Clint loved the role. When he costarred in Unforgiven with Gene Hackman, the latter told him he thought Highway was his best work. Here and there were reviewers who agreed with him. “His most complex, fully dimensional character,” Dave Kehr wrote in the Chicago Tribune. Vincent Canby called his performance “the richest he’s ever given” and praised his “essential humor … now overt.” He also said: “At 56, Mr. Eastwood doesn’t look especially young, but neither does he look old. Nor does he look preserved, or perhaps surgically improved, like some of his contemporaries. He looks as if he’s absorbed the years and turned them into guts and grit.”
If Canby came late to a recognition of Clint’s humor, he perceptively recognized the quality that would be the most important factor in perpetuating his career: the decision not to hide his age but to play it gracefully. His practical, director’s judgment is that actors who resort to cosmetic surgery or diffusion filters just make the problem worse by calling attention to it in a way the camera, and thus the audience, can’t help but notice.
After his electoral efforts it was a relief for Clint to be among people with whom he did not have to watch his language, among whom he was the tested professional. His on-screen antagonist Marsha Mason (giving one of her best performances) had worried about Clint’s habit of not rehearsing much; she was an actress who liked to polish things in private. But on her first day he greeted her with the reassuring promise that they wouldn’t shoot until she felt fully rehearsed and ready. Later, she had to dance with him in a party scene, when he was duded out in stiff dress blues and had to direct all the movement and act at the same time. Jack Green was using a steadicam and moving around them as they danced, and Mason couldn’t figure out exactly how Clint knew where to lead her, since they had choreographed nothing. Oh, he said casually, “I was catching the light as it played across your face.”
With Van Peebles, young enough to be his son, he was much more the mentor. Interviewed a few years later, when he was well along in his own directing career, Van Peebles quoted as his credo some advice he got from Clint on this picture: “Whip me, beat me, but don’t bore me.” All kinds of bonding took place on this picture—but not with military officialdom.
The title refers to the bloody Korean War engagement in which Highway is supposed to have won his Medal of Honor. It had been primarily an army battle, and Clint had originally sought its cooperation in filming. When the army objected to the script, he turned to the marines, who permitted the company to shoot first at Camp Pendleton, then at Vieques, a base in Puerto Rico, where they were able to join marine maneuvers, doubling them for the Grenada invasion that rather awkwardly brings the film to a climax.
But as the movie went into prerelease screenings objections arose on every hand. Army veterans insisted it would have been historically impossible for a marine to serve, let alone win a medal, at Heartbreak Ridge. Then the marines expressed pique with Fritz Manes, who had for some strange reason disported himself on location in a marine major’s uniform, an affair that, along with some other curious incidents, led to his departure from Malpaso. Then marine officialdom, hearing the film’s rough dialogue coming at them from the screen, beat a strategic retreat. They primly declared that it did not accurately represent current training procedures and compared it unfavorably to Top Gun, which had done wonders for navy recruiting. They demanded that acknowledgment of corps cooperation in filming be removed from the credits and that premieres scheduled to benefit marine relief organizations be canceled.
This controversy, as well as a televised “All Star Party for Clint Eastwood,” a variety show-cum-tribute, assured a successful launch for the film, which grossed solidly. With the exceptions noted, however, it fared poorly with the critics, who expressed general dismay at its raucousness. One or two found some of the dialogue excessively homophobic, which is true; there are times when realism must yield to social realities. Many objected to its triumphant conclusion, the tin-pot invasion of Grenada.
Clint does not entirely disagree. “It was a stupid invasion,” Clint now says, “kind of a Mickey Mouse operation.” He had not suddenly turned cold warrior, but he felt he had to, as he puts it, “tour the group,” that is, put them in some life-and-death situation where their sergeant’s hard work would pay off, and this was an available option. He would have been glad to ironize it—it might have completed Highway’s cycle of disillusion very forcefully—but he was shooting with Marine Corps cooperation, and marines tend not to be ironic about such matters. Moreover, this was at heart a comedy requiring an upbeat ending—a band playing, flags flying, Marsha Mason misty-eyed as the troops come home. Clint notes dryly that at least he kept the welcoming crowd “sparse,” and not exactly wild with patriotic fervor.
“I’d have done it even if the script was no good,” Clint says of Bird. It had been out there for years, Joel Oliansky’s screenplay about the short life, troubled times and soaring gifts of Charlie Parker. Clint had heard about it, and vaguely resented the fact that someone else was going to tell the life of his musical idol. Producer Ray Stark controlled the property, which had been developed with Richard Pryor in mind: one dangerous master of the improvisational riff, one famously self-destructive genius, one notorious addict of controlled substances, playing another.
But after the freebasing accident of 1980, in which Pryor suffered third-degree burns over half his body, both his spirit and his career had been sadly tamed. By the mideighties the project was languishing. So was another one, Revenge, an adaptation of a Jim Harrison novel that Clint had passed on, and Warner Bros. had on its shelf. Learning that Stark was sniffing around this tale of a husband seeking retribution against his wife and her lover who had tried to kill him, he proposed a simple swap for the Oliansky script, which by this time he had read (he swiped a copy from Lenny Hirshan’s office) and liked.
This deal was completed shortly before Clint began his run for public office. But shooting did not begin until two years later, delayed by his political duties and his quest for absolute musical authenticity. “A jazz movie had never been made by someone who really liked jazz,” Clint said later. He particularly recalled Young Man with a Horn, the movie based loosely on the life of Bix Beiderbecke, which he had seen in 1950: “The breathing was off, the dubbing was terrible, and the plot line—I thought, oh God, what have they done, and I went out of the theatre dejected.” He was determined that Bird would avoid such mistakes and somehow re-create the improvisational excitement of a live performance as no fictional film ever had.
As is always the case in films of this kind, the source of music for the many scenes of Parker working in jazz clubs or in studios had to be recorded before shooting, so that the mimed playing of the actors could be synchronized accurately with the sound track. Moreover, Clint did not want to hire a contemporary alto player to imitate Parker; he wanted to find a way to use Bird’s original recordings in the film. But most of the music Parker recorded in studios, where the sound quality was passable, was very short—useless for the live-performance sequences, where Parker typically played longer pieces. Some of this material had been recorded, but on inferior equipment. It would be embarrassing emanating from a modern theatrical sound system.
The solution was to track down these fugitive tapes and reprocess them. Clint led the pursuit of material (some of which was found just a couple of miles from the studio); Lennie Niehaus, his old friend from Fort Ord, who was now virtually his composer in residence, supervised the reconstruction, which required many months of sixteen- and eighteen-hour days. He and his technical crew electronically eliminated from the old tapes the frequencies carrying the other instruments, leaving Parker’s work standing alone. He then brought in the best available sidemen to reproduce the work of the other musicians, and when no other alternative was available, Charles McPherson, a San Diego-based sax man, to stand in for Bird. The resultant mix was recorded on state-of-the-art equipment. While this work was proceeding, Niehaus, who had begun his musical career as an a
lto saxophonist, had to teach the young actor engaged to impersonate Bird, Forest Whitaker, to play well enough to look plausible on the bandstand.
Fortunately, Whitaker required only minimum makeup to pass for Bird. More important, he had some musical training—he had studied voice in college—and was by nature a rather studious sort. He read up on Parker, played his records day and night, studied the scraps of film in which he appeared, flew to Paris to talk with Chan Parker, his fourth and last wife, on whose unpublished memoir, Life in A-Flat, Oliansky’s script was largely based. At the same time, Clint consulted with many musicians who had worked with Parker, drawing particularly on the memories of Red Rodney, the white trumpet player whose role in the film is probably somewhat larger than it was in Parker’s life, since writer and director wanted to provide white audiences with a surrogate to help draw them into this essentially black world.
The issue for everyone was the same: sustaining period authenticity while retaining dramatic values. Cinematographer Jack Green recalls an early meeting where Clint told him that he wanted the movie lit as if it were being shot in black and white. Green, who had also been a youthful jazz fan, flashed on “these beautiful black-and-white photographs, very hard, very contrasty,” that had been a feature of Downbeat and the other jazz publications of the fifties, and shot some tests in this manner. Clint immediately recognized their inspiration, and according to the cameraman, the film became “easy and simple” for him precisely because “the whole lighting concept was just absolutely ironclad.”
Despite an offer from Oliansky to do some rewrites on what he considered to be a first-draft screenplay, Clint went with what he had, though he cut about forty pages from a script that still required close to three hours to realize on-screen. He began shooting in October 1987, working with a kind of contented conviction, depicting “the music of the forties and fifties or the feeling of a club the way it was.”
For this, he was able to draw on memory. The decor of each jazz joint might be unique, but the smoke and funk of these rooms was universal, he thought. In one important respect he could improve on memory. When he was a kid he could not afford a trip to New York’s West Fifty-second Street, bebop’s avatar. Now, on a budget near $10 million, he could afford to have Ed Carfagno, his art director, re-create it with meticulous historical accuracy.
He lingered over Bird longer than he did most of his films—it had a nine-week shooting schedule. Both Whitaker and Diane Venora, who gave a remarkable performance as Chan, spoke of his patience in letting them find their characters. “In one scene,” she said, “I did three different things in three different takes and I knew it wasn’t right. Clint said, ‘Good, now play all three things at once.’ I did, and that was it.” She also remembers his interrupting the flow of an intense fight scene between Chan and Charlie in order to dismiss the two-year-old who was playing their son as soon as he had all the reaction shots from him he could possibly use. “I don’t want to be responsible for him having to see a psychiatrist when he’s fifteen or sixteen,” she recalls him saying.
But for all the punctiliousness Clint brought to it, much of Bird’s distinction derives, paradoxically, from its very free structure. Covering Parker’s last months, beginning with a suicide attempt, ending with death suddenly choking off his laughter at a television show, but illuminating this passage with a deliberately disorderly array of flashbacks, it is Clint’s only radical break with linear narrative, and with what one might call linear morality, that is to say, the pistol point QED that brings most of his movies to an end. Finally, to risk stating the obvious, this film is the freest of the burden of self-reflection that the presence Clint Eastwood, actor, inevitably imposes on Clint Eastwood, director.
Bird was almost invariably described as a “personal” film by the press when it was released, since it was obvious that a powerful star had persuaded his studio to allow him to spend major money exploring an obsession shared by no more than a minor cult. What only a few observers saw was that something more than nostalgia was moving in Bird. Reflecting on the life of Charlie Parker, Clint was able to reflect on certain issues in his own life.
When he reviewed Bird for the Chicago Tribune, Dave Kehr drew an apt analogy between jazz and the kind of vernacular American moviemaking Clint practices. Both, he said, “operate in the gray areas between the popular and the personal, the bluntly commercial and the purely idealistic,” therefore “as much as it is a movie about jazz, it is a movie about filmmaking as practiced by Clint Eastwood and the generations of self-effacing American moviemakers who have come before him.” This was more than a matter of riffing on popular themes as most genre movies do. Kehr daringly analogized Charlie Parker’s saxophone to Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum; both are “outsized tools used by the individual to confront society, to give expression to emotions and impulses that otherwise would remain bottled up,” presenting their adepts with enormous issues of self-control, issues that Harry (narrowly) overcomes and Bird succumbs to. Finally, like the adolescent Clint, he observed that playing an instrument is “a way for the individual to hide his identity while channeling his emotions into a less personal, less threatening form.”
One of the film’s severest critics, Stanley Crouch, suggested, without knowing he was doing so, a more basic connection between director and subject. In reviewing Bird he compared Charlie Parker to “the gangster hero, the charming anarchist that Cagney introduced in Public Enemy.” To Crouch, the musician was, like Cagney, all “velocity,” a man rubbing out musical clichés with the same joyous élan with which Cagney erased his thickheaded enemies in a film where, like Bird, he lived fast and died young.
Parker was, however, more awesome and, in a certain, narrow sense, more imitable to Clint than the actor was. Surprisingly, Clint told one reporter in a prerelease interview that he had, in adolescence, thought of himself as “really a black guy in a white body.” Now he consciously understood what he had no more than instinctively grasped as a young man: that bebop, so spiky and challenging to traditionalists, was, as many jazz experts now claim, protest music—or at the very least a radical assertion of black singularity.
Clint also understood that Bird’s racial experience, like the deepest sources of his genius, was impenetrable to an outsider (it is the film’s great strength that it offers no simple dramatizations of either). He was, however, “the single most confident individual I’ve ever seen in my life when he was playing the saxophone,” Clint says, yet when he was finished, “he would just drift into the woodwork.” Clint would do his idol the honor of presenting him in a movie in the same way that he presented the characters he himself played—coolly, unsentimentally, enigmatically.
Still, he believes those possessed by genius have certain obligations to it, and he needed to make that point too. There is in Bird a central symbol, which is in fact a central cymbal. Legend has it that when Parker was a kid, playing out of his league in a Kansas City jam session, a drummer sailed one at him in disgust. This was a turning point. Bird took his horn into a retreat during which, for three or four years, he did nothing but play alone, eleven to fifteen hours a day, obsessively evolving the style by which he would create his musical revolution. The image of that cymbal, traveling through the air in slow motion, recurrently haunts Bird, signifying death and rebirth and, above all, the film’s morality, which holds that redemption is achieved only through disciplined effort in whatever work we undertake.
About this, Clint was quite clear. “Everyone,” he told jazz writer Gary Giddins, “is the product of some sort of setback or something, the thing where you snap and say, I don’t give a crap what they say, I’m going to overcome this.” Pressed to name such a moment in his own life Clint rather diffidently offered that matinee showing of Ambush at Cimarron Pass, when, after the embarrassment and despondency passed, “I mustered up the sand and said, I’m going to win this game.”
What he could not understand was why, having made a similar, more consequential effort, Charlie Parker
would not husband the grace it granted him and build on it, morally as well as musically. That mystery is set forth in a remarkable sequence that is scarcely mentioned in any of the critical writing on the movie, perhaps because it is not musical, perhaps because it is so austerely realized. We do not expect a movie’s turning point to consist of insert shots of typewriter keys striking paper and platen and a monologic voice-over.
Bird is playing in California, shacked up with another woman, when a telegram from Chan arrives, informing him of their daughter’s death. He then composes a series of telegrams attempting to justify his failure to return to his daughter’s bedside (and now to her obsequies) and, more significantly, all his failures as husband, father, artist. It was, as Clint says, the point of no return in Bird’s flight, so crucial to our understanding of him that he reshot the inserts when it was discovered that they had in minor ways misquoted the originals. “Reading them in sequence,” Clint says, “you can just see the whole story unfolding, you can see the man collapsing, mentally just disintegrating in that period of an hour or two.”
There is no more possibility of “understanding” a human failure of this kind than there is a possibility of “understanding” genius. One may respond to it with compassion, just as one may respond to sublime artistry with awe. But, finally, they are enigmas. What the movie does, in compensation, is posit an alternative Bird, a morally instructive double in the figure of Dizzy Gillespie (splendidly played by Samuel E. Wright).
He is the true hero of this film, a man whose contributions to the evolution of jazz were as significant as Parker’s, but who was utterly responsible to his talent, his colleagues, his race. “They’re going to talk about you when you’re gone, Bird,” he says, understanding it will be more romantic and intense than whatever may be said about himself. But he also insists, this wise and distinctly undizzy man, that especially for a black man in racist America, blowing your own horn is not enough, no matter how entrancingly you do so. It is necessary also to maintain your sharpness and stamina, to be, if you are gifted with talent and fame, “a leader of men,” which Gillespie, who played on serenely into his seventies, surely was.
Clint Eastwood Page 60