By mid-January, just two months after completion of principal photography, Clint and Joel Cox had a rough cut ready to screen. Even without music—Clint would contribute a theme to Lennie Niehaus’s very spare score—the picture played powerfully. There was some talk, apparently, among Warners executives about asking him to trim it slightly, but no one had the nerve to broach the subject. Clint agreed to make an appearance at Sho-West, the annual Las Vegas convention of exhibitors, where all the studios present samples of their forthcoming wares at expensive, star-studded parties. Unforgiven was slightly misrepresented in the Warner Bros. product reel, which cannily combined violent moments from previous Eastwood westerns with similar shots from the new one to suggest a return to Clint’s most profitable territory. It went over very well.
The film itself did the same when Clint invited David Webb Peoples to the studio to see it in finished form. It was their first meeting, and the writer, fearing the worst, sat well apart from Clint so his reactions could not be read. He noticed, but made nothing of, a few small changes in his script, principally because everything he really cared about was present. Peoples had the experience, uncanny for a screenwriter, of seeing his work come to the screen essentially as he had written it; only, he said, better. “I’d never seen or imagined anything so dark and relentless and powerful,” he later wrote. “Without changing the words, Clint made the script … tougher, more uncompromising, without slickness, and the heart was still in it.” Like Clint, who never takes them, Peoples is opposed to possessory credits, but graciously added: “If ever there was a picture that belonged to its director it is Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.” In Clint’s mind, though, it belonged to his mentors. He placed a dedication on the closing credits: “For Sergio and Don” (Siegel had died in 1991).
Peoples’s response was heartening. But neither it, nor the enthusiasm of other early viewers, affected the prerelease campaign for the picture, which Clint insisted be low-key. He did not want to stir excessive expectations for the movie, or openly acknowledge his own. He also believed it was a picture that would profit by letting people come away from it with a sense of discovery.
In press previews of the summer’s releases, Unforgiven was scarcely mentioned. In the spring all eyes were fixed on the supposedly erotic thriller Basic Instinct; in the summer the media were transfixed by high-risk sequels—Lethal Weapon 3, Batman Returns, Patriot Games—and low-rent comedies like Sister Act and Wayne’s World. No one was paying much attention to an oater, all of whose stars were in their fifties and sixties.
But Unforgiven was lucky in the order. There comes a time in early August when reviewers are overdosed on mindlessness, and a portion of the public, too, finds itself yearning for the finer things—or, at least, for something structurally coherent and dramatically meaningful. It’s not a large window of opportunity, but it exists, and Unforgiven slipped through it, emerging with ecstatic reviews.
Besides “revisionist” the word most frequently attached to the film by reviewers was “masterpiece.” Precisely because the movie so openly questioned western conventions, it allowed critics a chance to parade their analytical skills and their historical knowledge. More important, Clint was challenging them in a way they thought appropriate to him. He was not stretching as he had with White Hunter or Bird or Honkytonk Man into territories they believed to be foreign to him. Rather, as with Tightrope, he was exploring the limits of a genre in which his authority was unquestionable.
As it turned out, he was shrewd in the order, too. Let us take him at his word: It was purely an actor’s choice to wait until he had aged into this part. But let us also note that he had now attained an age when a leading player, if he is still vigorous and active (and lucky) may begin to achieve legendary status. This role, with its tragic overtones and its summarizing undertones, called out for such an acknowledgment. Richard Corliss caught this sense of things very well. He described Unforgiven as “Eastwood’s meditation on age, repute, courage, heroism—on all those burdens he has been carrying with such grace for decades. On Clintessence.” Possibly some of these preoccupations might seem—especially to the young—old-fashioned. “But to anyone who appreciates what Clint Eastwood has meant to the movies, old-fashioned is just another way of saying classic.”
Corliss noticed something else as well, that the movie took its time “letting you watch Clint turn into Clint”—that is, into the righteous avenger the popular audience always wants him to be. But when the transformation was finally achieved it was “not thrilling but scary,” a descent into temporary insanity. In short, there was something for everyone here—irony for the enlightened, a measure of simple kick-ass bliss for the groundlings, who did not notice—or care—in exactly what spirit Will Munny achieved his rough justice.
And so they all came in their millions. The film grossed a solid $15 million on its first weekend, leading the competition and giving Clint his best opening in six years. Moreover, it had legs. The film stayed in profitable release for about nine months, while the press, which had so largely ignored the film prior to release, tumbled over itself with follow-ups, reactions, second thoughts. Clearly, Unforgiven was going to be a serious contender for critical awards, especially when the late fall and early winter produced less-than-daunting competition.
On the whole, the film did very well in the Oscar preliminaries, winning four major prizes from the National Society of Film Critics and five from the Los Angeles Film Critics. Golden Globes were also acquired. The only disappointment was the New York Film Critics Circle, where, Hackman aside, Unforgiven was narrowly defeated in all the major categories. The big winner was The Crying Game, in which an IRA hitman falls in love with a transvestite, whose surprise revelation of his sex was a gimmick so cleverly managed that it was widely mistaken for art. Clint, among others, wondered if this late starter was going to emerge as an Oscar spoiler. Early on the morning of February 17 (5:30 a.m., in order to maximize p.m. coverage in the eastern time zones), when the Academy nominations were announced, Unforgiven received eight, two more than the Irish film, one less than Howard’s End, with the other best-picture nominations including A Few Good Men and Scent of a Woman, humanistically flavored dramas of the kind usually favored by the Academy.
Clint was, he said, asleep in Sun Valley when the nominations were announced, receiving word of the results from a message left on his answering machine. “When I heard, I thought, well that’s nice,” he told a reporter. Surpassing cool! Though there were some among his friends, who know that he is a late sleeper, but who also knew how keenly Clint wanted this recognition, who did not entirely credit it.
If he did snooze through the Oscar announcements, it was his last inattentive moment until the morning after the awards. Just as he had refused all along to admit how much this film meant to him, he now refused to admit how much he wanted this recognition for it. He would just quietly do everything possible to assure the right outcome. The strategy was to remain tastefully present in the minds of Oscar voters, without looking as if he was desperate for their favor. Something like a half-dozen major profiles appeared in important magazines during the first three months of 1993 when Academy members had their ballots in hand. He sat for television interviews with Barbara Walters and David Frost and appeared in a retrospective documentary about his career. He accepted a Director of the Year Award from Sho-West, a career achievement award from the American Cinema Editors, something from the Publicists Guild and a California Governor’s Award for the Arts—much meaningless metalwork, but reminders to the Academy that others were reckoning seriously with him.
This effort was complicated by a certain ambivalence about the Academy. He was a member, naturally, but a distant one, called upon to make contributions to various activities but never invited into its inner councils. Consequently he had come to think of it as a self-protective and exclusionary institution. “I’m popular with the public,” he told a reporter when there was talk of an acting nomination for Tightrope, “but that doe
sn’t make me popular at the country club.” In the same interview, he said, “You’ve got the Golden Globe crowd who don’t know a thing about acting and who don’t even try to learn. And then you’ve got the Academy Awards group, which is more political and so often gives [Oscars] to actors who don’t have popular appeal and therefore aren’t threatening—people like F. Murray Abraham or Ben Kingsley.” He wasn’t putting them down, but what about Paul Newman, at that time a frequent nominee, but not a winner?
For that matter, what about Cary Grant and two of his best directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, and all the other distinguished nonwinners of the past, men and women whose long and legendary careers far outshone many of those who had enjoyed Oscar’s fleeting favor? And what about the fact that no pure western had ever won the best-picture prize? Among the sixty-four winners to date the genre was represented only by the decrepit Cimarron of 1930, which had men on horseback, but no classic western themes, and Dances with Wolves, which an English reviewer neatly dubbed “the first Perrier western.”
So his inner conflict played out. If a friend tried to engage him in speculation about the balloting, he would always retreat, saying how crazy it made him, pondering imponderables. He focused, instead, on the small pleasantries of the award season, like starstruck Emma Thompson. The effervescent English actress, nominated (and eventually a winner) for her work in Howard’s End, kept turning up at the same ceremonies he did, professing herself thrilled to be in his company. When she was growing up, her father, who was also an actor, kept taking her to see Clint Eastwood pictures and telling her that that was what acting was all about—not letting it show.
Then three weeks before the Academy Awards ceremony, he received concrete encouragement from the Directors Guild. Its award banquet is traditionally a long sit, especially for nominees, and Clint found himself growing particularly irritable with a nearby table of Warners executives, laughing and chatting easily, not in the least sharing his angst. It was not until later that he learned the Guild has a satellite banquet in New York, which takes place three hours earlier than the one in Los Angeles, and that a studio representative attending it had already informed management that Clint was the winner.
The Guild award is a nearly infallible Oscar predictor in the director category. But Clint was taking no chances. On March 29, the night of the Academy Awards, he showed up wearing a slightly geeky red leather bow tie. It had been fashioned by an extra on Bird, and Clint had sworn to wear it should he ever be nominated.
He ran into Jack Nicholson as they headed toward their seats. His occasional golfing partner, due to present the best-picture prize, said he was sure Clint would win—“You should have had it for Bird,” he said. Clint hoped he was right. Early in the evening Hackman and Joel Cox won statuettes. He hoped that was a good sign. Later, Neil Jordan beat out Peoples for the best original screenplay award. He hoped that was not a bad sign. He would remember glancing at his mother, wondering if he had brought her all this way, subjected her ailing heart to all this pressure, for nothing. Actually, of course, that loss was good news; the screenplay award is a customary consolation prize for nonwinners of the best-picture prize. But naturally his anxiety grew again when Al Pacino beat him out as best actor, though again this signaled nothing important about Unforgiven. It was the Academy belatedly rewarding an actor whom it had nominated five times for this prize, twice as a supporting actor—for his highly mannered performance in Scent of a Woman.
Now it was time for the director’s award. And he says he could tell from Barbra Streisand’s grin that he had won, even before she read out his name. He was barely back in his seat when Nicholson, mercifully cutting out his scripted jokes, was calling his name. He mimed a golf stroke as Clint stepped on-stage. Clint mimed one in return. He did something unprecedented; he thanked the critics for their support. And he remembered Steve Ross, who had “predicted this outcome” not long before he died the previous December.
Then he was backstage, fielding questions from the press. Somebody asked how it felt to win a prize so late in his career, and he said he thought there was a danger in winning too young: “You wear a monocle and leggings and walk around thinking you’re a great genius.”
He dropped by the Governor’s Ball then headed for Nicky Blair’s restaurant. He had meant this as a sentimental occasion. Blair had been a young actor with Clint, plying his out-of-work colleagues with homemade pasta, and Clint had never forgotten. When Blair opened his restaurant, Clint was one of the opening-night customers. Now he thought it would be nice to celebrate at his old pal’s place. He invited a carefully chosen list of friends, family and Unforgiven coworkers. Alas, the studio got wind of it. This would not do. Where were the A-list names? Where was the press? Suddenly the crowd was three or four times the restaurant’s capacity, and suddenly Clint was trapped with an endless succession of interviewers. Even when they let him go, he could scarcely make his way through the crush. By that time he was thoroughly befogged.
Asked how he felt the morning after, he simply said, “Tired.” Asked to analyze his victory, “industry insiders” made much of the fact that it was Clint’s turn, making the well-worn point that if you hang in long enough you are bound to achieve official recognition from haute Hollywood. Even Clint was not immune to that idea. “I think it helped me that I had a couple of years where nothing much was happening with me. They said, ‘Hey, he’s back.’ ”
These are basic realities. But they ignore the more interesting ones: that this was one of the rare occasions when the best American movie of the year actually won the best-picture Oscar; that for once that picture was neither slick escapism nor a fake-serious hymn to the human spirit, that it was, if anything, the opposite, a dirge to all that was dispiriting in human nature. Which is to say that somehow Clint achieved his largest triumph for his most dangerous and subversive work. A couple of weeks after the Academy Awards, Unforgiven’s cumulative domestic gross reached $100 million. That, too, was unprecedented for him.
SEVENTEEN
NATURAL EMINENCE
Will Munny was finally lost in the chaos of Unforgiven, blotted up, blotted out. No less than the men he left dead, it stripped from him all that he had and all that he would ever have. That figure evanescing before our eyes in its last shot took with him as well the hard, cold core of a screen character. That wearily vengeful redeemer of what little was left of the American Dream has not appeared again in a Clint Eastwood movie.
Will’s last option—a new name, a new life—is not available to movie stars. They are lifers, without hope of parole from their celebrity, which finally includes their audience’s unreasonable disappointment when, visibly, stars fail to resist the ravages of time. If they are wise and graceful—and very few are when the burden of the years begins to weigh on them—their best hope is to acknowledge, with what grace they can muster, the cost and limits that age places on heroism.
It requires a certain gumption to follow this course; you never can tell how people will respond when reality is imposed on their fantasies. Face-lifts (and doubles for the action scenes) have a certain cowardly appeal. Unless, of course, you have all along based your career on brutal frankness. Then you have no choice but to act your age.
There is, however, no law against acting it in the best possible light. In the three movies Clint has released since Unforgiven, wistfulness often replaces willfulness, vulnerability substitutes for vengefulness, and the play of memory preoccupies his characters at least as much as the drive for mastery. Two of these films leave him frustrated and disconsolate, not necessarily wiser than he was when he entered the narrative, but infinitely sadder, a condition not unknown to men and women who undertake daring or strenuous adventures late in life.
These movies also represent a change in Clint’s approach to the filmmaking process. As we have seen, he learned from Unforgiven the value of money well spent—on a richer mise-en-scène than he had usually offered, on acting colleagues of significant stature. They co
mmanded attention in ways that the pictures he had “made for a price,” as the Hollywood saying goes, did not. Most important, he could see that this slightly more conventional approach to his craft relieved him of a burden. Despite his huge central role in the creation of Unforgiven he had not been obliged to carry it to success single-handed.
Take, for example, In the Line of Fire. Budgeted at close to $40 million, it was far and away the most expensive movie to which he had ever lent his talents—“lent” being the operative word. It was not a Malpaso production, and though a few of Clint’s people worked on it, production responsibility was entirely vested with Castle Rock, with Columbia Pictures financing and distributing. Clint was unquestionably the star of the movie; if it failed, he would take much of the blame for it. But he was operating here within a well-calculated commercial package that placed beneath him the kind of wide, closely woven net other stars of his stature expected as a matter of course, but which he had rarely enjoyed.
In essence In the Line of Fire, which was released in the summer of 1993, is a deadly, darkly funny, two-handed game played by Clint’s Frank Horrigan and John Malkovich’s Mitch Leary. The former is a Secret Service agent haunted by his failure, thirty years earlier, to react in time to save John F. Kennedy’s life. The latter is eventually identified as a onetime CIA operative twisted into psychosis by his grievances against the agency, against government in general, and therefore determined to kill the current occupant of the White House. Theirs is an intimate duel, its winner to be determined by which man best reads the other’s mind. But it is played out against the background of an election campaign, all jostling crowds, primary colors and brassy music, which impart to the movie the kind of glossy production values that are in themselves an attraction.
Casting is of a piece with the film’s careful mounting. Malkovich is every bit Hackman’s peer, but far more obviously than that canny underplayer, he represents a style that critic Kenneth Turan called “instinctively adversarial” to Clint’s. Having honed his chops in Chicago’s Steppenwolf company, he was an actor known for his bold, black, utterly unpredictable comic effects, which make his essential menace all the more terrifying. Adopting an absurdly languid manner, issuing his taunts and threats in a whispery drawl, he turns the movie into an aesthetic contest as well as a conflict between good and evil.
Clint Eastwood Page 66