Peter Bart

by the Mob (And Sex) Infamous Players: A Tale of Movies

I had long since learned that every star had a favored writer and that the only way to pacify their story concerns, real or imagined, was to hire that writer at the eleventh hour. For Beatty, that writer was Bob Towne, with whom he had worked on Bonnie and Clyde. The problem was that Towne, too, was famously slow in delivering script changes.

  I knew I had one card to play and I decided to play it. The Writers Guild was threatening an imminent walkout. Unless we jammed on the script, I pointed out, no writer—even Towne—could do a rewrite without facing banishment from the guild. The time had come to push forward.

  Over dinner with Pakula, the director endorsed this strategy. “We know the direction of the narrative,” he reasoned. “Warren and Bob Towne need to stare at a deadline.”

  Beatty himself turned up at my office one afternoon, looking troubled. “Alan has told me of your conversation,” he said. “I just want you to know that I’m ready to start the picture. If there’s a strike and changes need to be made in the script, I’ll make them myself.”

  His comment surprised me and also left me stymied. “I appreciate your attitude,” I responded. “But the writing ...”

  “I know how to write,” he reassured me. “I’m a good writer.”

  I didn’t think it prudent to argue with him about his literary talents. Knowing the cadence of his speech, meandering and absent of structure, my every instinct was that Beatty’s talents did not lie in writing.

  Alan Pakula agreed. “We’ll figure a way through it,” he said. “Besides, the writers may very well call off the strike at the last moment. Writers don’t strike. They’re not Teamsters.”

  Even as the movie started, however, the writers’ strike commenced. By the end of the first week, the pace of shooting had already slowed. The company would arrive on set ready to start, and Pakula and Beatty would retire to discuss script changes. By midday, the cameras would start to roll.

  But pages of the rewritten script would then start arriving. The official word was that no one knew where they came from. The young assistant director, Howard Koch Jr., son of the former studio chief, would distribute the mystery pages with a genial wink. I would read them, along with Pakula and Beatty. And none of us would discuss their source.

  “Where the fuck are the pages coming from?” Frank Yablans asked one day.

  “I don’t know and I don’t want to know,” I replied.

  “Beatty’s pal Towne is writing,” Yablans said. “Towne’s the only guy in the business who’s as big a mind-fucker as Beatty.”

  If last-minute rewrites were slowing the shoot, so was Beatty’s desire for multiple takes. In one scene, Beatty demanded repeated shots of him sitting at a table, stirring soup. I happened to be on the stage that day and, despite my impatience, had to admire the way Pakula indulged him. If his star was worried about the lack of steam rising from the cup, Pakula would let him play.

  When I visited Beatty in his dressing room, however, he seemed unconcerned about the sluggish pace. Thumbing through newly arrived pages, Beatty was wearing nothing but red-and-white-striped underpants, which struck me as oddly patriotic. “I think the story is unfolding well,” he said, “but Gordie Willis is costing us time. There was one scene yesterday—Alan said it was so dark it was unusable.”

  The man he referred to, Gordon Willis, the gifted cinematographer, previously had worked on The Godfather where, again, his tendency to underlight scenes had caused some reshooting, but the finished film was superb. On Parallax, Willis was seeking a darkly moody atmosphere to reinforce the sense of paranoia.

  Ultimately, Parallax wrapped with no writer admitting authorship, but when Evans and I viewed the first cut, we were both disappointed. The movie was intelligent and well acted but oddly unsatisfying. Beatty’s character had pinpointed the dreaded Parallax Corporation as being responsible for the murders, but the point of the exercise still seemed unclear.

  “As I said at the start, Beatty’s movies never make money,” Evans grunted.

  The Parallax View was released on June 14, 1974, but instead of causing a stir, it seemed to stir disappointment. “You’re likely to feel cheated, as I did,” wrote Vincent Canby in his review in the New York Times.

  Beatty and Pakula, too, felt cheated, but for a different reason. In their view, the campaign for their film had been vastly overshadowed by the publicity blast greeting Chinatown, which opened only a few days later. Chinatown, of course, was the first production from Bob Evans’s new production label at Paramount, and, as such, commanded the major share of attention from the marketing teams at the studio—at least to the mind of Beatty and Pakula.

  Release of the two films side by side should have resonated as a triumph for Paramount. Here were two ambitious films announcing a reenergized studio.

  Instead, the openings marked the beginning of a new frenzy of anger and bitterness. To Pakula, the release of Chinatown had “doomed” his movie—a view he expressed to Bluhdorn with great passion. Beatty, too, felt that his longtime friend, Evans, had betrayed him. Evans, he knew, had a percentage of the profits in Chinatown. He thus had every incentive to make that film the winner, not Parallax.

  When I first learned of the release dates of the two films—they were set very late in the game—I warned Yablans of my apprehensions, but he was sternly dismissive. “They both have great dates,” he countered. “They are our summer pictures. Anyone who complains about it can go fuck themselves. That goes for Evans, too.”

  What I did not realize was that Yablans and Evans were themselves battling at that moment over shares of Chinatown profits. If Pakula and Beatty were alarmed about conflicts of interest on Evans’s part, they should have been even angrier about Yablans’s cut.

  Their movie about paranoia, it turned out, was even more relevant than they had imagined.

  From the outset, Clint Eastwood didn’t seem comfortable on a movie set and certainly didn’t display the natural gifts of an actor. Tall and chiseled, his gaze nonetheless seemed distanced and disinterested. His teeth were yellow and he moved awkwardly. He looked like what he was—an awkward kid who pumped gas during the day and took acting classes at night. In 1953, shortly after getting married, he lucked into a modest contract at Universal where he started earning bit parts in movies. Always the realist, however, Eastwood sensed that his career as a film star wasn’t going to happen. He considered going to college and looked for other jobs.

  But then he got lucky again. TV westerns like Gunsmoke and Wagon Train were registering solid ratings, and he caught the eye of CBS executives who were casting a rip-off titled The Outrider, later retitled Rawhide. To his surprise, Eastwood got the nod for the young lead, Rowdy Yates. The show was a hit from the start and rolled on to seven seasons, with Eastwood playing the fast-drawing young stud opposite Eric Fleming.

  One unexpected fan of the show was the Italian film director Sergio Leone, who yearned to make a western. Leone needed a believable young American cowboy and was keenly aware that the top Hollywood actors weren’t interested; even Eric Fleming had turned him down.

  Eastwood was wary when he got the offer. For one thing, he didn’t think of himself as a cowboy, yet feared being typecast as one. On the other hand, he had never been to Italy, and the $15,000 offer, with Rawhide on hiatus, was tempting.

  It was not long into the shoot of A Fistful of Dollars that Eastwood realized that while Leone was shooting a traditional revenge movie—the stranger who helps folks, is left for dead, then comes back against the odds—his rhythms and stylized camera angles were vastly different from those of TV directors. The Man with No Name, in sheepskins and poncho, was a mythic figure in the making. And since the character had little dialogue—Leone was shooting in three languages simultaneously—Eastwood began to come to terms with the power of his physical presence, his eyes and his gestures.

  Eastwood went into his Leone experience as a television actor but emerged from it as a director-in-the-making, with a heightened sensibility about the possibilities of cinema.r />
  Meanwhile, the young actor was also aware of the fact that he was beginning to occupy a precarious never-never land in the pop culture. Serious critics were fascinated by his Leone films. Andrew Sarris wrote, “What Kurosawa and Leone share is a sentimental nihilism that ranks survival above honor and revenge above morality.” Sarris concluded, “The spaghetti western is ultimately a lower class entertainment.”

  Eastwood noticed that while his Leone sequel, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was outgrossing most Hollywood movies, its reviews were still dismissive. Charles Champlin, the critic of the Los Angeles Times, dubbed the movie The Bad, the Dull and the Interminable and Pauline Kael, writing in the New Yorker, called the film both “stupid” and “gruesome.”

  In a 1974 interview in Playboy magazine, Eastwood observed petulantly that while his spaghetti westerns were increasingly popular in the U.S. and overseas, “I’m having a rough time cracking the Hollywood scene.” He added, “Not only is there a movie prejudice against television actors but there is a feeling that an American actor making an Italian movie is taking a step backward.”

  I occasionally ran into Eastwood in and around the Paramount lot during this time, and he was candid about his frustration. Though reserved and spare in his conversation, Eastwood was always good company. He liked drinking beer and his gaze would dwell on any attractive woman who happened by.

  Though a married man, his reputation as a player was well known and well deserved. Yet he also saw lots of movies and studied scripts and, if pressed, commented on them concisely and lucidly. His tastes were populist, but he particularly admired filmmakers whose work was lean and disciplined. While Warren Beatty sought out the top playwrights and auteurs, Eastwood was drawn to the working artisans of the business. His friend and mentor was Don Siegel, a Hollywood veteran of B-pictures. “He shoots lean and he shoots what he wants,” Eastwood observed. “He knows when he has it and he doesn’t need to cover his ass with a dozen different angles.” Siegel’s films ranged from Baby Face Nelson to Hell Is for Heroes and the studios considered him dependable but pedestrian.

  To Eastwood, the time had now come to mobilize his own company and turn out films to his liking. Since he owned land in Big Sur that encompassed the Malpasso Creek, he named his company Malpasso and decreed that its initial production would be a contained little western titled Hang ’Em High.

  The project was classic Eastwood: it represented a step forward, yet a very guarded one. The $1.5 million movie followed a Sergio Leone–type plot—Clint pursuing the men who tried to kill him, all of it ending in a shootout. He selected as its director a veteran from TV, Ted Post, a safe choice, who had shot several Rawhide segments.

  Funded by United Artists, which had distributed the spaghetti westerns, Hang ’Em High turned out to be a solid business venture and a help to Eastwood as a filmmaker. Upon seeing it, Universal offered him $1 million to star in Coogan’s Bluff, in which he would play a deputy from Arizona assigned to bring back a murderer hiding out in New York. In his new venture, Eastwood was invited to function as a producer, working with the writers and appointing his friend, Don Siegel, to direct.

  While his first Hollywood films gave him credibility as a producer, they also raised his price as a movie star, and Eastwood was eager to exploit that franchise as well. He accepted the lead in an action film titled Where Eagles Dare, opposite Richard Burton. Clearly the notion of hanging out with the brilliant, hard-drinking Welshman and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, in Salzburg, Austria, was appealing to an actor who had been locked into low budget westerns. The film was a potboiler but represented a good payday.

  Upon its completion offers were streaming in for other action films and westerns, but Paramount put another scheme before him—one that would provide a bizarre diversion in his career path.

  When Bob Evans first informed me that Alan Jay Lerner had offered Eastwood a role in Paint Your Wagon, I laughed it off. “I know Clint a little bit,” I responded. “His mind is set on becoming a filmmaker. There’s no way he’s going to do a singing western.”

  I was dead wrong. Having made his “secret” album of western songs, Eastwood was, in fact, thrilled that the Broadway legends Lerner and Loewe were now pursuing him. Years later, when I discussed the film with him, he seemed embarrassed by the entire episode. “These great men of the theater ... they actually were courting me. And they wanted me to sing!” he said.

  In the end, of course, Paint Your Wagon proved to be a career embarrassment. Eastwood now found himself caught up in a series of almosts: He was almost a TV star, almost a movie star, almost a producer. His frustration was exacerbated by bad luck in the release schedules. Three Eastwood movies, Paint Your Wagon, Kelly’s Heroes, and Two Mules for Sister Sara, were all opening in close proximity—a daunting triple-header that dramatized the lack of direction in his career.

  In an unusually candid interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter at the time, Eastwood declared, “After seventeen years of bouncing my head against the wall and watching actors go through all kinds of hell without any help, I’m at the point where I’m ready to make my own pictures. I stored away all the mistakes I made and saved up the good things I learned and now I know enough to control my own projects and get what I want out of other actors.”

  Clint Eastwood was determined now to transform himself into a director, but typically, he would do so on his own terms. Play Misty for Me, his first turn as a director, would be modest in design and conventional in plot, as Hang ’Em High had been. Misty was a thriller about a disc jockey who had a one-night stand with a caller, but then turned violent when she subsequently refused his advances. The plot seemed somewhat dated, but the performances were solid.

  Eastwood completed his film in under five weeks in the fall of 1970. It received respectful notices. Studio reps who saw it complimented him. They treated him as though he were a diligent student who had now received his diploma.

  But Misty was to be overwhelmed in the marketplace. The screens seemed ablaze with films that were redefining the lexicon of cinema—A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection, The Last Picture Show. In comparison, Eastwood’s foray seemed bland and dated. It was a start—but Clint Eastwood knew he had to do better.

  The inability of Misty to attract the attention it deserved played a part in Eastwood’s decision to take on the role of Dirty Harry Callahan. Here was a character who demanded attention. Frank Sinatra and Paul Newman had both turned down the movie, fearing that the public would reject the movie’s violence and its lowlife protagonist. Callahan had set himself up as both judge and jury, tracking down a bad guy named Scorpio who had earlier been set free because his rights allegedly had been violated by other cops. Eastwood felt he could capture Callahan’s antiauthority rage. But, following the disappointment of Misty, he wanted the assurance of having his alter ego, Don Siegel, serve as director.

  Dirty Harry was released in December 1971, two months after Misty. The audiences loved it and the critics were appalled. Writing in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael described it as an exercise in “Fascist medievalism.” The New York Times critic Roger Greenspun said Eastwood’s performance amounted to “iron-jawed self-parody.”

  To Eastwood himself, the chorus of criticism reflected the ideology of what he liked to call “the pussy generation.” He felt great about the movie. Perversely, the intensity of the response to Dirty Harry guaranteed Eastwood’s ascent to stardom.

  Among the young actors coming into their own in the late sixties, Robert Redford seemed the best bet for conquering the studios. Born in Santa Monica, he instinctively understood Hollywood’s schemes and idiosyncrasies. He was intelligent and handsome in a stolidly conventional way. Hollywood always needed a young star with an all-American look, and Redford not only had the look but also knew how to market it.

  But he wasn’t who he seemed to be. Though an LA brat, he was reserved and rather conservative in his personal habits and liberal in his political beliefs. Seemingly open in discussions
, he would walk away from confrontation. If a negotiation became an argument, Redford would simply disappear. “Redford is someone you can easily get to know, but you never really know him,” Judd Bernard, the producer, warned me early on.

  One clue to his behavior was that Redford distrusted the studios and their executives perhaps more than any other actor. His dream was to construct an institution that embodied the mirror opposite of Hollywood processes and values—a vision that ultimately came to life as the Sundance Festival. But to achieve his aims, Redford understood he would first have to exploit the resources of mainstream Hollywood without becoming a servant of the system.

  Inevitably, Redford would turn out to be the most difficult to deal with of his generation. With Redford, all commitments were tentative, all relationships arm’s-length. In my dealings with him, I sensed his distrust, but felt it was an institutional antipathy, not a personal one. I represented studio power and Redford hated studio power in all its iterations.

  Since he generated so many mixed signals, Redford’s ride to stardom was a bumpy one. He was the clean-cut young leading man in Barefoot in the Park, displaying solid instincts for comic understatement. Cast in somber melodramas like The Chase and This Property Is Condemned, Redford received tepid reviews and his films generated meager box office results. Inside Daisy Clover, too, demonstrated his competence as an actor, but the movie simply didn’t work.

  Keenly self-aware, Redford realized that his Waspy appearance often worked against him. Mike Nichols auditioned him for the lead in The Graduate, but opted instead for the more ethnic and idiosyncratic Dustin Hoffman. The movies that were stirring excitement were not about blond, blue-eyed Protestants but rather about freaks.

  Mindful of Redford’s shifting moods, producers began to approach him with more complex roles, and Blue was such a project.

  Redford liked his character—a tough cowboy raised by Mexican bandits—and also related to the milieu (the Mexican border), but had reservations about both the script and the director, Silvio Narizzano. Fearful of potential failure, he simply walked away. Lawsuits were threatened but Redford would not reconsider.