alcatraz. Since then, it has become his most closely guarded retreat, the place he often goes to clear his mind and put himself in top condition before shooting a film or to unwind (and often to make the first cut) after he finishes principal photography. The ranch buildings are simple in design and decor, the vast acreage surrounding them a nature preserve, offering him unsurpassed solitude.

  His contentment, as he began a new decade, was thus nearly perfect. For after four years he could see that the most significant of his commitments, the one with Warner Bros., tested and proved by its quick and accommodating response in the Bronco Billy crisis, was close to ideal. As of 1980, Ted Ashley and John Calley were in the process of departing, with Frank Wells soon to follow. But Steve Ross was still setting the tone of the place, Clint’s allies Terry Semel, Barry Reardon and Joe Hyams were still aboard, and Robert Daly, recruited from CBS to be the new CEO, was his kind of guy. To succeed in the movie business, Daly once told Connie Bruck, Ross’s gifted biographer, you need three things—“the intelligence and the financing and the guts to stay at the table and play”—and all these he and his associates at the studio had, as their long and successful reign would eventually prove.

  These virtues, translating into stability and great steadiness in adversity, have been vital in sustaining a relationship between star and studio unduplicated in the modern American motion-picture industry and crucial to Clint’s long-running success. If, like so many stars, he had been obliged to wander from studio to studio, hawking his wares to anxious strangers, enduring the long delays between pictures that this process entails, he clearly would not have made as many films as he has. Nor as an actor-director for hire would he have been able to mount his quirkier projects so quickly and easily; he might, indeed, have found himself bankable only in a much narrower, action-oriented range, which as he aged would have rendered him increasingly implausible and irrelevant to the young male audience for whom those films are made. What happened to Burt Reynolds and Charles Bronson in the eighties, what is happening to Sylvester Stallone in the nineties, could have happened to him.

  Consistent success aside, it may be that the most important element in Clint’s relationship with Warner Bros. is its lack of long-term contractual ties. Malpaso has headquartered in the same five-room Spanish-style stucco building on the Warners lot—people used to call it the Taco Bell—since Josey Wales. Rather dimly lit and until a recent refurbishment decorated more by accretion than design, it stands not more than one hundred yards from the studio’s executive building. But nothing other than propinquity and incalculable self-interest link Clint with management. Whenever they agree on a project—and Clint has released all but two of his twenty-five films between 1976 and 1996 through Warner Bros.—Lenny Hirshan and Bruce Ramer negotiate a deal for it alone. He is, in theory, free at any time to work elsewhere; Warner Bros. is, in theory, free at any time to ask him to leave.

  To put it simply, where there is no contract, there is nothing to argue about—not among men determined to treat one another honorably. But unspoken trust, a quality that, like good movies, has always been hard to come by in Hollywood, requires further exegesis. In this instance, it begins with the corporate culture Steve Ross established as he put together the Warner Communications conglomerate. Ross may have betrayed a certain slipperiness in some of his dealings, but no entrepreneur of his era inspired greater loyalty among his associates. Famously generous with salaries, bonuses and perquisites, he was yet more generous with freedom. He had a mystical belief in talent and a sort of boyish wonder in its presence. He thought that
given patience and unquestioning support, gifted people would over the long run deliver consistently profitable work. Conversely, he believed that nagging oversight of their plans, extensive second-guessing of their failures, would only distract their energies and dim their spirits.

  A lifelong and knowledgeable movie fan, he loved the studio more than any of his other corporate holdings and indulged its management and its stars more fully than anyone else. Warner Bros. was, like Malpaso, a self-described “family”—albeit a much more extended one—and probably, in the last analysis, no less a patriarchy than its competitors. But in this case, as opposed to Universal, for instance, the patriarch smiled benignly down on it from a distance, leaving day-to-day decision making to trusted lieutenants. He sent gifts and extended invitations to glamorous getaways and events and always left the keys to the family’s several airplanes on the mantelpiece where everyone could grab them and take off.

  Nothing could have suited Clint Eastwood better. “My father’s dream in life was to own a hardware store,” he once told a reporter. “I’m his son.” Though Malpaso is obviously dependent on the studio for financing and marketing, more than any comparable operation in Hollywood, it is run like a small free-standing business, with its sole proprietor enjoying astonishing autonomy. No one can remember a time when Clint was denied a project he wanted to make.

  John Calley and the late Frank Wells set the tone of this relationship. The former has, he says, seen every kind of bad and stupid star trip, and though he is not an uncynical man, he remains somewhat awed by Clint’s voyage through the heavenly realms. “The messages he got from himself about what he wanted to do were much more significant than most guys got. He never fell into that horrible trap: ‘Well, yes, I’m a star and, yes, it’s a huge success, and, yes, I can do anything I want, but to make sure I can do that for the rest of my life I’d better do three or four more of the same and then I’m really established.’ And then twelve years later they’re still doing the same movie and it’s not fashionable anymore and they’re gone.” He adds: “I was very comfortable being passive with him. I mean, I just figured he knows more about it than I do, so why fuck with him.”

  Calley—smart, volatile, unguarded—amused and delighted Clint, but Wells, besides being Calley’s perfect balance wheel, was his old friend and trusted adviser. A former Rhodes scholar, he was as lanky as Clint and, more important, as dry, reserved and commonsensical. If Clint didn’t know he was a movie star, then Wells didn’t seem to know he was a movie mogul, so distant was his style from the clichés associated with that breed.

  Wells had perfect trust in Clint’s skills, instincts and frugality. “Clint’s greatest moment of pride,” Wells said, “was not when he called you up to say, ‘Hey, I made a good one, come on down and see it.’ It was when he called you up the last day of shooting and you had to play a guessing game as to how much under budget they were.” Clint became, he said, the standard by which the studio’s executives judged the work of other independent producers.

  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 fawnin
g, 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.