To put it another way, the purpose of Bird was to glorify its protagonist’s music, but not to further romanticize yet another of art’s youthfully fallen heroes, a man who, as Clint (who does rather tend to personalize this loss) once put it, “takes his genius away from us as fast as he came on the scene and gave it to us.” His film, he acknowledges, “was actually a way, a left-handed way, of paying tribute to all the great geniuses—the Ellingtons, the Dizzy Gillespies, the Count Basies, the Fats Wallers—the people over the years who did live normal lives, and did have a normal existence.”
This refusal of conventional sentiments and simplicities is the film’s great strength. No moral judgment is passed on Bird’s descent into drugs. Nor is any easy explanation—the childhood trauma, the shattering love affair—offered for it. But neither is blame shifted decisively to others, so that Bird can be read as society’s victim. Bird is the sole author of his own misery—and quite unapologetic about it. He likes drugs, likes what they do for him. And the dark glamour with which Clint realizes the jazz world becomes their objective correlative—a moral (actually an immoral) force in the story. Bird is, in every way, an addict of half-lights, real and chemically induced. It is—to tell the truth of this movie—where he does his best work.
Clint completed principal photography on Bird toward the end of January 1988. He would finish postproduction and have it ready to enter in competition at Cannes three months later. It was not his only service to jazz in this period. When producer David Valdes and production assistant Tom Rooker were scouting possible locations for the film in Kansas City, they noticed in a musicians’ union hall a poster for a jazz documentary called The Last of the Blue Devils, about a regional group of the late 1920s that included Count Basie and others who would later form the core of his legendary band.
They pulled it in, and everybody liked it so much that Clint got in touch with its producer, Bruce Ricker, and bought from him the French and Italian rights to it, releasing it in those territories under Clint’s name, in part because Joe Hyams thought it would help establish his credentials as a jazz enthusiast prior to Bird. But there were larger consequences to this action. Ricker had for years been trying to put together a documentary on Thelonious Monk, drawing on some twenty hours of previously unseen cinema verité material that had been shot by a filmmaker named Christian Blackwood as well as rare performance footage. He had fought his way through problems involving rights and finance, but still needed $400,000 to complete the film. He mentioned this to Clint one day. In less than twenty-four hours Clint called back to say Warner Bros. would put up the finishing money. The resulting film, Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser, edited and directed by Charlotte Zwerin, is a hypnotizing portrait of a figure every bit as enigmatic and as significant to the history of modern jazz as Charlie Parker was. “We made money on it, too,” Clint adds proudly.
As if this were not enough activity, Clint knocked out The Dead Pool while Bird was in postproduction. Morally, if not contractually, he felt he had to cross-collateralize the commercially chancy Bird with this surefire Dirty Harry sequel. As of a few months earlier, Detective Callahan “had been pretty much in my mind a closed chapter,” he says. But his interest in diet and health had brought him into contact with Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, authors of a best-selling self-help book called Life Extension, in which a regimen they had tailored for Clint was discussed. Soon after publication they let it be known that they were developing some ideas for him, in which they were aided by a young writer named Steve Sharon. Among them was the story that became The Dead Pool.
One of the things Clint liked about it was the sequence that turned out to be the one (and only) thing most people remember about the finished film—a car chase in which Harry and his partner (this time an Asian played by Evan C. Kim) are pursued by a toy vehicle, radio-controlled and loaded with explosives. It was, he thought, a nifty parody of the famous Bullitt car chase.
So … all right. He would run and jump, shoot and snarl, more or less as before—under Buddy Van Horn’s amiable direction. Doing his best to keep Harry within the conventions of the series, he would show his age—many reviewers mentioned his graying and receding hair, the ever more visible throbbings in the prominent vein in his temple—but he would not allude to it as openly as his Tom Highway character had. He would let his anger show, but more often than not as a kind of senior-citizen grumble rather than as full-throated rage. And though he would now and then sneer contempt at departmental fumblings, his heart would not truly be in it. For what Sharon’s script put at the forefront of Harry’s mind was something that had not escaped Clint’s attention—celebrity and the media’s dance of attendance on it.
His testimony at a Mafia trial has made Harry locally famous, and now he can’t do his job without someone thrusting a microphone or a TV camera in his face. Then confirming his new status, he discovers that his name is entered in the “dead pool” being run by Peter Swan, a grimly pretentious horror-picture director, played with appropriate grandiloquence by Liam Neeson. In this game entrants make up lists of well-known people they expect to die within the year, the person with the most correct guesses being the winner. Soon enough listees are being murdered with alarming regularity, among them a female movie critic (perhaps some wish fulfillment here) and a trashed rock idol—hilariously played by Jim Carrey, then billing himself as James, in his first telling movie role. The young actor—cheeky, bright and anarchic—was Clint’s kind of kid, and a mutual admiration society formed. Clint would give Carrey a small role in Pink Cadillac, and when stardom came to him, Clint appeard with him at his Chinese Theater footprints ceremony. Carrey, in turn, cohosted Clint’s AFI Life Achievement banquet.
The film’s more serious business is tracking down the serial killer who cuts short Carrey’s role. Harry must do so while a TV reporter named Samantha Walker (Patricia Clarkson, a Locke-alike in the eyes of several reviewers) tags along, doing a profile of him, with which his bosses have ordered him to cooperate. Their hostility is predictable; so perhaps are their debates about whether the media by so avidly covering crime does or does not encourage it; so, undoubtedly, is the fact that they eventually make love without exactly falling into it. In the end, she is abducted by the killer—a screenwriter rejected by Swan and trying to get even with him—and saved by Harry, who employs his most phallic weapon yet, a harpoon gun, to dispense with the villain.
If the film’s criticisms of pack-traveling journalists and its satirical thrusts at the pomposities of Swan’s auteurism were not notably original, they were at least unexpected, and not unintelligent. But there was no heat left in Harry. Reviewers treated him indulgently now. In a little over a decade and a half, he had made the journey from unconscious fascist to incipient fogey. Clint was tired of him too: “There’s only so much you can do with a character, and Dirty Harry was pretty much at the end of his rope.” Clint was also losing interest in the urban action genre, which was beginning to give itself over to careless raptures of violence, more detached from reality (and affect) than Dirty Harry’s original critics could ever have imagined. The Dead Pool’s grosses—smaller than any of the other Dirty Harry pictures, though still highly profitable—confirmed what Clint already knew: that it was time to bestow on Harry his grateful regards and ask him to take early retirement. It is a decision he has never regretted, though people still speak wistfully to him about Harry, wondering if, just possibly, he might someday return. As what? one wonders. A security guard?
Leaving Buddy Van Horn and the rest of his staff to complete The Dead Pool, Clint took off for Cannes and Bird’s world premiere in an optimistic mood. He felt it had a better chance for a prize than Pale Rider had. And, indeed, Bird was well received by the audience. He again enjoyed the “awesome” experience of the Palais steps, stayed in the theater just long enough to make sure the sound was all right, then sneaked away. He told William Goldman, who was a juror that year, and who has written with rare wit about the experience, “I just cou
ldn’t have sat there. I didn’t have nerve enough. Too terrifying. To sit there and agonize over the choices you’ve already made after you’ve seen it so many times.” A few minutes before the film ended he returned to face the music—the music of applause, as it happened. “That was a wonderful moment. Of course, it’s always wonderful when they don’t throw cabbages at you.”
The problem was getting a similar response from the jury, and here the defects of Bird’s virtues surfaced for the first time. Goldman observed what we have also seen: “No apologizing, no excuses, self-pity’s been banished. Warts and all, it says, here I am. Like me or not.” He also observed: “It was by far the outstanding directorial work of the fortnight. The only stigma being Eastwood and our memories of all those action films. How dare he attempt a serious movie? And bring it off. I believe that if Francis Coppola had directed it, frame for frame, the critics would have put him back on top with Woody Allen. And if Allen had done it, they would have elevated him up alongside Welles.”
The front-runners for the Palme d’Or were Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror and Chris Menges’s A World Apart, each in its way the kind of film that festival juries and critics find easy to approve. The former, the story of a Swedish farmhand and his son looking for work in the midst of an agricultural depression in nineteenth-century Scandinavia, was handsomely made and quite unsentimental in its humanism. The latter was much more ordinary, a predictable antiapartheid drama. Still, Goldman believed Clint had a real shot as best director and did his best to sway the jury in that direction. But the debate over the two leading contenders was so intense that when Pelle won, they decided to give two consolation prizes to its leading competitor. A World Apart was given the customary runner-up award, the jury prize, and its three leading ladies were jointly presented the best actress award. Then Forest Whitaker was given the best actor nod. Politically, this sealed Clint’s fate. The jury was not going to give two awards to yet another film, and, indeed, the Argentine, Fernando Solanas, won the directing award for Le Sud, a movie Goldman insists is largely about scrap paper blowing artfully through the empty streets of Buenos Aires.
Clint kept his disappointment to himself. Bird had at least been in serious contention, his leading actor had won a prize, and the generally good reports of it flowing out of Cannes heightened his hopes for the movie, which was given its American premiere at the New York Film Festival in September.
Bird’s critical reception was the most interesting (because it was the most serious and engaged) so far accorded any Eastwood film. Partly, this was because some new voices, writers whose first allegiance was to jazz, not film, were added to the dialogue. They were not always appreciative, but the length and the passion of their arguments were stimulating. Some, like Giddins and Leonard Feather, were inclined to concede the film its musical and dramatic licenses, delighted at last to have a fictional jazz film that was both passionate and emotionally authentic. Others were determined to hold it to stricter historical accountability. Crouch, for example, deplored the rerecording of Parker’s music, insisting that recent remasterings of his work would have served as well, not understanding that this material could not have been persuasively played on a modern theatrical sound system. He also made much of Bird’s failure to go more deeply into Parker’s family history—he thinks Parker was overindulged by a mother who was, at the same time, emotionally withholding—its elimination of significant liaisons with women other than Chan, its failures of detailed musicological history. More interestingly, this would-be biographer of Parker insisted there was an intellectual arrogance and a competitive hardness in him that Whitaker and Clint did not capture. He quotes pianist Walter Davis Jr.: “You can’t have a movie about Bird and not have him run over somebody. This was a very aggressive man. He took over and made things go his way. If you weren’t strong, Charlie Parker would mow you down like grass.”
A movie biography, however, unlike a literary one, has a need to compress and symbolize, and if every significant character in Bird’s life is not present here, most of its significant issues are. Certainly Whitaker’s soft-gliding performance, patiently accumulating sympathy for Bird until we are devastated by his demise, was a sensible strategy, especially since he conveys very well the man’s infantile, premoral quality and the erratic willfulness that typically accompanies that condition.
The mainstream reviewers, eschewing biographical detail, responded to Bird more flatteringly. They had not previously paid much attention to Clint as a filmmaker, in part because his controversial stardom had so often preoccupied them, in part because his directorial manner had been so self-effacing. But because he was not distractingly present in Bird, and because its striking look and tragic subject matter were so obviously singular, they were encouraged to write up to his ambitions.
That drove Pauline Kael crazy, especially coming as it did not long after Wesleyan University and the Museum of Modern Art had established Clint Eastwood archives, his papers going to the former, his films to the latter, with a black-tie dinner at the Museum of Modern Art celebrating the occasion. She loathed Bird, calling it “a rat’s nest of a movie” that looked as if Clint “hadn’t paid his Con Ed bill.” Then lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania, she charged the critics with praising this “perfectly atrocious” director “because they would like to be Clint Eastwood. It is basically as silly as that. I mean, he is tall and his stardom is very sexy, and a lot of people on magazines who lead lives that are not exciting imagine him to have a terrific time.”
But she’s the one drawing the dirty pictures, and advancing a curious critical theory as well. Hereafter, anyone praising any star must be suspect, since all stars do, indeed, lead lives that are “sexier” (using the word in its broadest sense, and probably its narrower one, too) than the typical journalist. Employing this principle, what is one to make of her career-long infatuation with Marlon Brando? Her shorter, more self-destructive crush on Warren Beatty, for whom she briefly abandoned reviewing to become his story editor?
More rationally, Kael joined a number of other critics—Janet Maslin, John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann—in finding Bird’s structure confusing, and chastising its failure to find and sustain a conventional dramatic line conducting us smoothly to exemplary tragedy. They might be prepared to grant Bird his mystery. But in the end, they wanted it solved, wanted to see the crucial betrayal—by Mom or women or the unfeeling world, whomever or whatever. Alternatively, one feels, they might have settled for something more sentimental and hagiographic. Responding to such criticism, Helen Knode, writing in the L.A. Weekly, observed that “Parker didn’t live his life as though he were the greatest musical innovator since Beethoven. He lived his life like we all do, as best he could. He lived inside the legend, not outside it.” It would have been wrong, as she correctly suggests, to impose upon it the glib comforts of psychology and the grander consolations of tragedy.
Perhaps because of its refusal to romanticize or sentimentalize Charlie Parker’s story, there was a dutiful quality to much of the critical regard for Bird. It made only a few ten-best lists, and it was no more than a minor contender in the award ballotings of the critical organizations. Showbiz reporters listed it, Clint, Whitaker and Venora as potential Oscar nominees, and the studio campaigned for them; films of this kind get made largely in hopes that heavy Academy attention will bring reluctant customers in, but it lacked the triumphal note Academy members respond to, and only Lennie Niehaus got a nomination (and, eventually, a statuette). Clint’s only consolation prize was a Golden Globe as best director of a drama.
This reception hurt and puzzled Clint. Almost two years to the day after its ambiguous reception at Cannes predicted its ambiguous fate elsewhere, he would tell an interviewer, “We just didn’t seem to have enough people in America who wanted to see the story of a black man who in the end betrays his genius. And we didn’t get the support through black audiences that I’d hoped for. They really aren’t into jazz now, you know. It’s all this rap stuf
f. There aren’t enough whites who are, either.…”
Preoccupied first by politics, then by this film, Clint had not been attending closely to his relationship with Sondra Locke. They were still seeing each other, and she had accompanied him to Cannes for the Bird premiere. But she had not participated in his mayoralty—not even attending his inaugural—and as he puts it, “The handwriting was slowly becoming murky on the wall, so I started withdrawing a little bit.”
He dates the beginning of his final disaffection to a relatively trivial incident. When he was shooting Heartbreak Ridge he invited her, on the spur of the moment, to spend a weekend with him. She declined. She said she had promised to drive Gordon and a friend to Ojai, felt she couldn’t renege at the last moment—and, oh, by the way, could she borrow Clint’s car for the trip? It was something like the showerhead incident with Maggie, a moment that crystallized the anger that had been building up in him for years. As always, he felt Sondra’s first allegiance was to Gordon, not to him.
The upshot was predictable. “All of a sudden, you start looking around”—looking around, that is, in his public and professional world. At first, he did not do so with any consequential results. Indeed, something over two years drifted by with Clint more or less content not having to explain himself or justify his movements to anyone. This condition began to change around six o’clock on the evening of October 2, 1988, when Frances Fisher made a spectacular entrance into the preproduction party for Pink Cadillac, which was held around the pool of a Holiday Inn in Reno, Nevada. Wearing shorts, she zipped in on roller skates, and she says she was smitten by her first glimpse of the star.
Clint Eastwood Page 61